Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme
A documentary film about the great ‘primitive’ painter Niko Pirosmani, a Georgian equivalent to Henri Rousseau, and a role model for Parajanov.
21'
Armenia
IFFR 2019
"It was the pinnacle of my career", says editor Ziva Postec of Shoah, the monumental Holocaust documentary she edited between 1979 and 1985. She and director Claude Lanzmann (1925-2018) were a good team, she says: he a journalist, she with her film background, even though "Lanzmann wasn't an easy man". Postec, born in Israel in 1940, moved to Paris in 1961, where she worked as an (assistant) editor for the likes of Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Melville and Orson Welles.
This film tells her life story, emphasing the period when she was editing Shoah, selecting from 350 hours of footage. Lanzmann shot seven to twenty hours of footage for each interviewee (victims and perpetrators). Footage which Postec then "edited like lacework", punctuated by shots of the "guilty landscape". When Shoah was finally finished (running at over nine hours), Postec collapsed from exhaustion for three months. In 1986 she returned to Israel, where she still lives.
IFFR 2019
Programme IFFR 2019
Drawing upon cinematic memories: restored classics, films about film(makers), experimental works, installations and retrospectives.
Read more about this programmeA documentary film about the great ‘primitive’ painter Niko Pirosmani, a Georgian equivalent to Henri Rousseau, and a role model for Parajanov.
21'
Armenia
IFFR 2019
Portrait of a key figure from New York's underground film scene, a rising star who disappeared as fast as she appeared.
78'
USA
IFFR 2019
David Letterman’s ghostwriter indulges in a curious hobby: he collects industrial musicals on vinyl, and even revives this largely underrated genre.
87'
USA
IFFR 2019