OVID.tv, the curated streaming destination for documentaries and art-house films, has announced its February streaming lineup! OVID exclusives next month include Rogier Kappers’ Emmy nominated documentary Lomax the Songhunter, two films by Romanian director Radu Jude titled I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians and Aferim!, as well as Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God, The Hole, and much more. You can learn more about these films and check out the full February slate below!
RELATED: New to Hulu February 2021: All the Movies & Shows Coming & Going
Monday, February 1st
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Lomax the Songhunter (2005)
Directed by Rogier Kappers; Icarus Films, Documentary
Netherlands
Alan Lomax (1915-2002) devoted his life to recording the world’s folk tunes before they would permanently disappear with the rise of the modern music industry. In Lomax the Songhunter, filmmaker Rogier Kappers follows the route that Lomax took across America and beyond its borders-traveling to remote villages in Spain and Italy, hearing memories and music from the farmers, shepherds, and weavers whose songs Lomax recorded decades earlier.
The film also tells Lomax’s story by interviewing friends such as Pete Seeger, using archival recordings of music greats Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and gathering footage of the cotton fields, rock quarries, and prisons where Alan Lomax captured America’s quintessential music.
Tuesday, February 2nd
Ezra (2007)
Directed by Newton Aduaka; California Newsreel, Feature
Nigeria/France/Austria
Ezra stands out among other African films because it is a complex psychological study of a child soldier, not just about the trauma, healing, and reintegration into society, but also as a key for reconstructing these societies themselves. This drama was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2007 Festival Panafricain du Cinema à Ouagadougou (FESPACO), Africa’s largest and most prestigious film event, and selected for the International Critics Week at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
Karmen Gei (2001)
Directed by Joseph Gai Ramaka; California Newsreel, Feature
Senegal
Director Joseph Gaï Ramaka writes: “Carmen is a myth but what does Carmen represent today? Where do Carmen’s love and freedom stand at the onset of the 21st Century? Therein lies my film’s intent, a black Carmen, plunged in the magical and chaotic urbanity of an African city.”
Karmen Geï is the first African Carmen and, arguably, the first African filmed “musical.” Accordingly, Gaï Ramaka has completely replaced Bizet’s score and the usual staging with indigenous Senegalese music and choreography: Doudou N’Diaye Rose’s sabar drummers, Julien Jouga’s choir, El Hadj Ndiaye’s songs and Yandé Coudou Sène’s prophetic voice. Saxophonist David Murray’s contemporary jazz score runs like a thread of unfulfilled desire through the film.
Karmen Gei may convince viewers that this African ambience is what the Carmen legend, perhaps leading back through Andalusia to its African roots, has been waiting for all these years.
Wednesday, February 3rd
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
In the Last Days of the City (2016)
Directed by Tamer El Said; Big World Pictures, Feature
Egypt/Germany/Great Britain/United Arab Emirates
Tamer El Said’s ambitious debut feature tells the fictional story of a filmmaker from downtown Cairo played by Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, United 93, Green Zone) as he struggles to capture the soul of a city on edge while facing loss in his own life. Shot in Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad, and Berlin during the two years before the outbreak of revolution in Egypt, the film’s multi-layered stories are a visually rich exploration of friendship, loneliness, and life in cities shaped by the shadows of war and adversity.
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Tahrir: Liberation Square (2011)
Directed by Stefano Savona; Icarus Films, Documentary
Egypt
Soon after the first reports came about the occupation of Tahrir Square, filmmaker Stefano Savona headed for Cairo, where he stayed, amidst the ever-growing masses in the Square, for weeks. His film introduces us to young Egyptians such as Elsayed, Noha, and Ahmed, spending all day and night talking, shouting, singing, finally expressing everything they were forbidden to say out loud until now.
Thursday, February 4th
Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017)
Directed by Bruno Dumont; KimStim, Feature
Canada
France, 1425. In the midst of the Hundred Years’ War, the young Jeannette, at the still tender age of 8, looks after her sheep in the small village of Domremy.
One day, she tells her friend Hauviette how she cannot bear to see the suffering caused by the English. Madame Gervaise, a nun, tries to reason with the young girl, but Jeannette is ready to take up arms for the salvation of souls and the liberation of the Kingdom of France. Carried by her faith, she will become Joan of Arc.
Friday, February 5th
OVID EXCLUSIVE
False Confessions (2016)
Directed by Luc Bondy; Big World Pictures, Feature
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Louis Garrel, Bulle Ogier
France
Luc Bondy’s final feature film as director draws talent from both stage and screen to bring Marivaux’s play into 21st century Paris. Isabelle Huppert commands the screen as Araminte, the wealthy widow who unwittingly hires the smitten Dorante (Garrel) as her accountant. Secrets and lies accumulate as Dorante and his accomplice, Araminte’s manservant Dubois (Yves Jacques), manipulate not only the good-hearted Araminte, but also her friend and confidante, Marton (Manon Combes).
