S Club 7: It's An S Club Thing

“This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s The Only Son (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot (The Only Son), the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention.”

In this charming documentary, director Gillian Leahy combines her two great passions: dogs and film. She openly reveals her life story through a canine prism – lovers may come and go, but there are always the dogs. Leahy also weaves in her filmmaking career, starting out at the Women's Film Workshop in 1970s Sydney and the newly formed AFTRS. Dogs have carried her through childhood illness and heartbreak; in return she lavishes care, and frets over their waywardness. Today, she shares her life with a big brown Labrador called Baxter. There are echoes of Leahy's award-winning My Life Without Steve, a study in love and loss, in this meditative and romantic film.

A mockumentary about Doctor Kurz, the inventor of the BioK-2: a rejuvenating drug extracted from ñandús (rheas).

The picture is about the anti-Hitler coalition of the USSR, England and America, which developed as a counterweight to the aggressive policy of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The unique newsreel footage of these years, shot by operators of different warring countries, is connected with today's thoughts of the author about the fate of the post-war world, about the humanitarian losses of both sides and about gaining unstable hopes for the unity of the world in countering evil.

The Robert Mapplethorpe documentary, from 1988-one year before he died-is an excellent examination of one of the most controversial of American photographers. British documentarian Nigel Finch does an outstanding job fusing interviews with Mr. Mapplethorpe himself, with critic and author Edmund White, and with several of Mapplethorpe's subjects as well, with numerous shots of the man's work. Mapplethorpe, gay, did not hesitate to photograph what he wanted to without fear of reprisal or censorship. Indeed, a good number of his pieces were not shown in the documentary at its original airing on PBS with the comment, "Considered Unsuitable for Viewing On This Transmission." His openly sexual work can at times be more than shocking, but it is always powerful and direct; as critic Lynn Davies says in the documentary, he did not pose people but photographed them doing what they would normally do in the course of their lives.

This controversial documentary created a storm in Russia by taking the cloak off a violent, repressive period of Soviet history. Filmmaker Semyon Aranovich found the last surviving personal bodyguard of Joseph Stalin, Alexey Robin, who began working for the dictator in the 1930s.

Monte Hellman's short portrait of Francis Ford Coppola discussing business and craft at home and on the set of his Zoetrope Studios.

Documentary that explores the role of the Chilean Catholic Church in the fight against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, giving great emphasis to the creation of the Vicariate of Solidarity and protests against violations to human rights.

At 37 years old, time is not on his side. Sergio 'Marvelous' Martinez can drop the best boxers with his lightning strikes, floor the most beautiful women with his devastating looks, and has a hard-scrabble immigrant story and work ethic that make him the hero of the Latin street. But a willingness to call it the way he sees it and speak truth to power, has left him a virtual pariah in the notorious corrupt world of professional boxing. This is story of a man fighting to fight. But the clock is ticking. It may already be too late.