Substitute (2019)

AI's sacrifices

Magical, autonomous, all-powerful… Artificial intelligences feed our dreams as well as our nightmares. But while tech giants promise the advent of a new humanity, the reality of their production remains totally hidden. While data centers are concreting landscapes and drying up rivers, millions of workers around the world are preparing the billions of data that will feed the voracious algorithms of Big Tech, at the cost of their mental and emotional health. They are hidden in the belly of AI. Could they be the collateral damage of the ideology of “Longtermism” that has been brewing in Silicon Valley for several years?

The True Cost

Film from Andrew Morgan. The True Cost is a documentary film exploring the impact of fashion on people and the planet.

The Navigators

In South Yorkshire, a small group of railway maintenance men discover that because of privatization, their lives will never be the same. When the trusty British Rail sign is replaced by one reading East Midland Infrastructure, it is clear that there will be the inevitable winners and losers as downsizing and efficiency become the new buzzwords.

Richelieu

A French-to-Spanish interpreter working for a food processing plant that hires seasonal workers from Guatemala is, at first determined to obey the sometimes excessive directives of the young boss, but she befriends the workers and tries to defend them against the exploitation they suffer.

Trop chaud pour travailler

Plot unavailable

Anxiety

The story of Cevher and his family and their daily struggles as seasonal workers in the cotton fields of Southern Turkey. Cevher depends on the family earnings from the fields to pay blood money for a murder one of his relatives committed. On the cotton fields, people also have to compete with machines, which are preferred to human workers. Eventually, the workers unite and go on strike.

Forced Labour: SOS from a Chinese Prisoner

A desperate cry for help written in Chinese was discovered in a pregnancy test sold in France and made in a Chinese factory. It revealed a hidden world of Chinese prison-companies where prisoners are forced to work for 15 hour days manufacturing products for export. This documentary tries to find out who wrote the letter.

The Golden Thread

In the heyday of the jute industry, millions of people in Bengal made their living doing this laborious work, which has hardly changed since the industrial revolution. The 100-year-old machinery has been endlessly repaired. State aid kept this sustainable alternative to plastic going, but its future looks bleak.

Misery Loves Comedy

Do you have to be miserable to be funny? More than sixty comedians—including stand-ups, writers, actors, and directors from the US, Canada, and abroad—take on this question, sharing anecdotes and insights with lively enthusiasm.

The Inner Harbor

A documentary about the dockworkers in Gothenburg, and the future of the shipping industry in the city.

Salaryman

Tokyo work culture's most compelling and complex protagonist; the Salaryman. A nameless, voiceless, over-worked and under-valued cog in the labour pool, expected to compromise home and social lives. Late nights and intense drinking sessions leave many of them passed out in the city streets. This slick, incisive documentary raises questions around the ethics of our global working practices in a capitalist society.

Purl

Purl, an earnest ball of yarn, gets a job at a fast-paced, male-centered startup company. Things start to unravel as Purl tries to fit in with this tight-knit group, but she must ask herself how far is she willing to go to get the acceptance she yearns for and if, in the end, it is worth it.

Radium City

Documentary about the Radium Dial Company and the aftereffects experienced by its workers from repeated exposure to radioactive paint.

Paul F. Tompkins: Laboring Under Delusions

When it comes to odd jobs, Paul F. Tompkins has experienced them all, stand-up comedian included. In this extended and uncensored stand-up special, Paul (supported by his impressive mustache) takes us on a hilarious tour of his varied career. Relive his glory days as an employee at a Beta-only video store, a hat shop salesman catering to tourists looking for "king hats," an actor with an improbable cameo in an epic film, and an anxious host of Best Week Ever.

Waiting for the Carnival

A documentary film about the Brazilian town of Toritama, the self-proclaimed capital of jeans. The workers of the city’s self-managed small businesses only get one real break from their self-exploiting lives in the textile business: the annual Carnival.

Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story

The authorized documentary celebrating the film that redefined Hollywood, 50 years after its premiere. Featuring rare archival footage and interviews with acclaimed Hollywood directors alongside Steven Spielberg, top shark scientists, and conservationists, the film uncovers the behind-the-scenes chaos and how the film launched the summer blockbuster, inspired a new wave of filmmakers, and paved the way for shark conservation that continues today.

Nous paysans

In barely a century, French peasants have seen their world profoundly turned upside down. While they once made up the vast majority of the country, today they are only a tiny minority and are faced with an immense challenge: to continue to feed France. From the figure of the simple tenant farmer described by Emile Guillaumin at the beginning of the 20th century to the heavy toll paid by peasants during the Great War, from the beginnings of mechanization in the inter-war period to the ambivalent figure of the peasant under the Occupation, From the unbridled race to industrialization in post-war France to the realization that it is now necessary to rethink the agricultural model and invent the agriculture of tomorrow, the film looks back at the long march of French peasants.

Madame Hollywood

Daisy arrives in Los Angeles full of dreams and aspirations, but when her boyfriend dumps her unceremoniously, she ends up stripping to eke out a living. Soon, her ambition takes over as she unites her fellow strippers and begins a business that caters to a very wealthy and not so discreet clientele. It is not long before the Los Angeles Vice Squad raids her apartment and she meets and falls in love with Detective Collin. Will she now reveal all she knows? And can she find true love with Collin and finally enjoy the life of which she once dreamed?

Love, Women and Flowers

Women workers stand up to the toxic flower industry in Colombia.

L'Amour vache

Plot unavailable

Le Siècle des couturières

Plot unavailable

Matisse & Lydia

Plot unavailable

Desi Kattey

Desi Kattey is the story of two orphans who grow up in a remote village, making country guns to earn their livelihood. The film traces their journey, as they go on to become national level shooters.Desi Kattey is based in a small village of the Kanpur District of Uttar Pradesh, Mungera, which is famous for its geographical location i.e. at the shore of Holy river Ganga and manufacturing cum production of the country made guns, this story is about two young kids Pali and Gyani. Pali and Gyani alike other orphan kids with no support system work as a labor in one of such country made gun manufacturing factory for their survival.

A Lonely Woman in a Lonely Land

Onna Hitori Daichi wo Yuku (A Lonely Woman in a Lonely Land, Kinuta Production, 1953) was the second feature film directed by Kamei Fumio, who is known as a master of documentary films, and followed his “Haha Nareba Onna Nareba(Become a Mother, Become a Woman)” (1952).

Satan's Sword: The Dragon God

The sequel to Daibosatsu tôge (1960) and the second of the trilogy follows the adventures of Ryunosuke Tsukue after he is blinded.

Urban Tale

A boy and a girl wake up in bed one morning, naked. The children's mother died a few weeks earlier. Before she died she asked her children to find their birth father who left them when they were still babies. Their quest in search of their father leads them to hospitals, nursing homes and holding cells. In the course of the quest the brother and sister meet people who provide them - like in parallel quantum universes - a glance into what their future lives may hold for them.

The Fifth Empire

Manoel de Oliveira directs José Régio's historical epic of religious and political power struggles. King Sebastião plans to make Portugal the world's Fifth Empire.

Salama Is Fine

A courier is sent to deposit a cash amount to the bank but he arrives late. He goes to a hotel to spend the night and keeps the money in the hotel safe, but he gets confused with the Prince of Kandahar and who admires him and insists on keeping this confusion to reveal his enemies.

The Sublime and Beautiful

David Conrad is a college professor and sometimes philanderer raising three children in a small Kansas suburb with his wife Kelly. When sudden tragedy strikes the family in the days before Christmas, David and Kelly's marriage is brought to its breaking point and David's desire for retribution leads him into uncharted moral territory with the question: what can we forgive?

The Passion of Remembrance

Co-directed by Blackwood and Julien, the first full-length feature film by Sankofa Film and Video offers a radical and necessary interrogation into what constitutes 'post-colonial' identity at a time of political and social restlessness in Britain. Set within an isolated desert landscape contrasted with recognizable scenes of the intensity of family life, this vanguard work demonstrates the richness and variety of the black experience; it is a poetic and hard-hitting commentary on the complexities of race, gender and sexuality.

