Political Films

A world in which quiet beauty can still intercept brutality and corruption.

I never made a decision to become a film editor—or, in any case, I didn’t decide upon it at a young age and follow a single career path.

The insurgent Argentine documentarian’s retrospective screens at Anthology Film Archives from February 22 through 28.

Huddled in front of a suite of bulletin boards filled with military charts, folding his fingers over papers as if they were slices of pizza, licking his lips, jowls quivering—this is Senator Joseph McCarthy as he appeared live on ABC in 1954 as part of the 36-day, 188-hour televised extravaganza that would come to be known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings. He’s berating a colonel, insinuating that “phony charts” have been submitted to the floor of the Senate. “The television audience,” he yells, “they are the jury in this case.”

In the early 1960s, Eduardo Coutinho began shooting a film about the murder of Brazilian trade unionist João Pedro Teixeira.

A lighthearted psychodrama about mommy issues and Hillary Clinton.

“What I believe is that you just keep filming.”

Documentary, realism, and life on the margins.

Documentary, reenactment, and comedic failures of democracy.

Shining a light on Latin American cinema.

The master filmmakers on blending the political and the personal in their new film.

Civil war, exile, and documentary as art.

For the first time in more than a hundred years, the morning sun streams straight through the huge windows of a North 11th Street loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

It is difficult to gauge the level of outrage that will greet the US release of Adam Curtis’s film The Power of Nightmares, originally broadcast as a three-part BBC series last October. 

Documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim invites viewers into both Al Jazeera, Arab-language satellite television, and CentCom, the US military news center, for two very different media portrayals of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

February 27th, 1982. New York City. It’s a late Saturday morning, still winterish. On the far side of the Manhattan Bridge in another land, we inspect an abandoned factory and project a future, traipsing daily across the bridge … we reject it.

The Secret Agent is a feature length documentary investigating the effects and implications of the use of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange used in Vietnam between the years 1964 and 1971.