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Helga Reidemeister's Von wegen 'Schicksal' (Is This Fate?) screens this Saturday, September 10, as part of Open City Documentary Festival in London. Starting September 16, it will be available to stream on Another Screen along with Reidemeister's Der gekaufte Traum and Cristina Perincioli's Für Frauen. 1. Kapitel.Von wegen 'Schicksal' (Is This Fate?) (1979).Helga Reidemeister’s Von wegen ‘Schicksal’ (Is this Fate?) (1979) begins in a space of near total darkness. At the center of the frame is 48-year-old Irene Rakowitz, whose tumultuous family life at the social housing estate Märkisches Viertel constitutes the heart of this unblinking documentary. Divorced, disabled, and surviving on benefits, Irene lived with her two youngest children in a small apartment five floors above her ex-husband Richard’s. Her two older daughters had left—or rather fled—the claustrophobic environment. Facing a row of monitors, Rakowitz gazes upon playbacks of an interview between Reidemeister and her daughters...

The series Sex, Truth, and Videotape: French Feminist Activism is playing on Mubi in many countries. Maso and Miso Go BoatingTo commemorate the United Nations decreeing 1975 as the International Year of the Woman, French television host Bernard Pivot invited the State Secretary for Women Françoise Giroud to chat with a series of men who all proudly identified as misogynists. Throughout “The Year of the Woman: Thank God! It’s Over,” representatives from various corners of the arts came together to discuss why women will never be great artists, cooks, or human beings. Giroud happily agrees with them, the group having a chatty back and forth about why women marry their abusers. There’s no dissent from anyone, and these experts in their field and representatives of the state reveal the shallowness of hegemony, which is in turn transmitted directly into the homes of the French. These are the people in...

Next month’s Mubi lineup has been unveiled and if you can’t make it to Cannes Film Festival, they are spotlighting recent favorites from the event. As part of a Cannes Takeover series, they will show Lisandro Alonso’s Viggo Mortensen-led Jauja, the Zambian drama I Am Not a Witch, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After the Storm, plus two films from directors who have new films in this year’s lineup, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II and Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre, plus more.

Also in the lineup will be the Mubi debut of Magnus van Horn’s Sweat, which opens in theaters today, plus series on Jean-Claude Carriére and Luis Buñuel’s collaboration and a trio of films by the prolific Chilean master Raúl Ruiz. There will also be some recent festival favorites, including Arab Blues starring Golshifteh Farahani...

"Life-Edit (A Companion to Streaming and Solitude)" is a text by Costanza Candeloro commissioned by Fondazione Prada. Focused on the individual and collective experience of streaming, this native content accompanies the film project "Perfect Failures" conceived by Mubi and Fondazione Prada and available on the online platform in select countries from April 5, 2020. Every week an illustrated chapter of the text will be published on Fondazione Prada’s website and on the Notebook. Above: Carole Roussopoulos filming the demonstration of the Lip company workers in Besançon, September 1973, for her documentary La Marche de Besançon. Lip II (1973). Distribution by Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, ParisMovie memory works exactly like editing: it modifies, selects and assembles useful information, relevant images in order to give continuity to a personal bond with video reality. Wonderful representations of these processes merge the screen, streaming and the nomadism of multiple platforms with selective taste. Current streaming modes...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSZhang Yimou's One SecondZhang Yimou's latest One Second has been pulled from its competition slot at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film's official Weibo account cites "technical reasons," though some have speculated that the Cultural Revolution-set drama may have run into censorship troubles. Samuel L. Jackson and Giancarlo Esposito are both in talks to join Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, about African American veterans who return to Vietnam in search of a body and some hidden gold. “'I’ve done everything I need to do, I made a million films, I’ve been around the world,' she told CBS2’s Cindy Hsu. 'It’s been a pleasure to live and living has been terrific.'" One of the great pioneers of queer cinema, Barbara Hammer, speaks to CBS New York about "right to die" laws.

Alongside Angela Schanelec's I Was at Home, But..., the Berlinale is premiering new work by another stalwart practitioner of a highly individual film language. German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz has made what seems to be the final entry in his long-running, multi-film series of documentaries devoted to architecture, which has included such films as Sullivan’s Banks (2000) and Perret in France and Algeria (2012). (Mubi presented a retrospective of some of these films last winter.) Part of a greatly ambitious, international, multi-architect project of cinematic surveys, Emigholz’s beautiful new film, Years of Construction, is a gesture of powerful summary for the series, as it charts the destruction of a building and the creation of a new one.Commissioned by Kunsthalle Mannheim for this purpose, we get to see this through Emigholz’s characteristic gaze: no voiceover or text explanation, and favoring still shots on tripods that fleetly move from composition to composition,...

The Very Eye of Night is a series of columns on non-binary and female avant-garde film and video artists. The title refers to Maya Deren’s last completed film. Anthology Film Archives in New York presents a five-program retrospective of Carole Roussopoulos’s videos from November 7–9, 2017. The screenings will be introduced by Nicole Fernández Ferrer, director of the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Center.Carole Roussopoulos, 1970. Photo by Guy Le Querrec.Jean-Luc Godard wrote a letter to Carole Roussopoulos in 1979 for Cahiers du cinéma in which he reflected on the motivations behind making films, and inquired: “Sometimes I wonder what has happened to all you have filmed in the four corners of France and the world… And I wonder why people in cinema want to film others with so much frenzy.” As Nicole Brenez recalls, the Swiss filmmaker responded to him: “to privilege the approach of those without a voice.” Carole Roussopoulos...

Any roundup of the day's news has to begin with Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom. Following yesterday's release of the poster, France's Premiere broke the news that the tale set in the summer of 1965 and featuring Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman would open this year's Cannes Film Festival on May 16. The Festival's quickly followed up with its official announcement. Artistic Director Thierry Frémaux: "Wes Anderson is one of the rising powers of American cinema, to which he brings a highly personal touch, particularly in Moonrise Kingdom, which once again is a testimony to the creative freedom in which he continues to evolve. Sensitive and independent, this admirer of Fellini and Renoir is also in his own right a brilliant and inventive filmmaker."

A couple of related items: At Open Culture, Colin Marshall argues that, with his two ads for the Hyundai Azera (which,...