An in-depth feature length documentary of one of America's greatest and least understood authors, Nelson Algren. This never before told compelling life story reveals a unique literary voice through rare interviews, archival footage and the gritty noirish voice of Algren on Algren. Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel, literary giants in their own right, sing songs of praise along with many of his old friends, which makes this film seem like a hymn from the grave. This stylishly produced film embeds us in the 1950's cold war world when Algren worked. Algren's touching love affair with Simone de Beauvoir weaves it's way through the film along with the damaging impact of FBI and CIA surveillance.
After the coup d’état in 1973, employees at the Vicariate for Solidarity began the risky road to save the lives of the prosecuted and find the fate of the detained. With time, they understood there was a politics of extermination in place against the dissidents, and that, in order to decipher its functioning and those directly responsible, they had to turn into a sophisticated intelligence team.
The world knows Paul Newman as an Academy Award winning actor with a fifty-plus year career as one of the most prolific and revered actors in American Cinema. He was also well known for his philanthropy; Newman's Own has given more than four hundred and thirty million dollars to charities around the world. Yet few know the gasoline-fueled passion that became so important in this complex, multifaceted man's makeup. Newman’s deep-seated passion for racing was so intense it nearly sidelined his acting career. His racing career spanned thirty-five years; Newman won four national championships as a driver and eight championships as an owner. Not bad for a guy who didn't even start racing until he was forty-seven years old.
A documentary about Caroll Spinney who has been Sesame Street's Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since 1969. At 78-years-old, he has no intention of stopping.
The great French actor, Marcel Dalio, who has the lead role in Jean Renoir's THE RULES OF THE GAME, also appears in Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION. In both films he plays a character who is Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In fact, in most of the French films he's in the 1930s, he almost always plays shady characters, informers, blackmailers and gangsters. In other words, he is always "the Jew." When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to America and appeared in CASABLANCA and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. In America, he was no longer the Jew but The Frenchman. He became, in dozens of films, America's idea of a typical Frenchman. His film career has these two strands in which he has two different identities. Are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Are you always a creation of the way people want to see you? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you?
A video essay exploring the frequency and meaning of that particular prop in a wide variety of Sirk movies. Is it a device that traps and keeps women in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past and the future, and a distorted but nevertheless real vision of the roles that woman are forced to play in society? It's an exploration of the texts and subtexts of commercial films and the subterranean and complicated ways that they affect us and can be read.
Stars of the 1940s and 1950s, were they cast for their mutual affinities or for their commercial appeal? If and when they were re-starred years later, did the magic still work? Did sparks still fly? The movie business, a machine that manufactured romance and desire at the same time that it documented the process of aging. A meditation on youth and beauty, aging and box office.
Between 1900 and 1920 more than 14 million immigrants arrived in the US, like Howard Zinn's parents. They came fleeing poverty or war, or racism, or religious persecution. They dreamed of a promised land, of wealth, or simply of a better life.
A fragile and depressed university student disappears from his apartment in the middle of a cold winter's night. Four weeks later his name and photo explode across social media and into the mainstream media as 'suspect 2' in the Boston Marathon bombings. The search for truth by citizen journalists, mainstream journalists and members of social media Web sites derails with tragic consequences as collective fear and suspicion rule the day and rain down upon a vulnerable family. Exclusive access and never released footage reveal the enduring love of a family in crisis.
For a gay filmmaker, filming in Saudi Arabia presents two serious challenges: filming is forbidden in the country and homosexuality is punishable by death. For filmmaker Parvez Sharma, however, these were risks he had to assume as he embarked on his Hajj pilgrimage, a journey considered the greatest accomplishment and aspiration within Islam, his religion. On his journey Parvez aims to look beyond 21st-century Islam’s crises of religious extremism, commercialism and sectarian battles. He brings back the story of the religion like it has never been told before, having endured the biggest jihad there is: the struggle with the self.
On 15 March 1921, Talat Pasha, a high-ranking Turkish dignitary, was shot dead in a Berlin street by a young Armenian. A few months later, Soghomon Tehlirian, his assassin, appeared before a German court. He faced the death penalty. Yet, during the trial, the victim gradually changed into the guilty party, and the accused was finally acquitted.
Venture out to the Masumoto Farm – eighty acres of prime, peach-growing orchards – where seven varieties of the sweet juicy fruit are cultivated to sun-kissed perfection by a dynamic father-and-daughter team of David “Mas” and Nikiko Masumoto. Director Jim Choi succinctly captures this underrepresented facet of the CA farming industry about an Asian American family-run business, three generations strong, which in turn presents us with the changing idea of the American Dream. - See more at: http://laapff.festpro.com/films/detail/changing_season_2015#sthash.54OdJcdi.dpuf
The Day the '60s Died chronicles May 1970, the month in which four students were shot dead at Kent State. The mayhem that followed has been called the most divisive moment in American history since the Civil War. From college campuses, to the jungles of Cambodia, to the Nixon White House, the film takes us back into that turbulent spring 45 years ago.
When Dr. Haing S. Ngor was forced into labor camps by the Khmer Rouge, little did he know he would escape years of torture and recreate his experiences in a film that would win him an Academy Award®. "The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor" tells the dramatic story about arguably the most recognizable survivor of the Cambodian genocide, a man who became a worldwide ambassador for justice in his homeland, only to be murdered in a Los Angeles Chinatown alley - a case still muddled with conspiracy theories. Through an inspired blend of original animation and rare archival material - anchored by Ngor's richly layered autobiography - the years encapsulating the Khmer Rouge's tyrannical rule over Cambodia are experienced though a politically charged transnational journey of loss and reconciliation.
Game Face shows the quest to self-realization of LGBT athletes and the acceptance in society. The film follows athletes during their coming out process, and sheds light on the obstacles LGBT sports players deal with throughout their career.
Ted "Black Lightning" Patrick's practice of "deprogramming," also known as "reverse brainwashing," started in the early 1970s and quickly snowballed into a vast underground movement composed of concerned parents, ex-cultists-turned-deprogrammers and some sympathetic law-enforcers whose mission was to physically and mentally remove individuals from cults.