This documentary presents a before-and-after picture of people in a large-scale public housing project in Toronto. Due to a housing shortage, they were forced to live in squalid, dingy flats and ramshackle dwellings on a crowded street in Regent Park North; now they have access to new, modern housing developments designed to offer them privacy, light and space.
Fred, George, Doug and Howie are quickly reaching middle-age. Three of them are married, only Fred is still a bachelor. They want something different than their ordinary marriages, children and TV-dinners. In secret, they get themselves an apartment with a beautiful young woman, Kathy, for romantic rendezvous. But Kathy does not tell them that she is a sociology student researching the sexual life of the white middle-class male.
A lonely young suburban housewife participates in a radio interview survey while simultaneously engaging in an extramarital affair.
Stanislas Previne is a young sociologist, preparing a thesis on criminal women. He chooses Camille Bliss as his subject of study and begins to visit her in prison for interviews. Camille became acquainted with trouble at a young age and justifies her actions by "fate-bets." She is currently in prison for allegedly murdering one of her lovers. As she tells Stanislas of her life and love affairs, his interest in her grows to more than just professional. Can he resist her charm?
Directed by Djafar Damardji.
After losing his son in a traffic accident and his wife to mental illness, Harry moves to a gloomy Stockholm suburb. A local youth gang is harassing the neighborhood and Harry comes up with the idea of hiring the gang to kill the bureaucrats who are responsible for the construction of the suburb. The film is a fierce critique of the political project of building suburbs designed only for workers to sleep in and also wants to have a say in the debate over nature vs nurture.
Documentary focusing on the thrash metal band Kreator but also exploring the economic and social situation of Essen at the time.
Through one woman's experience as an adopted person and also as a mother who relinquished her child in 1971, this documentary highlights the many complex issues associated with adoption.
THE PERFUMED GARDEN is an exploration of the myths and realities of sensuality and sexuality in Arab society, a world of taboos and of erotic literature. Through interviews with men and women of all ages, classes, and sexual orientation, the film lifts a corner of the veil that usually shrouds discussion of this subject in the Arab world. Made by an Algerian-French woman director, the film begins by looking at the record of a more permissive history, and ends with the experiences of contemporary lovers from mixed backgrounds. It examines the personal issues raised by the desire for pleasure, amidst societal pressures for chastity and virginity. The film discusses pre-marital sex, courtship and marriage, familial pressures, private vs. public spaces, social taboos (and the desire to break them), and issues of language.
When her husband died Soumicha, mother of three, had to earn a living. She became the only woman taxi driver in Sidi Bel-Abbès, Algeria. This film accompanies Soumicha around a city where religious and political violence rages, and records her experiences in a job normally reserved for men.
A director feels he is about to lose himself to the market forces and thinks that the only way he can protest is by making a political film. He contacts Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who will become his mouthpiece and articulate what is wrong. But along the way the director becomes distracted by another person, a young, fumbling girl reminiscent of himself.
Join sociologists Monique and Michel Pinçon-Charlot on their “investigation” of the French aristocracy and gentry. An entertaining and instructive movie on an exclusive and highly secretive world.
What happens when western anthropologists descend on the Amazon and make one of the last unacculturated tribes in existence, the Yanomami, the most exhaustively filmed and studied tribe on the planet? Despite their "do no harm" creed and scientific aims, the small army of anthropologists that has studied the Yanomami since the 1960s has wreaked havoc among the tribe – and sparked a war within the anthropology community itself.
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
Steve, a 25-year-old Black man from the Paris suburbs, seeks to escape the violence of his immediate surroundings by training to become an actor at one of France’s most prestigious drama schools. But soon he discovers that the theater world is only interested in having him inhabit “Black” roles.
As we wait to see whether Rupert Murdoch will fall from power and lose control of News International, Every Day is Like Sunday tells the forgotten story of the dramatic downfall of Cecil King—the newspaper mogul who used to dominate British media in the 1960s, before Rupert Murdoch arrived.
Unlike anything else you will see in this year or any other, 'The Decline of the West' is a groundbreaking social allegory that challenges its audience to explore the effects of contemporary conditioning; of the stereotypes, and counter-stereotypes surrounding race and ethnicity. By employing a unique blend of absurdist humor and dry, dark comedy, both the insularity and the inertia of progressive society are put on trial and hanged in this bold film that goes places few have ever gone. The film maintains its extended, detailed allegory, in which the physical layout of Manhattan comes to life as its symbols of Progress slowly turn it into a comic liberal dystopia. Anything that "isn't allowed" is used to confront the audience with hypocrisy. Make-up plays a crucial role throughout the film, as a hinge that simultaneously showcases characters and the existential reality of the players behind them.