Global Lens: Documentary Films with a Wide-Angle Point of View
This course offers a vivid exploration of nonfiction filmmaking as seen through the lens of international directors addressing audiences within their own cultural contexts. The view from abroad—refreshing, revealing, and occasionally jarring—invites OLLI members to encounter how filmmakers across the globe engage with reality, storytelling, and the ethics of representation.
Screenings will include recent documentaries, many of which have not been shown in the U.S., followed by discussions that probe each film’s goals, strategies, aesthetics, and moral dimensions. We will discuss how documentary film serves simultaneously as an art form, a mode of advocacy, and a means of cultural expression, developing a critical vocabulary for analyzing how meaning, perspective, and emotion are constructed through cinematic form.
- Week One: In the Rear View — 84min. (dir. Maciek Hamela, Poland, 2023)
- Week Two: Life and Death in Gaza — 88min. (dir. Natasha Cox, UK, 2024)
- Week Three: Mankind's Folly — 83min. (dir. Yorgos Avgeropoulos, Greece, 2025)
- Week Four: A newly released international documentary TBA
Faculty Bios
Karen Davis Senior Film Programmer Emerita and Program Consultant for the Mill Valley Film Festival and Professor Emerita at California State University at Monterey Bay. She has also taught courses in world cinema at Vassar College, St. Mary’s College of California, and University of California at Santa Cruz.
Niels-Ole Rasmussen is a director at Copenhagen Film, making documentaries and series for Danish & European broadcasters. Active in the international documentary filmmaking community, he serves as a juror and coordinator for the prestigious Prix Europa, the INPUT Conference & the Japan Prize. He will join via Zoom.
This is an In-Person Course
- Classes meet in person at the Golden Bear Center, Suite 202/204 (2nd floor), at 1995 University Ave., Berkeley
- Classes will not be livestreamed nor recorded
- Films will be viewed and discussed in class
- You must be a current OLLI @Berkeley member to register. Learn about membership, including our fee assistance program.
Schedule Highlights
- Course starts on Tuesday, March 31, and ends on Tuesday, April 21
- Classes meet for 4 weeks, 2 hours per session (10–noon)
- All course materials will be available in Member Dashboards through May 25