Steal This Film II

A major shift of political power in Sudan started with street protests throughout Sudan on 16 December 2018 That resulted in the overthrow of the dictator Omar Al-Basheer. The Sudanese Revolution took over 38 weeks to achieve its demands with over 300 casualties and +1200 arrests. Fire in the Nile is a documentary about how the people dealt with the government and how to protest until their demands have been granted.

In 1794, French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre produced the world's first defense of "state terror" - claiming that the road to virtue lay through political violence. This film combines drama, archive and documentary interviews to examine Robespierre's year in charge of the Committee Of Public Safety - the powerful state machine at the heart of Revolutionary France. Contesting Robespierre's legacy is Slavoj Zizek, who argues that terror in the cause of virtue is justifiable, and Simon Schama, who believes the road from Robespierre ran straight to the gulag and the 20th-century concentration camp. The drama, based on original sources, follows the life-and-death politics of the Committee during "Year Two" of the new Republic.

This film is dedicated to Maria Lai, an artist born in 1919 in Ulassai, Sardinia. Surrounded and inspired by the ogliastra countryside, the cyclopic guardian of plots and landslides, Maria Lai uses inert materials like stone, concrete, asphalt, metal and wood to work old and new legends into librettos of individual works, installations and interventions, thus becoming part of the landscape that calls to her. In making this film the authors have confided in the artist’s role as a spokeperson, and it is as if one is listening to the voice of a wild olive tree - both millenary and contemporary - a voice that knows what to say (and can say whatever it wants) from beyond the boundaries of reality, history, nature and art. As that tree, the artist - confident of her roots - with a sound sense of rhythm and scansion, multiplies big and small stories, just as she did with the bread and fish in Santa Barbara di Ulassai along the way to the country church.

What kind of world power is Iran becoming, and how will Western countries deal with it?

In Italy, in the mid-seventies, Adriana, Barbara, Nadia and Susanna were 20 years old when they decided to join the armed struggle and leave behind their social life and their families in order to make the revolution the center and the aim of their existence. Today they have returned after many years in prison, and they try, each one of them, to recount their own experiences. They speak about the political reasons which initially sustained them, the conflicts, the doubts, and the moments of being torn apart which market out their lives as women caught up in the vortex of war. A course of events which ended in the condemnation of the armed struggle and the pain of the lives that were destroyed – their victims’ lives and their own.

Starting as a documentary on the sexually liberated culture of late-Sixties Denmark, Sexual Freedom in Denmark winds up incorporating major elements of the marriage manual form and even manages to squeeze in a montage of beaver loops and erotic art. All narrated with earnest pronouncements concerning the social and psychological benefits of sexual liberation, the movie, is a kind of mondo film dotted with occasional glimpses of actual sex.

After the elections that followed the Tunisian revolution, as well as the violence that shook the country, an author seeks to make a film on women's issue in his motherland. He makes his questioning the subject of his film and starts a journey.

Year 1969 - in Turkey. 60s youth were living the most excited days. There was a great effort to make a bridge in Istanbul, on the Bosphorus. Meanwhile, on the eastern border of Turkey, in a Kurdish city between the borders of Iran and Iraq that is left to its destiny, in Hakkari, Zap River was taking lives since there were no passage on it.

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.

This program consists of unedited responses to questions presented to G. Edward Griffin by a camera crew creating a documentary on the U.S. Constitution. In this session, he answers the most difficult questions imaginable in the fields of political and social science. The depth and clarity of his response is amazing, especially considering he is speaking extemporaneously without benefit of script or notes. In an era when many people are just now waking up to the WHAT of current events, here are issues for the brain that go far beyond that shallow pool into the deep water of WHY and HOW.

The Colegio de Arquitectos de Catalunya commissioned Pere Portabella to make this film for the Joan Miró retrospective exhibit in 1969. There were heated discussions on whether it would be prudent to screen the film during the exhibit. Portabella took the following stance: "either both films are screened or they don't screen any" and, finally, both Miro l'Altre and Aidez l'Espagne were shown. The film was made by combining newsreels and film material from the Spanish Civil War with prints by Miró from the series "Barcelona" (1939-1944). The film ends with the painter's "pochoir" known as Aidez l'Espagne.