.Yl 2004 - 494

Enjoy christmas this year with the lovable Aussie character Humphrey B Bear

In an old district of Hanoi, formerly a village, new loud speakers must be repaired and installed. By observing everyday life, Vang Anh films with humor the animation caused by this event and plunges us into the heart of Vietnamese contradictions.

A tribute to the classic: “Man with a movie camera”/ Dziga Vertov (USSR 1929). A naïve documentary filmmaker, heavily armed with 3 cameras and a purple draped stage, sets out to roam his beloved country on his cheap motorcycle in order to bring to the screen the ultimate truth of his people. The racist and violent reality reflected from his people’s words increasingly darken his heart and vanquish his dream, until he is forced to confront his deepest fears through encounters with characters drawn from his tormented soul.

A ground-breaking project, Mind if I Call You Sir? is an oral history video project documenting queer Latina/o histories through testimonies on gender expression by self-identified Butch Lesbians and Female-to-Male Transgendered men. As a femme-identified Latina lesbian and community scholar, Karla E. Rosales has devoted her academic and artistic pursuits to issues of gender identity in the Latina community. Her research led her to uncover a growing rift between the ‘old school’ Butch Lesbian community and the rapidly-growing FTM community, whose numbers are increasing.

An exploration of the ghostly tales and history of the Battle of Gettysburg with the acclaimed author of the Ghosts of Gettysburg, series of books, Mark Nesbitt.

A class of 9-year-old children is making an animated movie, whose chosen theme is the “War on Iraq”. Their protagonists are the same we see on TV: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Saddam, and Bin Laden. But the story is quite more imaginative… Children talk with no interference from adults, and the final result is the product of their free expression. While they discuss war matters and fiction strategy, camera captures their dialogs with intimacy, and shows us their unexpected sense of humour. Nevertheless, they commit to the story with total dedication and faithfulness, as in a real labour. The way they make decisions, and talk and listen to each other, is a vivid lesson of democracy (in every place of the world).

Durham, North Carolina’s own Bouncing Bulldogs have no peer when it comes to precision jump roping. Boys and girls leap, tumble, whirl, flip and entwine in a series of gravity-defying tricks. The team’s inspiring coach believes in mentoring relationships between the older and younger members, and challenges each child to ask, “What am I giving back to the community?

This is a 2004 french documentary about the Catacombs of Paris, with english subtitles. Directors Jean Labourdette and Marielle Quesney follow veteran "cataphile" and graphic artist Psyckoze in what is probably one of the world's most amazing places.

In a high school, several young people must run from a battle between two heavyweights of the slasher cinema, a confrontation that cannot be stopped.

The Hamat'sa (or "Cannibal Dance") is the most important-and highly represented-ceremony of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) people of British Columbia. This film traces the history of anthropological depictions of the dance and, through the return of archival materials to a First Nations community, presents some of the ways in which diverse attitudes toward this history inform current performances of the Hamat'sa. With a secondary focus on the filmmaker's fieldwork experience, the film also attends specifically to the ethics of ethnographic representation and to the renegotiation of relationships between anthropologists and their research partners.

Desire peaks and thoughts race as a man watches as another man swims naked in a pool.

A daughter's "coming out" to her mother falls on deaf ears. Sometimes people just don't want to listen.

In the style of a Chris Marker essay film, Hotel Saudade follows Bailey on a journey to Brazil. Prompted by a failed love and a disturbing pursuit of danger, this film critic picks up a camera and goes looking for a picture - a picture of the woman he loved, a picture of an accident, a self-portrait.

In the history of modern art, Pablo Picasso is a nearly mythological figure. Born in Malaga, Picasso was an innovative master of various media and as one of the most prolific artists in history, creating more than 20,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, and ceramics using all kinds of materials. First famous for his pioneering role in Cubism, Picasso's art developed with a pace and energy parallel to the sweeping cultural and technological changes of the twentieth century.

After five years of work, Chen Zhen of CCTV has made the first feature length documentary about the Potala Palace, a film that reveals the long history and the splendid culture of the Tibetan heritage. Chen provides us with a rare chance to get to know more about Tibet and to reflect upon the important issues -- more specifically, the director offers us a chance to really think about how to appreciate our historical and cultural achievements and the relationship between the past, today's present reality, and future developments in society. The film is told through the eyes of someone who entered the Potala at the age of 13 and has lived there for 60 years, experiencing personally the rise and fall of its fortunes during this long period.