Downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century are mostly gone. That city area is now an archaeological site of sorts that reveals aspects of life in society which have been lost. And that’s just part of the story.
Related Movies
A Remembering of Disremembering (2020)
Told through the tales of love of a retiring film projectionist and a late-blooming actress, the short documentary delves into the journey of Manila’s oldest movie theater from grandiosity to obsolescence.
Xiao Jia Going Home (2007)
Leading Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns home to Fenyang in Shanxi province after winning the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for Still Life (2006). The experiences of his childhood, the people he grew up with, and the changing landscape of his home town gave Jia the inspiration to make his first films. The documentary forms a poignant inquiry into the past of the director's life and Chinese society at the same time.
Cinéma Laika (2023)
In the heart of the Finnish forest, the long-closed foundry of the little town of Karkkila has come back to life thanks to director Aki Kaurismäki and his creation of the town's first cinema. The peace and calm of the little town of Karkkila, nestled deep in the Finnish forest, is interrupted by unexpected sounds. In the abandoned foundry, noisy building work is taking place. Inside the building, Aki Kaurismäki is both builder and site manager of what is soon to become the Kino Laika cinema. The creation of the cinema is the talk of the town. In the factory still in activity, in a 1960s Cadillac, in a bikers' club, in the local pub, in the woods or in Aki Kaurismäki's former editing room, people start talking about cinema again.
Back to the Drive-in (2022)
A feature-length documentary that goes behind the scenes to get to know the families who own and operate drive-in theaters.
Pride & Attitude (2025)
The viewpoints of women from a country that no longer exists preserved on low-band U-matic tape. GDR-FRG. Courageous, self-confident and emancipated: female industry workers talk about gaining autonomy.
Familiar Phantoms (2023)
Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma.
Memoirs of a Movie Palace: The Kings of Flatbush (1980)
When Brooklyn's Kings Theater -- one of five "Wonder Theaters" in the New York area -- closed its doors in 1977, the neighborhood mourned. In a series of interviews, local aficionados of the palace as well as its projectionist, its organist, and former employees, reminisce about the Kings and its charmed days gone by.
being queer here (2024)
A portrait of Toronto, as defined by the spaces its queer residents inhabit and the memories they’ve created there.
I Bought a Time Machine (2020)
Yeon Park orders a time machine on eBay for her father’s birthday, seeing it as an opportunity to discover a few truths about her family’s past. Yeon responds to her father’s private prints through another distribution of the sensible. Fun and intimate, I Bought a Time Machine uses technology like a mediation necessary for communication.
Caixa D'Água: Qui-Lombo é Esse? (2012)
The documentary "Caixa D'água: Qui-lombo is this?" It reports, through testimonies from former residents and photographic collections, the importance in the cultural and historical scope of the Getúlio Vargas neighborhood located in Aracaju, capital of Sergipe. Emphasis is placed on black culture and the presence of black slaves and their descendants, with the rescue of issues related to their origin, orality, geographical location and awareness of their racial identity, showing that, although this community exists in an urban area, it still maintains many aspects of the quilombo life of the former black slaves in Brazil.
All this Roughness (2020)
An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories.
The Noise of Time (2024)
In the town of Xoco, the spirit of an old villager awakens in search of its lost home. Along its journey, the ghost discovers that the town still celebrates its most important festivities, but also learns that the construction of a new commercial complex called Mítikah will threaten the existence of both the traditions and the town itself.
While You're Still You (2024)
After 50 years in theatre, film and television, Carme Elias is diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. Together with Claudia Pinto, a director and friend, they decide to record her last conscious voyage. The characters played by Carme accompany this difficult period, while the borders between fiction and reality disappear. While You're Still You is a constant game of mirrors, a pact of love and friendship.
Tongue (2020)
Tracing the life of activist Costis Achniotis, the film develops within the history of the Cypriot radical Left and the bicommunal movement for reunification. In parallel quests between the past and present and with an auto-ethnographic approach, the filmmakers bring together personal artifacts, new and archival material, exploring the dialectics and poetics of the ethnic clash and division in Cyprus.
The Future Tense (2022)
Staged as a series of voiceover sessions, written with gloriously off-balanced precision and dipped in the color green, THE FUTURE TENSE unfolds as a poignant tale of tales, exploring the filmmakers’ own experiences in aging, parenting, mental illness, along with the brutal history that lies submerged beneath Ireland’s heavy, moist earth.
I'm Not From Here (2016)
Day after day, an elderly woman recalls the Spanish Basque country of her youth — while forgetting she is consigned to a retirement home in Chile.
Shivtown (2025)
"Surrounded by dozens of soldiers like me, I was led by bus to a remote camp in the desert, a place I knew nothing about. As a military photographer, I collected fragments of moments in my photos, serving as solid evidence for me." Shivtown is the story of an ordinary soldier who, in an intimate and courageous act, revisits memories from his military service through the still images he captured with an analog camera.
Paper City (2021)
Just after midnight on 10 March 1945, the US launched an air-based attack on eastern Tokyo; continuing until morning, the raid left more than 100,000 people dead and a quarter of the city eradicated. Unlike their loved ones, Hiroshi Hoshino, Michiko Kiyooka and Minoru Tsukiyama managed to emerge from the bombings. Now in their twilight years, they wish for nothing more than recognition and reparations for those who, like them, had been indelibly harmed by the war – but the Japanese government and even their fellow citizens seem disinclined to acknowledge the past.
