From cinema-verite; pioneers Albert Maysles and Joan Churchill to maverick movie makers like Errol Morris, Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield, the world's best documentarians reflect upon the unique power of their genre. Capturing Reality explores the complex creative process that goes into making non-fiction films. Deftly charting the documentarian's journey, it poses the question: can film capture reality?
When independence is declared in 1962, the minority communities of Jewish and European origin flee Algeria. Four people of Muslim ascendency searching for the truth about their own lives evoke the last decades of French colonization, the years of war, from 1955 to 1962. Hatred and friendship lead us through a hidden memory: their relationships with their Jewish and Christian neighbours. The foundational myths of the new Algeria are revisited, but will they succeed in getting to the bottom of their own legends?
When independence is declared in 1962, the minority communities of Jewish and European origin flee Algeria. Four people of Muslim ascendency searching for the truth about their own lives evoke the last decades of French colonization, the years of war, from 1955 to 1962. Hatred and friendship lead us through a hidden memory: their relationships with their Jewish and Christian neighbours. The foundational myths of the new Algeria are revisited, but will they succeed in getting to the bottom of their own legends?
Set in the 1800s among the Berbers of North Africa, this 1997 Algerian feature concerns a noble widow who receives a customary purse of gold coins from the enemy tribe that murdered her husband; the gift puts her in conflict with her kinsmen, who want the money to buy back land taken by the enemy in cahoots with French colonials.