LA STRADA DEI SAMOUNI by Stefano Savona. Premio ‘L’Œil d’Or’ al Festival di Cannes 2018 per il Miglior documentario. 

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Da quando la piccola Amal è tornata nel suo quartiere, ricorda solo un grande albero che non c’è più. Un sicomoro su cui lei e i suoi fratelli si arrampicavano. Si ricorda di quando portava il caffè a suo padre nel frutteto. Dopo è arrivata la guerra. Amal e i suoi fratelli hanno perso tutto. Sono figli della famiglia Samouni, dei contadini che abitano alla periferia della città di Gaza. È passato un anno da quando hanno sepolto i loro morti. Ora devono ricominciare a guardare al futuro, ricostruendo le loro case, il loro quartiere, la loro memoria. Sul filo dei ricordi, immagini reali e racconto animato si alternano a disegnare un ritratto di famiglia prima, dopo e durante i tragici avvenimenti che hanno stravolto le loro vite in quel gennaio del 2009, quando, durante l’operazione ‘Piombo fuso’, vengono massacrati ventinove membri della famiglia.

VISAGES VILLAGES di Agnès Varda e JR

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The 90-year-old director goes on the road with street artist JR to create remarkable, moving portraits of the people they meet. Here’s a wonderful warmth and playful indirectness to this essay/road movie in the classic nouvelle vague spirit, conjuring a semi-accidental narrative in the midst of what is ostensibly a documentary. 
It is a collaboration between the 90-year-old director Agnès Varda and a 35-year-old French street artist who styles himself simply JR and always wears a hat and dark glasses, indoors and out – an opaque mannerism, almost a disguise, which Varda compares to her old comrade Jean-Luc Godard, and which irritates her a little bit.

FAITHFULL by Sandrine Bonnaire

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Marianne Faithfull has seen it all: success and celebrity at 17 years of age in Swinging London, life with Mick Jagger through the tumultuous Rolling Stones epic, scandal, drugs, addiction and decline, life in the street and then rebirth, awards and artistic recognition. Actress and director Sandrine Bonnaire tells her incredible journey, her thousand lives, her encounters with the greats and her extraordinary lifetime.

Harry Dean Stanton & David Lynch in LUCKY. A bittersweet meditation on life.

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LUCKY follows the spiritual journey of a 90-year-old atheist and the quirky characters that inhabit his off the map desert town. Having out lived and out smoked all of his contemporaries, the fiercely independent Lucky finds himself at the precipice of life, thrust into a journey of self exploration, leading towards that which is so often unattainable: enlightenment. Acclaimed character actor John Carroll Lynch’s directorial debut “Lucky”, is at once a love letter to the life and career of Harry Dean Stanton as well as a meditation on morality, loneliness, spirituality, and human connection.

Jean-Michel Basquiat & Jim Jarmusch in BOOM FOR REAL.

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Never-before-seen works, writings and photographs offer insight into the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat as a teenager in New York in the late 1970s. The times, the people and the movements of the city help Basquiat form his artistic vision. With: Jim Jarmusch, Alexis Adler, Al Diaz, Fred Brathwaite aka Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quiñones, Felice Rosser, Jennifer Jazz, Luc Sante, Carlo McCormick, Glenn O’Brien, Michael Holman, James Nares, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Kenny Scharf, Sur Rodney (Sur), Patricia Field, Mary-Ann Monforton, Diego Cortez, Bud Kliment.

A WAY OUT by Cherelle Zheng > LUCI DALLA CINA Chinese Independent Documentary Festival

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The film concerns poets in Southern China who, while enduring arduous, sometimes hazardous conditions in working-class occupations, preserve their spirits with verse. Its inspiration is Xu Lizhi, the 24-year-old poet and laborer at a Foxconn electronics factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, who leapt to his death in 2014. Mr. Xu was one of the countless workers from the countryside who travel to China’s growing cities seeking employment, only to be eaten alive by the tedious, pitiless demands of industry.
The film examines four living poets, some writing pseudonymously. The young Blackbird (whose real name is Wu Niaoniao) attends a job fair and performs at a reading with other worker-poets. Lucky Chen (Chen Nianxi), a demolitions expert, risks his life daily underground while tending a paralyzed father and aging mother living in rural squalor. Old Coalmine (Lao Jing), a coal miner for 25 years, writes of “ghosts between coal seams and rock crevices.” In her poem “Sundress,” Dawn (Wu Xia), 33, a seamstress since she was 14, considers the affluent woman who will enjoy the fruits of her labor amid wealth Ms. Wu will never know.
With arresting images, The Qin Xiaoyu and Wu Feiyue documentary powerfully addresses China’s moral crisis in the wake of economic prosperity. Today, “if you don’t have money or power, it’s really hard,” says Xu Lizhi’s father. Especially if you’re working the line.

ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS > Best Director Sundance Film Festival

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Many of us know the freedom of our twenties-unfettered by responsibilities or mortality, inventing ourselves in the rush of the moment. ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS viscerally summons that feeling, chronicling life across two Warsaw summers when students Kris and Michal resolve to experience life to the limit. After Kris breaks up with his long-time girlfriend, anything seems possible and Warsaw is his playground. Along with best friend Michal, handsome and wide-eyed, they roam the metropolis at night, floating from party to party, dancing until dawn in makeshift clubs and city squares.

Boom For Real. The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat

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Never-before-seen works, writings and photographs offer insight into the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat as a teenager in New York in the late 1970s. The times, the people and the movements of the city help Basquiat form his artistic vision. With: Jim Jarmusch, Alexis Adler, Al Diaz, Fred Brathwaite aka Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quiñones, Felice Rosser, Jennifer Jazz, Luc Sante, Carlo McCormick, Glenn O’Brien, Michael Holman, James Nares, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Kenny Scharf, Sur Rodney (Sur), Patricia Field, Mary-Ann Monforton, Diego Cortez, Bud Kliment.

On The Road FF 6

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Errant images, displacements and psycho-geographical drifts. Based at the DETOUR Arthouse Cinema in downtown Rome since 2010, ON THE ROAD FILM FESTIVAL is devoted to contemporary independent cinema – fiction, documentary and experimental – presenting travelogues, urban and waste-land wanderings, real or imaginary topographies, unexpected detours, psycho-geographical drifts, migration and nomadism.
We look for films that develop, through linguistic and narrative skills, a critical and inventive approach to the subject guidelines of the Festival: a traveling mood with digressions from fixed paths, where the route is what matters, not the destination.
The Festival hosts screenings, master classes, meetings, art exhibitions, live performances and music, both at DETOUR Cinema and at a variety of cinema venues, film clubs, schools, public libraries and other unusual locations in Rome and and in its surrounding area.

VISAGES VILLAGES by Agnès Varda. A masterpiece.

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The 90-year-old director goes on the road with street artist JR to create remarkable, moving portraits of the people they meet. Here’s a wonderful warmth and playful indirectness to this essay/road movie in the classic nouvelle vague spirit, conjuring a semi-accidental narrative in the midst of what is ostensibly a documentary. 
It is a collaboration between the 90-year-old director Agnès Varda and a 35-year-old French street artist who styles himself simply JR and always wears a hat and dark glasses, indoors and out – an opaque mannerism, almost a disguise, which Varda compares to her old comrade Jean-Luc Godard, and which irritates her a little bit.