Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by starting the country's first farm worker's union with fellow organizer Cesar Chavez. What starts out as a struggle for racial and labor justice, soon becomes a fight for gender equality within the same union she is eventually forced to leave. As she wrestles with raising 11 children, three marriages, and is nearly beaten to death by a San Francisco tactical police squad, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her new found feminism with racial and class justice.
Giovanni Segantini rose from humble origins to become the most important of Italian pointillists, and one of the most important symbolist painters in the 19th century. This film focuses on his way of feeling nature as a source of artistic and spiritual inspiration.
Comprised of two interviews with President Barack Obama conducted both before and after the 2016 Presidential election, The 44th President: In His Own Words is the President’s first-hand account of his time in office–his successes, his failures, his unfinished business–and what he hopes will be his legacy. Including additional interviews with members of his staff, Congress, and the press, The 44th President: In His Own Words is a unique examination of the Obama presidency from the inside out, and a profound and candid historical record that will stand for generations.
Bandleader Vince Giordano keeps the Jazz Age alive with his 11-member band The Nighthawks, vintage musical instruments, and a collection of more than 60,000 original arrangements from the 1920s and '30s.
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker take a powerfully personal journey through the former East Germany, as Epperlein investigates her father’s 1999 suicide and the possibility that he may have worked as a spy for the dreaded Stasi security service.
A tiny community in rural Ghana recently discovered that the religion they have been practicing for centuries is Judaism. Filmmaker Gabrielle Zilkha explores their story from isolation to global connection and the challenges and rewards they face along the way.
How do you put a life into 500 words? Ask the staff obituary writers at the New York Times. OBIT is a first-ever glimpse into the daily rituals, joys and existential angst of the Times obit writers, as they chronicle life after death on the front lines of history.
Alive and Kicking gives the audience an intimate, insider’s view into the culture of the current swing dance world while shedding light on issues facing modern American society.
On the 29th September 1945, the incomplete rough cut of a brilliant documentary about concentration camps was viewed at the MOI in London. For five months, Sidney Bernstein had led a small team – which included Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock – to complete the film from hours of shocking footage. Unfortunately, this ambitious Allied project to create a feature-length visual report that would damn the Nazi regime and shame the German people into acceptance of Allied occupation had missed its moment. Even in its incomplete form (available since 1984) the film was immensely powerful, generating an awed hush among audiences. But now, complete to six reels, this faithfully restored and definitive version produced by IWM, is being compared with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955).
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb…Daesh…Boko Haram.** So many extremist movements, of which Africa has become a breeding ground, have declared war against Western values and people. Beyond the misunderstandings that often paralyze us, we have to ask ourselves the real question: **how did we get here?** Filmed in Mali, *RETURN TO BAMAKO* is a deep dive into the land of Islam, seeking to understand the causes and challenges of the threat posed by the rise of radical Islamism to all societies. The Islamist wave did not come about accidentally, but instead is the result of recent history, of which Westerners are the actors, because in the vast majority of cases, it is the failure of a political and economic system, copied or imposed by the West, along with unbridled globalization, which opens a gaping hole and allows the rise of extremism.
In the highlands of Tigray - northern Ethiopia - on the edge of the escarpment that descends steeply to the Danakil dessert, Hagos Mashisho and Desta Gidey have toiled and struggled for years to turn the rugged slopes of the East African Rift Valley into fertile ground. They have grown crops here not only to feed themselves and their family, but also to share with others, in particular the pilgrims who regularly pass by on their way to the monastery of Gundagundo. Touched by the kindness of their hosts, the pilgrims have given them the biblical names "Abraham" and "Sarah". The film explores the work ethos and grace of these Tigrean farmers: the cheerful mood with which they do what needs to be done; the devotedness to the tasks at hand; the coordinated movements of humans and animals as they work when ploughing, sowing, harvesting, threshing; - and finally those moments of invocation when the dependence on nature and the transcendent are acknowledged.
Follows the struggles of Stefonknee Wolscht, a trans woman trying to rebuild her life. Losing her home and her family, Stefonknee gives a first hand account of the many challenges trans people face. In her hometown, Stefonknee was known as a loving husband and father, a really good mechanic and a staunch Catholic but only she knew the truth; that she had been assigned to the wrong gender.