Dorante, by turns pitiable and proficient, but always deferential to his social better, walks a fine line in his quest to arouse an equal desire in the object of his affections. Bulle Ogier delivers a memorable turn as Araminte’s mother, who suspects the young man’s intentions, but wants to push her daughter into the arms of an aged, hard-up Count (Jean-Pierre Malo). Filmed in part on-site at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the film blurs the distinction between stage and screen, offering a new turn on this classic take on the psychology of love.
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Marie Curie (2016)
Directed by Marie Noëlle; Big World Pictures, Feature
Germany/France/Poland
Working alone after the premature death of her husband and colleague, physicist and chemist Marie Curie struggles for recognition in the male-dominated science community in early 20th-century France.
Monday, February 8th
Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority (2008)
Directed by Kimberlee Bassford; Women Make Movies, Documentary
U.S.
In 1965, Patsy Takemoto Mink became the first woman of color in the United States Congress. Seven years later, she ran for the US presidency and was the driving force behind Title IX, the landmark legislation that transformed women’s opportunities in higher education and athletics.
Winning Girl (2014)
Directed by Kimberlee Bassford; Women Make Movies, Documentary
U.S.
From award-winning Hawaiian filmmaker Kimberlee Bassford (Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority) comes Winning Girl, an inspirational film that follows the four-year journey of Teshya Alo, a part-Polynesian, teenage judo, and wrestling phenomenon from Hawaii. Teshya is only 16 years old and 125 pounds, but on the judo and wrestling mats, she dominates women twice her age and pounds heavier!
Now Alo has her sights set on taking the Olympic gold at both the judo and wrestling world championships – and in doing so would be the first to accomplish that feat. Winning Girl tells the dynamic story of an elite athlete on her ascent, a girl facing the challenges of puberty and growing up with an entire family dedicated to a single dream. A great companion piece to any discussion on Title IX and gender.
Tuesday, February 9th
This is Nollywood (2007)
Directed by Franco Sacchi; California Newsreel, Documentary
Nigeria
First came Hollywood, then Bollywood, and now Nollywood — Nigeria’s booming film industry, which released two thousand features in 2006 alone. Where else can you shoot a full-length dramatic film for $10,000 in 7 days? Until recently, it was rarely known outside its own country. This is Nollywood explains why Nigerian video production is becoming recognized as a phenomenon with broad implications for the cultural and economic development of Africa. The most intimate and accurate portrait of the technical, economic, and social infrastructure of the industry.
Thunderbolt (2000)
Directed by Tunde Kelani; California Newsreel, Feature
Nigeria
A story from the burgeoning video industry of Nigeria combines melodrama and issues of ethnicity, gender, culture, and identity in post-colonial Africa.
Thunderbolt will come as a bolt out of the blue to most Americans, even aficionados of African cinema. The new Nigerian video industry is without doubt one of the most vibrant new developments in the world cinema today.
The first half of the film is in a sense a retelling of the Othello story – except the protagonists are not Abyssinian and Venetian but Yoruba and Ibo. In the second half of the film, a distinctly West African emphasis on the supernatural comes to the fore; curses and ritual cleansing take the place of psychological explanations.
Wednesday, February 10th
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Althusser: an Intellectual Adventure (2016)
Directed by Bruno Oliviero; Icarus Films, Documentary
France
Althusser: an Intellectual Adventure traces the development of Althusser’s thought, which influenced a who’s who of French philosophers, including Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. His most enduring contribution may be the concept of ideological state apparatuses: institutions and social structures including schools, churches, and families, that serve to reinforce the capitalist state.
The film also delves into Althusser’s little-understood struggles with the mental illness that would see him hospitalized numerous times throughout his life. In intimate letters to his wife, Helene Rytmann, and mistress, Franca Madonia, Althusser describes his treatment and mental states. As Yves Duroux says, in order to understand the man, one must look not only at his philosophy and relationship with the Communist Party, but to “his own madness” which in some ways linked the two.
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Foucault Against Himself (2014)
Directed by François Caillat; Icarus Films, Documentary
France
Divided into four chapters, Foucault Against Himself focuses on Foucault’s critique of psychiatry, his work on the history of sexuality, the growth of his radicalism arising from his research into the French penal system, the nature of knowledge and underlying structures of human behavior, and his immersion in American counter-cultural movements-in particular the resistance to current social structures that he found among sexual minority communities in San Francisco.
Thursday, February 11th
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018)
Directed by Radu Jude; Big World Pictures, Feature
Romania/Germany/ Bulgaria/ France/Czech Republic
A young artist reconstructs a historical event from 1941, in which the Romanian Army carried out ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front.
