A triumphant film that traces the origins of the world-wide disability rights movement. It tells the stories of the individuals who bravely put their lives on the line to create a better world where everyone is valued and can participate. Featuring interviews and rarely seen archival footage, the film reveals how these activists fought to live outside of institutions, challenged the stigmas and negative image of disability portrayed by the media, demanded access to public transportation, and battled to reframe disability rights as a social responsibility relevant to us all. This film is an excellent tool to encourage discussions about diversity and disability for students, audiences and community groups.
A young man born with Cerebral Palsy battles a paralyzed left hand, bullies and stereotypes about the disabled to defy the odds and make it as a rock and roll guitarist. Ultimately, sharing the stage with the very band that inspired him to start (or to achieve the impossible).
The epic journey of two friends, ex-soldiers, who battle the moral injuries of war, and the temptation to escape through suicide, as they walk across America.
Juno Award-winning musician Kinnie Starr is on a quest to find out why only 5% of music producers are women even though many of the most bankable pop stars are female. What does it take for a woman to make it in music?
Julita expressed her three greatest wishes shortly after getting married: lots of children, a monkey and a castle she can call her own. That all of these wishes have become a reality is probably down to the immense stubbornness of this charismatic and equally hilarious matriarch who has a weakness for collecting crazy objects. When financial circumstances force the family to sell their castle, her adult children are left sifting through a lifetime of peculiarities in search of a few lost bones… Spanish actor and neo director Gustavo Salmerón paints a deliciously absurd family portrait that just happens to reveal a lot about Spain, Catholicism and the economic crisis.
Sittwe is about two teenagers separated by conflict and segregation in Burma's Rakhine state, Phyu Phyu Than, a Rohingya girl and Aung San Myint, a Buddhist boy. Both youth saw their homes burned down during communal violence in 2012. Phyu Phyu Than is confined in an apartheid-style camp and has no chance to go to school or travel to her home just a few miles away. Aung San Myint's family struggles to survive and support his high school studies to fulfill his dream to go to medical school. Interviews filmed over two years with the teenagers reveal their ideas about each other's communities and the hope of reconciliation.
Beyond Food explores the ways a group of extraordinary people live amazing lives, eat delicious food while extracting more energy and mental focus from their daily rituals. Biohackers, Paleo, Vegan, Neuroscientists, Athletes, Foragers, Ranchers, Farmers, Gut scientists. Some of our characters are Dave Asprey (Bulletproof Exec), Mariel Hemingway, Laird Hamilton, James Hardt (Biocybernaut Institute Advanced Neurofeedback) Our target audience is everyone who is desiring to learn how to fuel and create an extraordinary life. Our main purpose is to share the lessons from the journey we lived because it changed our lives.
This documentary looks at the life and work of Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, who first garnered attention in the 1970s when she pioneered contemporary forms of geometric mirror works. Monir created an artistic language that was informed by traditional Iranian craft and architecture; formative years spent in New York in the 1940s and 50s and ongoing conversations with some of the 20th century's most experimental artists were also part of Monir's artistic universe. The film takes an intimate look at the artist's life and her practice, and explores how she has become one of the most innovative and influential artists working in the Middle East today. From her method of constructing mirror mosaics, to uncovering her past following the political changes in her own country and her subsequent migration to New York, and an artistic renewal sparked by her return to Tehran after an absence of 25 years, it offers an inspiring chronicle of Monir at the peak of her career.
Hollywood collides with a group of veterans who are tired of the typical PTSD and valor-portrayed movies and decide to make an original dark humor zombie apocalypse film all on their own.
Portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman found her medium in 1980: the larger-than-life Polaroid Land 20x24 camera. For the next thirty-five years, she captured the “surfaces” of those who visited her studio: families, Beat poets, rock stars, and Harvard notables. As pictures begin to fade and her retirement looms, Dorfman gives Errol Morris an inside tour of her backyard archive.
Canadian documentarian Jamie Kastner (The Secret Disco Revolution) looks back at a notorious 1970s murder trial in the Virgin Islands — where five politicized young islanders were convicted of a massacre at a ritzy country club — and its dramatic aftermath a decade later, when the culprits’ ostensible leader staged a skyjacking and found refuge in Cuba.
For the first time fashion designer Dries Van Noten allows a filmmaker to accompany him in his creative process and rich home life. For an entire year Reiner Holzemer documents the precise steps that Dries takes to conceive of four collections, the rich fabrics, embroidery and prints exclusive to his designs. As well as the emblematic fashion shows that bring his collections to the world and have become cult “must sees” at Paris Fashion Week. This film offers an insight into the life, mind and creative heart of a master fashion designer who, for more than 25 years, has remained independent in a landscape of fashion consolidation and globalization.
A documentary film about session and touring musicians that are hired by well-established and famous bands and artists. These people may not be household names, but are still top-notch performers!
A cruise ship and 3,000 men – it is a universe without heteros and women that usually remains a mystery to the outside world. Once a year the Dream Boat sets sail for a cruise exclusively for gay men where most passengers are united by the wish to live life authentically as themselves in a protected place.
A film about a 93-year-old creative wonder who skips and jumps in his heart like a child. He served in a World War II all-Black battalion and experienced the racism of a separatist Army and the carnage of D-Day. As a result he dedicated his life to creating beauty and joy, spreading love and awe through his art. He's a poet/illustrator of over 50 children's books, makes magical puppets and sea glass windows from found objects inspired by his African heritage.
From the well-publicized events at San Francisco State in 1968 to the image of black students with guns emerging from the takeover of the student union at Cornell University in April, 1969, the struggle for a more relevant and meaningful education, including demands for black and ethnic studies programs, became a clarion call across the country in the late 1960's. Through the stories of these young men and women who were at the forefront of these efforts, Agents of Change examines the untold story of the racial conditions on college campuses and in the country that led to these protests. Agents of Change links the past to the present and the present to the past--making it not just a movie but a movement.
The well-known actress and world champion in freediving, Marina Kazankova, presents the most beautiful and wonderful reef in the world: the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Threatened by the ongoing global warming and over acidification of the ocean, it is fighting for the preservation of this unique UNESCO World Heritage Site. She takes us on an extraordinary journey from the Hardy Reef across the Whitsunday Islands to the unique Coral Cays. It is accompanied by a variety of reef-based life forms such as whale sharks, turtles and the rare, up to three meters long giant grouper. Once again we experience the underwater world of the world’s largest reef with its hidden caves, mysterious shipwrecks and fantastic horizontal waterfalls.
This is a film about the power and necessity of community action in Detroit, and the street level solutions that residents there are finding to make a way in the biggest city in our nation to ever go bust.