DOCS OF THE YEAR: DECEMBER 13 2006 – JANUARY 4 2007

To celebrate the end of a great year for documentary filmmaking, the ICA will be screening a selection of the top documentary features from 2006.

As well as the 30th anniversary of acclaimed Vietnam war documentary HEARTS AND MINDS, 2006 saw the release of new films from two leaders in the field of documentary film-making – Nick Broomfield returned to south Africa to catch up with white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche in HIS BIG WHITE SELF and Kirby Dick launched a bracing and often hilarious investigation into the antiquated US film censorship system in THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED. Sophie Fiennes’ THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA, narrated by psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, is another enlightening piece of cultural criticism whilst other documentaries in the selection offer insights into far-reached places across the globe – from KZ, a haunting film about the small Austrian town of Mauthausen which exists in the shadow of the infamous Nazi concentration camp, to Michael Glawogger’s challenging WORKINGMAN’S DEATH which takes us to 5 places across the globe – including a mountainside sulphur mine in Indonesia and a blood-drenched slaughterhouse in Nigeria - where heavy manual labour in brutal conditions is still a fact of life for most inhabitants. SISTERS IN LAW is the uplifting story of a pair of female prosecutors in Kumba Town, Cameroon whilst the award-winning FAVELA RISING is a pulsating documentary set in and amongst the young people of Rio de Janeiro’s most feared and violent favela (slum).

Other films in the season include: Steven Bognar’s and Julia Reichert’s moving insight into the lives of 5 child cancer sufferers and their families in A LION ON THE HOUSE; BLACK SUN, the story of blinded French artist Hugues de Montalembert as he tries to rebuild his life; and UNKNOWN WHITE MALE which documents one young man’s attempt to re-discover the world around him after a rare form of amnesia wipes out his memory. And finally, a pair of highly idiosyncratic looks at London will be screened – the lesser known THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS, a gritty portrait of 1960’s London narrated by James Mason and Lindsay Anderson’s more famous EVERY DAY EXCEPT CHRISTMAS, a landmark of British “Free Cinema”.