In the near future, a group of young revolutionaries, militants of the National Committee of Revolutionary Organizations, prepare to come out of clandestinity and engage in guerrilla actions. Meanwhile, in Mexico, the Liberation Front is fighting the United States of America. The goal is to associate white revolutionaries with blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, all subjected to the same exploitation and violence, but divided by their inability to understand each other. Committee officials find that they must face the same uncertainties, doubts and fears as the militants. The revolutionary offensive breaks out. Subversive newspapers are distributed. A colonel is killed. A refinery explodes. Prisons and radio and television stations are stormed. After the police eliminate the leader of the group, his place is taken by Jim, who gives instructions from a telephone booth to one of his comrades, announcing the next decisive battle.

In his first documentary, Nestler uses a rather unconventional way of telling the story of a small Northern German seaside village. The protagonist and narrator is an old, worn-out dike sluice, expressing its very own nostalgic views of the people living in the village, situated at the other end of its floodgate.

A cheerful take on the lives of school children in a Swiss rural environment. Young pupils recite short essays they have written on subjects ranging from the long walk to school, the distribution of milk during breaks, and to a brawl in the courtyard. The use of the original Swiss German dialect instead of High German emphasizes Nestler’s fascination with the simple, the innocent and the natural.

Shot a few years after the first mining pits were closed in the Ruhr area, Nestler takes his audience on a journey through mining pits, coal heaps, cold stores and to workingmen’s settlements and pubs in the city of Mülheim. In this fourteen minute ride, the rich contrast between the workers and their employers is explored using fast moving images and quick editing between the two extremes.

As in many of his previous films, Nestler once more provides a critical view of the rise of the machine age. He uses the small village of Ödenwaldstetten as an example of the changes from manpower to mechanical power. We witness how handicraft and traditional agricultural tools are discarded and replaced by high-tech equipment and assembly line production. The words of the people who live there, their memories of the past, from the war and the reconstruction, constitute a document about the mutations of the 60’s, common to several countries.

In a thirteen minute navigation, Nestler takes us downstream the Rhine River. The opportunity of cheap water transport kept prices of raw material down and made the Rhine one of the most important arteries of industrial transport in the world. Rheinstrom conveys the significance of this waterway to its people.

Shot two years before the military junta began to rule the country, Von Griechenland reflects upon the instability, which has characterized Greek government in the 20th century, culminating in the victory and eventual dismissal of liberal politician Georgios Papandreou. The resulting chaos and demand for new elections brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets, which further destabilized the Greek government.

This film is arguably Nestler’s angriest documentary. It is a bitter personal statement about life in the Ruhr region: the fight against fascism, the reality of communism and his own struggle for acceptance in his native Germany. It confronts viewers with a sequence of rigid images that are accompanied by seemingly frozen voices, giving evidence of one big frustration. Nestler makes no compromise. There is only room for wrath in this impressively filmed ‘rebellion.

In Die Nordkalotte, Peter Nestler provides a critical view on industrialization, especially the mining of ore, on the Kola Peninsula, which led to a wideranging destruction of forests, lakes and tundra. In addition, the film examines the consequences of industrialization on Lappland’s indigenous people. The traditions and understanding of nature of the few thousand reindeer herding Lapps in the remote northern Russian peninsula and in northern Scandinavia are juxtaposed to the modern world after the Industrial Revolution.

Pachamama is another fine example of Peter Nestler’s extraordinary documentaries. He takes us on an expedition to Ecuador, to the heart of an ancient Indian culture. Although heavily damaged by the Spanish conquerors, many of the old treasures and, more remarkably, many of the old traditions and customs have survived and are still in practice today. It’s a film of quiet beauty and sadness, but of a sadness that is friendly and not bitter; a film about the cultural wealth of a fascinating country. – Ted Roth

Two sons, Pierre and Vladimir, ask their father, Max Léon, about his life and his engagement as a communist militant. They also ask questions to their mother Svetlana and their sister Michèle. Alongside the family stories, they meet with other witnesses to the socialist dream: Jacques Rossi, former Komintern agent and deported to the Goulag, and Marina Vlady, who was married to revolutionary singer Vladimir Vyssotski and lived in the USSR in the seventies. Hopes and despair, between words and silence. That’s how personal lives are written, and how they may differ from history.