OVID EXCLUSIVE
Aferim! (2015)
Directed by Radu Jude; Big World Pictures, Feature
Romania/Bulgaria/Czech Republic
Radu Jude’s third feature has been aptly compared to films as diverse as The Searchers, The Last Detail, and Pulp Fiction (the latter for its rambling, coarse, and endlessly entertaining dialogues), but the film is ultimately a moving parable about late-feudal Europe developed from historical documents and songs: its power structures and hierarchies, people’s ideas of themselves and others, interaction with minorities and the resulting conflicts. A Balkan Western in black-and-white that brings the cacophony of the times strikingly to life and explores the thematic arcs that stretch into the present.
Friday, February 12th
OVID EXCLUSIVE
Rebels of the Neon God (1992)
Directed by Tsai Ming-liang; Big World Pictures, Feature
Taiwan
Tsai Ming-liang’s debut feature Rebels of the Neon God already includes a handful of elements familiar to fans of his subsequent work: a deceptively spare style often branded “minimalist”; actor Lee Kang-sheng as the silent and sullen Hsiao-kang; copious amounts of water, whether pouring from the sky or bubbling up from a clogged drain; and enough urban anomie to ensure that even the subtle humor in evidence is tinged with pathos.
The loosely structured plot involves Hsiao-kang, a despondent cram school student, who becomes obsessed with young petty thief Ah-tze, after Ah-tze smashes the rearview mirror of a taxi driven by Hsiao-kang’s father. Hsiao-kang stalks Ah-tze and his buddy Ah-ping as they hang out in the film’s iconic arcade (featuring a telling poster of James Dean on the wall) and other locales around Taipei, and ultimately takes his revenge.
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
The Hole (1998)
Directed by Tsai Ming-liang; Big World Pictures, Feature
Taiwan
Set just prior to the start of the 21st century, this vaguely futuristic story follows two residents of a quickly crumbling building who refuse to leave their homes in spite of a virus that has forced the evacuation of the area. As rain pours down relentlessly, a single man is stuck with an unfinished plumbing job and a hole in his floor. This results in a very odd relationship with the woman who lives below him.
Wednesday, February 17th
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Colette (1951)
Directed by Yannick Bellon; Icarus Films, Documentary
France
French writer Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) was both a popular and literary sensation. Known simply as Colette, she scandalized French society with her three marriages and her career as a racy music-hall performer and mime artist. She was also one of the finest prose stylists of her era, and a legendary figure in Paris. Her work often explored the struggle between independent identity and passionate love, and asserted female sexuality in a male-dominated world.
Thursday, February 18th
I Was A Teenage Feminist (2005)
Directed by Therese Shechter; Women Make Movies, Documentary
Canada/US
Why is it that some young, independent, progressive women in today’s society feel uncomfortable identifying with the F-word? Join filmmaker Therese Shechter as she takes a funny, moving, and very personal journey into the heart of feminism. Armed with a video camera and an irreverent sense of humor, Shechter talks with feminist superstars, rowdy frat boys, liberated Cosmo girls, and Radical Cheerleaders, all in her quest to find out whether feminism can still be a source of personal and political power.
Tokyo Idols (2017)
Directed by Kyoko Miyake; KimStim, Documentary
Japan
A fascinating exploration of Japan’s girl bands and their music, delving into the cultural obsession with young female sexuality and the growing disconnect between men and women in hyper-modern societies.
Friday, February 19th
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street (2017)
Directed by Ruth Zylberman; Icarus Films, Documentary
France
209 Saint-Maur Street is a classic Haussmann building in the 10th arrondissement of Paris: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working-class people, about a third of them Jewish.
And then came the Nazi occupation. Parents rounded up and deported. Children left on their own. Neighbors hiding Jewish kids under the blankets.
The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street is filmmaker Ruth Zylberman’s painstakingly researched reconstruction of life in the building before and during the Second World War. (At one point she wrote to every single person in France with a particular last name trying to find a resident of the building.) There’s the small grocer whose husband is deported and who loses her business when it is “Aryanized.” The deaf woman who eagerly writes down the names and locations of Jews so the Nazis can find them. The girl whose father hid Jews in the apartment and threatened to murder his collaborator son if anything should happen to them. And the Jewish children themselves, now elderly, many living abroad, who recall the rumors of roundups, the hiding, and the friends they played with. “I wonder if all of this was real,” one of them, the son of Polish immigrants, says.
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
A German Youth (2015)
Directed by Jean-Gabriel Périot; Big World Pictures, Documentary
France/Switzerland/Germany
A German Youth (Une Jeunesse Allemande) chronicles the political radicalization of some German youth in the late 1960s that gave birth to the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German revolutionary terrorist group founded notably by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, as well as the images generated by this story. The film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today’s society.
