If you are a fan of Mads Brugger, who went behind the Iron Curtain separating South and North Korea in his first doc Red Chapel, you will enjoy The Ambassador even more. As Karinna Longworth from LA Weekly notes in her Sundance review, Mads represents the latest form of gonzo journalism, following in the foot steps of Hunter S. Thompson but taking more risk to expose political corruption.
This time Mads travels to the Central African Republic under diplomatic pretense. He brings a strong fashion sensibility to his mission, like Sean O'Connory in the early Bond films if he were dressed by Helmut Lang, which climaxes in one political assassination and a failed attempt to smuggle diamonds. Mads escape back to the Congo and civilization leaves many questions unanswered except to highlight that political corruption in Africa is so entrenched that the current president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson, was banned from holding political office at one point in her career on grounds of crimes against humanity.
Hope that everybody will be able to catch the movie soon in a theater near you. Stay tuned.
What we suspected long ago is now confirmed:
She may be a newcomer, but Alison Klayman, who makes her directorial debut with documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, isn't wet behind the ears. Klayman met the provocative Chinese artist while working in China for Global Radio News, producing radio and television features for PBS Frontline and NPR, and has been working on her documentary since 2008. Given Ai's recent arrest -- he was jailed in China for 80 days in April for alleged tax evasion, charges his supporters believe are the government's revenge for his online activism and fight for free speech -- this is one of Sundance's more anticipated docs. Klayman's explorations of modern China, as well as the blurring of politics and art, means we'll likely be hearing a lot more about this film and Klayman in the year to come.
Read more here.
Crazy Wisdom makes The Global Culture Girl's Guide to Last Minute Gifts on Huffington Post:
My favorite pastime is watching films. But not just any moving pictures, ones that will change my life. Fortunately, just in time for Christmas, three DVDs of personal favorites are available to buy and there is no excuse not to infuse your friends' lives with a little culture and a lot of cinematic love. ... for the spiritual junkies in your lives Crazy Wisdom is both entertaining and extremely enlightening.
Zombie movies always have a component of political commentary but how appropos that the Cubans have taken the popular genre and adapted it to satirize their own political revolution.
“Juan of the Dead” tells the blood-drenched tale of a slacker who decides to save the island from an invasion of cannibalistic zombies. As the zombies turn Havana into a gory circus of flying limbs and severed heads, the nightly news anchors continue to calmly assert the government line, that the attacks are not the work of the undead but dissidents in the pay of the United States.
"Raw Faith" is now available for download-to-own plus limited edition white label DVD that ships free. Available only from Alive Mind Cinema to US viewers.
Tell your friends!
2 comments ( 52 views )
Crazy Wisdom: Premium Digital and Limited Edition DVD Release
Crazy Wisdom is now available for download-to-own, which includes a limited edition white label DVD that ships free. Available only from Alive Mind Cinema to US viewers. Tell your friends!
Limited Edition DVDs are Sold Out! (Update 01/10/12)
Just back from IDFA, where there was a plethora of great docs. The official prize for Best Feature Length Doc went to the South Korean film Planet of Snail and the Audience Award to 5 Broken Cameras. Other festival favorites: Putin's Kiss and Mads Bruegger's newest film, The Ambassador. We released his prior film, Red Chapel, which you can download here.
Sushi: The Global Catch also had its European premier and will be coming to a featival or theater near you soon.
Stay tuned for more.
Mashabble.com gave this review of the Taqwacore doc by the Canadian filmmaker Omar Majeed:
Stripped down and laid bare of all cultural referents,Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam is a rock ‘n’ roll road movie. Made by Canadian filmmaker Omar Majeed, it feels similar to its frenetic and lionized antecedent Another State of Mind, which showcased and documented the efforts of Better Youth Organization-related bands, like Youth Brigade and Social Distortion, to tour and connect disparate communities in far flung locales during the heyday of early ‘80s hardcore punk.
Yet that analogy doesn’t encompass the full breadth of this film. With stealth, the filmmaker and participants dissect America’s so-called mosaic or melting pot culture in-depth by examining the tale of emergent Muslim-American youth. In doing so, it exposes fervent politics, abundant identity crises, varied social, religious, and inter-generational conflicts, and undeniable mixed cultural heritage.
Cool Kick Starter project that we think our fans should support. Check it out below:
Yesterday we reviewed a film that was financed entirely with integrated advertising, Morgan Spurlock's "Greatest Movie Ever Sold." Today we turn to a project that could use a few good sponsors to see the light of day. Or to see the dark of an art house cinema. The makers of the proposed film about comic strip artists and the decline of their platform, newspapers, are in need of final financing. "Stripped" is not a "Food Inc" expose or "Waiting for Superman" polemic. It describes itself benignly as a "love letter to the art form" of comics.
According to The New York Times film review "The movie offers the only chance that most of us will probably have to visit what he left behind, this strange, eerie Kieferland." Follow the movie Playdates in the US and latest reviews at the official movie site.
Download to Own or Download + DVD
The linup of guest speakers for selected screenings of EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS at Film Forum has been announced! Read More
Intimate Stranger," says Berliner, "walks the fine line between sorting the dirty family laundry and polishing the precious family jewel." Family members try to make sense of it all in this witty, candid and cinematically inventive documentary biography.
"Funny, probing and so wholly original in both style and
substance as to seem completely without precedent...
brilliant, one-of-a-kind film...the remarkable life of a
seemingly average man presents a figure as complicated and
enthralling as any fictional character in recent memory...
intoxicating montage...expertly pieced together...
a spectacular high-wire feat by a fledgling master."
— THE WASHINGTON POST
"Compellingly eccentric...powerful, bittersweet...
a rich, tumultuous portrait of family life..."
— THE NEW YORK TIMES
Watch film trailer on your computer, on iPad, on iPod or on iPhone (automatic resolution)
"A thoughtful, confident, completely engrossing documentary about a cultural figure every bit as iconic as Jim Morrison or James Dean." - Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
"The most comprehensive and touching film portrait of the great Canadian pianist in all his glories and miseries." - David Denby, The New Yorker
Based on the ground-breaking work of Krafft-Ebing, a nineteenth century Austro–German sexologist and psychiatrist, this dramatization of the principal work of Dr. von Krafft-Ebing is a series of sexual case histories of the varieties of human sexual behaviour. Krafft-Ebing popularized the terms sadism, derived from the brutal sexual practices depicted in the novels of the Marquis de Sade; and masochism, derived from the surname of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel Venus in Furs (1870) features a protagonist who requires flogging and sexual enslavement by a beautiful woman, and early uses of the terms homosexual and heterosexual.
Kino Lorber Acquires Doc El Bulli: Cooking in Progress at SXSW
Watch a short clip on your computer, on iPad, on iPod or on iPhone (automatic resolution)
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, directed by Gereon Wetzel (Castells). To be released under the company’s newly launched theatrical line Alive Mind Cinema, the film is set to begin its national run at New York’s Film Forum on July 27, 2011, and will expand to other markets around the country during the fall.
The deal was negotiated by Kino Lorber’s Vice President Elizabeth Sheldon with Peter Jager, CEO and Astrid Guger, Head of Theatrical Sales – both from Autlook Films.