Two extensive collections of documentary films were purchased for the video library at FAMU.
The edition of the almost complete work of American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman contains 40 DVDs and covers the director's work between 1967 and 2016.
The observational documentaries, close in style to direct cinema, capture public life in the USA - health care, education, the judiciary, social services, military training, working conditions, sports, etc. They focus in particular on the lives of socially disadvantaged or disabled people or animals subjugated by humans (Primate, Zoo, Meat, Racetrack) and offer reflections on ethics, the limits of a democratic society and the power and ideological structures within state institutions.
In addition to the three booklets included in the DVD boxes, the library is now offering a new publication on Wiseman's work, Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (Columbia University Press, 2023).
The Children of Golzow (Die Kinder von Golzow) documentary series represents the longest time-lapse documentary project in the history of cinema. German filmmaker Winfried Junge followed the lives of several residents of the East German village of Golzow on the German-Polish border from 1961, when they were children entering first grade, until 2007. The documentaries, which he made first alone and later with his wife, filmmaker Barbara Junge, are not just testimonies of specific lives, but depict life in the socialist GDR and after German reunification in 1990.
24. April 2025