Tuesday, February 23rd
The Rest I Make Up (2018)
Directed by Michelle Memran; Women Make Movies, Documentary
US
Maria Irene Fornes was one of America’s greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, but many know her only as the ex-lover of writer and social critic Susan Sontag. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds onstage, writing over 40 plays and winning nine Obie Awards. At the vanguard of the nascent Off-Off Broadway experimental theater movement in NYC, Fornes is often referred to as American theater’s “Mother Avant-Garde.” When she gradually stops writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off.
The duo travels from New York to Havana, Miami to Seattle, exploring the playwright’s remembered past and their shared present. Theater luminaries such as Edward Albee, Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson, and others weigh in on Fornes’s important contributions. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting.
Service: When Women Come Marching Home (2012)
Directed by Marcia Rock & Patricia Lee Stotter; Women Make Movies, Documentary
US
Women make up 15 percent of today’s military. That number is expected to double in 10 years. Service highlights the resourcefulness of seven amazing women who represent the first wave of mothers, daughters, and sisters returning home from the frontless wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Portraying the courage of women veterans as they transition from active duty to their civilian lives, this powerful film describes the horrific traumas they have faced, the inadequate care they often receive on return, and the large and small accomplishments they work mightily to achieve.
The Heretics (2009)
Directed by Joan Braderman; Women Make Movies, Documentary
US
Tracing the influence of the Women’s Movement’s Second Wave on art and life, The Heretics is the exhilarating inside story of the New York feminist art collective that produced “Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics” (1977-92). In this feature-length documentary, cutting-edge video artist/writer/director Joan Braderman, who joined the group in 1975 as an aspiring filmmaker, charts the collective’s challenges to terms of gender and power and its history as a microcosm of the period’s broader transformations.
Thursday, February 25th
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Suspension (2019)
Directed by Simón Uribe; Icarus Films, Documentary
Colombia
A car and mini-bus meet on the highway connecting the cities of Mocoa and Pasto, in southern Colombia. The road, opened in 1944, is the main link between the two centers, but it’s not exactly a superhighway. In fact, it’s barely a highway at all. As the bus advances, the car backs up, seeking a place wide enough for the vehicles to pass each other.
For decades, Colombian authorities have talked of building a bypass, a road that will replace the one currently known as “the springboard of death.” With more than two dozen curves per mile, it may be the most dangerous stretch of road in the world. Shrines dot the route, marking the spots where so many have died. Landslides and washouts have killed dozens more.
Suspension brilliantly captures some of the absurdities and contradictions that come with the decades-long effort to try and build a road through this part of the Amazon—an effort one engineer calls “political madness.”
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Winter Nomads (2013)
Directed by Manuel von Sturler; Icarus Films, Documentary
Switzerland
Pascal, 53, and Carole, 28, are shepherds. In the month of November 2010, they embark on their long winter transhumance: four months during which they will have to cover 600 km in the Swiss region, accompanied by three donkeys, four dogs, and eight hundred sheep.
An exceptional adventure is about to begin: They brave the cold and the bad weather day in and day out, with a canvas cover and animal skins as their only shelter at night. This saga reveals a tough and exacting profession requiring constant improvisation and unflinching attention to nature, the animals, and the cosmos.
Friday, February 26th
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Ága (2017)
Directed by Milko Lazarov; Big World Pictures, Feature
Bulgaria
In a yurt on the snow-covered fields of the North, Nanook and Sedna live following the traditions of their ancestors. Alone in the wilderness, they look like the last people on Earth.
Nanook and Sedna’s traditional way of life starts changing – slowly, but inevitably. Hunting becomes more and more difficult, the animals around them die from inexplicable causes, and the ice has been melting earlier every year.
Chena, who visits them regularly, is their only connection to the outside world – and to their daughter Ága, who left the icy tundra long ago due to a family feud.
When Sedna’s health deteriorates, Nanook decides to fulfill her wish. He embarks on a long journey in order to find Ága.
OVID EXCLUSIVE – SVOD Premiere
Viktoria (2014)
Directed by Maya Vitkova; Big World Pictures, Feature
Bulgaria/Romania
Maya Vitkova’s stunning debut feature Viktoria, which had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, follows three generations of women in the final years of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and the early years of the transition to democracy. The film focuses on reluctant mother Boryana and her daughter, Viktoria, who, in one of the film’s surreal, magical touches is born without an umbilical cord. Though unwanted by her mother, Viktoria is named the country’s Baby of the Decade, and is showered with gifts and attention until the disintegration of the East Bloc.
Despite throwing their worlds off balance, the resulting political changes also allow for the possibility of reconciliation. Vitkova wrote, produced, and directed Viktoria, making it both personal and universal, and demonstrating a precocious command of all elements of the filmmaking process. Especially impressive is the film’s visual sensibility and its command of a range of shifting tones, from absurdist humor to political allegory to deeply moving familial drama.
RELATED: New to Netflix February 2021: All Movies & Shows Coming and Going
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