Camorra

The fast career of a young Neapolitan among contraband, gambling dens, bribes and illegality. He will upgrade its rank till the maximum level of the "Family".

Feelings

When a widowed fisherman moves in with his brother and sister-in-law to escape the collapsing Nazi forces, he finds himself caught up, like Lithuania itself, in perilous questions of collaboration and occupation, resistance and escape.

Baghdad Messi

Iraq, 2009. Little Hamoudi (10) is totally obsessed with football. Just as the rest of the world, he and his friends are eagerly looking forward to the Champions League finale FC Barcelona-Manchester United. The long awaited clash between Messi and Ronaldo. But then Hamoudi's television breaks down...

Five

Four close friends cram into a car in the middle of the night and drive deep into the forest. They arrive at the spot where their lost friend Annie died, under the same tree. Camille, Flora, Lucie and Marion hold a ritual to ensure that Annie's spirit appears to them.

Amiko

Amiko isn't like other children. Her endless energy makes her an outcast at school and gets her in trouble at home. When a painful family loss disrupts her seemingly idyllic seaside life, her sense of isolation intensifies, yet it doesn't stop Amiko from inviting people into her world.

Cinematic Liars of Asahi-za

Movie theater Asahiza has existed for almost a 100 years in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture. Unlike other theaters, Asahiza plays old films and doesn't get a lot of customers. The manger of Asahiza, Yasuzo Morita, finally decides to close down the theater. When he is about to burn the old 35 mm films, a young woman named Rika Motegi suddenly appears and tries to stop him. Rika Motegi came to Minamisoma from Tokyo to save Asahiza.

Ma nouvelle Héloïse

A wealthy Japanese patron, enamored with Rousseau, offers an atypical and versatile filmmaker the opportunity to freely adapt Jean-Jacques Rousseau's epistolary novel into a film. The filmmaker brings together three young actors in a deserted palace above Clarens and begins shooting. Rousseau's tragedy then reverberates through the contemporary characters.

The Wonders

In the Tuscan countryside, a family of traditional honey farmers struggles to make ends meet. The household consists of only daughters—four of them—led by the eldest, Gelsomina, who takes on the responsibilities of the family. When a small boy is sent to stay with them for rehabilitation, their routine is disrupted. As financial troubles threaten their home, Gelsomina sees an opportunity in a reality TV contest searching for 'Italy’s Most Traditional Family.' Willing to expose their secluded life for the prize money, she clashes with her father’s rigid ways in a bid to secure their future.

Timbuktu

Just outside of the Malian city of Timbuktu, now occupied by militant Islamic rebels who impose the Sharia on civilians and inconvenience their daily life, a cattleman kills a fisherman.

Gone Are the Days!

A young, idealistic man returns home to the plantation where he grew up in servitude. With him, he brings his fiance, Lutiebelle, in hopes of convincing the plantation owner that she is really his cousin in order to secure the family inheritance. To aid in the comic complications that follow are his family members Missy and Gitlow, and the plantation owners endearing (but ineffectual) son Charlie.

Don't Leave Your Lovers

Sometimes divorce process could be really painful. This is exactly the case for the heroes of this romantic drama.

Hengstparade

Plot unavailable

Destination Death

A group of West German men on a stag party find themselves stranded in a Montenegrin village inhabited only by vengeful women since all their men were shot during the war.

Tunguska – Die Kisten sind da

An early declaration of war on narrative cinema, using a barrage of visual and acoustic elements while at the same time juggling ironically - as he still does - with the term 'avant-garde'. A number of other preferences and obsessions were evident at an early stage, e.g. the mind-numbing habit of having his people stumbling and screaming around: life as a race track. His films likewise feature a lot of theatrical and cryptic outpourings. No wonder that they failed at the box office. No wonder either, however, that Schlingensief was attracted to theatre.