Jewish painter Leopold Mayer fled his native Frankfurt at the rise of the Nazi regime finding refuge in France, where he changed his name to Leo Maillet. His stay was cut short by Germany’s invasion of Paris. Flucht traces Maillet’s escape from the Gestapo and the French police, using Maillet’s Entre Chien et Loud series of painting as the framework for the film. Accompanied by Maillet’s son Daniel, Peter Nestler revisits the late artist’s hiding places and depicts a hauntingly beautiful portrait of an outstanding artist on the run.

From Mexico to Russia, from Germany to India, director Vladimir Léon seeks the traces of an adventurous revolutionary from Bengal’ – M.N. Roy. Founder of the Zapata Communist Party in Mexico, leader of the Communist International in Soviet Russia alongside Lenin, anti-Stalin and anti-Nazi militant in pre-war Germany, a politician and an atheist philosopher in independent India, Roy personifies the struggles of a century on different continents. Yet the official history of these countries has chosen to erase his mark. Through direct and indirect accounts, Léon patiently reconstructs the chaotic existence of a free spirit. This film, an inquiry and meditation on the dark course of history, is a modern epic that allows us to understand the current state of things in different countries.

I had literally organized my meeting with Jean Lambert. Right away I feared his death, which he himself tried to warn me about: to choose such an old friend… At night we listened to the Javas until the fear was gone… Anyway we laughed in front of the camera, which was there, stupidly alone, filming us. With Marie, a friend, we bought the house where we found you dead, when your heart stopped during your nap. Ariane, a neighbour remembers the time he thought he would live until the eclipse. I don’t live in Vattetot, I live where Jean Lambert no longer lives. That’s it.’

Détour is a succession of fixed shots made on one of the Shetland Islands. Jovan from Foula is a succession of travellings made in a car in Foula, another of the Shetland’s, with a guide named Jovan. Détour suspends the traveller’s look and composes in the landscape the intangible gallery of works that nourish that look. Jovan from Foula accompanies the movement of life where each one searches the other, searches himself, runs, and finally escapes.

In the Caux area of Normadie, France, Secteur 545 defines the limits within which Pierre Creton weighs and inspects cattle and milk for breeders who ask him to do so. Being also a filmmaker, Pierre Creton is both an actor and an observer in this film. He records moments in rural life that are far removed from picturesque clichés. One question, addressed explicitly to livestock breeders, provides the main thread to the film: what is the difference between Man and animals?

In an agricultural school in Yvetot, pupils and teachers recount their experience of the term ‘landscape’, they evaluate it and its future. But the film is not a systematic study of the subject, nor is the subject a theme, except in the musical sense, because other landscapes also appear in it – those of the teenagers’ faces and gestures, those of their classrooms, their workshops, their game rooms and corridors. In short, the memory of a childhood as likely to change as the apparently still geography in which we move about.

It is now seven months since Blé, my mother, died. I am in front of the sea in S. Miguel, Azores, the land of the distant family. I meet great-aunt Maria do Rosário, 91 years old, looking for her moment to leave. She tells me about God. Around her, babies are being born. They all pass through the island’s sea, black, volcanic. It is here that I meet Florence and Beru, a French couple who every year cross the Atlantic aboard Balaou, a sailing boat. They invite me to continue the trip with them. I throw away my plane ticket and head for the open sea. Divided into three moments and eight lessons, Balaou is a journey towards accepting the forgetfulness of things. – G.T.

At Jie cattle camps in Uganda, men often gather under a special tree to make leather and wooden goods and to talk, relax, and sleep. The conversation on this particular afternoon becomes a kind of reverse ethnography, centering on the Europeans’ most noticeable possession, the motor vehicle. A uniquely delicate and intimate film, filled with the humor of the Jie and, implicitly, the ironic wit of the filmmakers.

The first film in the Turkana Conversations trilogy, this is a multifaceted portrait of Lorang, the head of a Turkana homestead in northwestern Kenya and one of the important senior men of his area. Because the Turkana are relatively isolated and self-sufficient, most (including Lorang’s own son) see their way of life continuing unchanged into the future. But Lorang thinks otherwise, because he has seen something of the outside world. The film is a study of a man who has come to see his society as vulnerable and whose traditional role in it has been shaped by that realization. It explores Lorang’s personality and ideas through his conversations with the filmmakers, the testimony of his friends and relatives, and observation of his behavior with his wives, his children, and men of his own age and status.

Winter in China. A town in the snow. Night is falling. Wrapped in her coat, an old woman walks slowly through a housing complex to her simple apartment. Inside, He Fengming settles into her armchair and remembers. Her memories take us back to 1949 – to the beginning of a journey that will take us through 30 years of her life and of the New China.

Photo Wallahs is a film about the varied meanings of photography. It is set in Mussoorie, a famous hill station in northern India that has attracted tourists since the 19th century. In this setting, photography has thrived. Without spoken commentary, the film discovers its subject in the streets, bazaars, shops, photographic studios and private homes of Mussoorie. In the process, it compares the diverse work and attitudes of the local photographers — Mussoorie’s ‘photo wallahs’. Although photography has developed certain culturally distinctive features in India, its many forms and uses there tell us much about the nature and significance of photography throughout the world.

The social dynamics of the group is the focus of this film on life in a school dormitory, the fourth in the Doon School quintet, MacDougall’s long-term study of childhood and adolescence at the Doon School in northern India. The school is India’s foremost boarding school for boys, and this film provides unique insights into the values and training of the Indian middle class and postcolonial elites more generally. Within the group are boys of varied personalities and backgrounds — some natural leaders, some subject to teasing and bullying, some argumentative, some peace-makers. An important feature of the film is the inclusion of conversations among the boys about the causes of aggression and warfare, homesickness, restaurant food, and how to speak to a ghost.

This is the fifth and final film in David MacDougall’s Doon School Chronicles quintet, an intimate study of India’s most prestigious boys’ boarding school. In this film he focuses on the life of one student whom he discovers at the school. The film explores the thoughts and feelings of Abhishek, a 12-year-old from Nepal, during his first days and weeks as a Doon student. This is at once the story of the encounter between a filmmaker and his subject and a glimpse of the mind of a child at ‘the age of reason’.

The experience developed by the association Os Filhos de Lumière since 2001, with several workshops leading an initiation to cinema (‘O Primeiro Olhar’, ‘Filmar’) has been guided by the desire and urgency to conceive, implement and develop a pedagogical device that allows a sensibilisation to cinema through experimentation. In 2006, the association Os Filhos de Lumière was invited to participate in the pedagogical program ‘Le Cinéma, Cent Ans de Jeunesse’, conceived by Nathalie Bourgeois and Alain Bergala, and coordinated by the Cinémathèque Française since 1996. Thus, Os Filhos de Lumière – which has been developing its workshop ‘O Primeiro Olhar’ in the Municipality of Serpa (Vila Nova de S. Bento, Brinches, Pias) since 2003 – started a collaboration with the town’s high school and implemented this pedagogical program in collaboration with two of the school’s teachers throughout the school year. The films made by the students in this context are the result of artistic (and technical) work, but the fundamental aspect of this endeavour are less in the final result and more in the individual experience of each student throughout the workshop. Their learning process, based on practice, involves the assimilation of basic knowledge and contact with all the technical equipment: image (camera, tripod, lighting, etc.), sound (recorder, punch, microphones, etc.), editing and mixing. Framed by a sensibilization to the problems of constructing forms and senses, the apprehension of basic notions of technique, aesthetics, grammar and cinematographic history takes place in a very organic way since it is sustained by experimentation. One of the great objectives of these pedagogical devices is to approach cinematographic creation, with all its specificities, through experimentation. This session’s program will include films made by students from the two classes involved, as well as examples of the image awareness exercises carried out in this context during the 2006-2007 school year. A selection of exercises carried out in other workshops by Os Filhos de Lumière, in different locations around the country, will also be presented.