Riveted: The History of Jeans reveals the fascinating and surprising story of this iconic American garment. At any given moment, half the people on the planet are wearing them. They have become a staple of clothing the world over, worn by everyone from presidents and supermodels to farmers and artists. More than just an item of apparel, America’s tangled past is woven into the indigo blue fabric. From its roots in slavery to its connection to the Wild West, youth culture, the civil rights movement, rock and roll, hippies, high fashion and hip-hop, jeans are the canvas on which the history of American ideology and politics is writ large.
From the makers of Console Wars comes the origin story of the GameStop stock market phenomenon, featuring exclusive access to the original players who lit the fuse on a historic amateur investor uprising. Spotlighting the human side of a sensational business drama, this documentary is a David vs Goliath tale about ordinary people waking up to the power they have in numbers.
Georgia’s former prime minister has found a unique hobby. He collects century-old trees, some as tall as 15-story buildings, from communities along the Georgian coast. At a great expense and inconvenience, these ancient giants are uprooted from their lands to be transplanted in his private garden.
Second grader Sylvie navigates the absurdities and emotional turbulence of her eccentric, multigenerational Jewish matriarchy, a dad who lives far away and life gone virtual, seen through the lens of her filmmaker single mom.
In Croatia in 2005, a machine tools factory was occupied by its workers. Since then, they have operated collectively, becoming the only successful example of a worker occupation in post-socialist Europe. Today, as they seek a new model of collective ownership, the microcosmic world of the factory clashes with the forces of the globalized market economy, having an increasingly brutal impact on wages and the organization of the factory, causing rising disaffection among the workers. Filmmaker Srđan Kovačević returns regularly over a five year period to make a film that charts the evolution of this communal enterprise. Factory to the Workers tells the inside story of the workers who challenged the dominant economic narrative with their actions. After a decade, the same question remains: can a factory in the hands of workers survive at the periphery of capitalism, or do we need a bigger dream?
Based on Mallory Smith's posthumously published memoir, Salt In My Soul offers a look inside the mind of a young woman trying to live while dying. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, Mallory turned to a secret diary to record her thoughts.
Brash and opinionated, Christine Choy is a documentarian, cinematographer, professor, and quintessential New Yorker whose films and teaching have influenced a generation of artists. In 1989 she started to film the leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests who escaped to political exile following the June 4 massacre. Though Choy never finished that project, she now travels with the old footage to Taiwan, Maryland, and Paris in order to share it with the dissidents who have never been able to return home.
Filmmaker Mark Pedri had never heard his grandfather Silvio's story. Ten years after his grandfather's death, Mark found an archive of photos and letters that changed the rest of his life. The discovery inspired Mark to journey across Europe on a bike to examine his grandfather's experience as a Prisoner of War in WWII in an effort to understand the man who helped raise him.
When, in the late 1990s, Israeli student Teddy Katz exposed the massacre of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in the village of Tantura, in May 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war, he was initially praised for his pioneering work; but he was soon infamous and branded a traitor. Decades later, incendiary new evidence emerges that corroborates Teddy's findings.
As reports of fatal police violence continue to flood the headlines, this film shines a light on not only the circumstances of these cases but how to improve the system as a whole and heal the communities they impact.
A close-up portrait of the daily lives of a pair of cows: told by way of some narrative-free, intimate POV photography, with plenty of close shot images, we follow the daily routine of these animals as they live what can only be described as mundane, boring lives - all with an ultimate purpose within the human food chain.
The hidden scientific secrets of butterflies reveal them to be more inventive and resilient than we ever imagined. Follow their extraordinary life cycle and migrations to tropical rainforests, windswept prairies, and even inside a chrysalis as it’s being spun.
Charlotte Gainsbourg looks at her mother Jane Birkin in a way she never did, overcoming a sense of reserve. Using a camera lens, they expose themselves to each other, begin to step back, leaving space for a mother-daughter relationship.
Beyond Impossible exposes the corruption of the fake meat industry. Health expert Vinnie Tortorich asks the question: what do Harvard, Vegans and the World Economic Forum all have in common? A religious desire for the world to go Vegan.
“Rollout“ is a vérité-style journey alongside residents of a tight-knit Kenyan community gripped by the “shadow pandemic of vaccine hesitancy,” as they face mounting pressure from a government they don’t trust, to get a vaccine they suspect may cause more harm than good.
Follows Patty Gentry, a former chef, as she battles to earn a living on her three acre Early Girl Farm on Long Island. Isabella Rossellini, from whom Patty rents her land tells us, "Patty is the Picasso of vegetables!" The documentary upends the romance of farm-to-table – buying fresh produce directly from farmers markets and at farm stands is wonderful, but the farmer's life is a constant struggle. We watch Patty work her butt off (with her small, mostly female team) seven days a week, growing the vegetables her top chef clients treasure. Patty's passion is to constantly improve her soil, increase her yield of organic vegetables, and just as urgently scramble to stay afloat.
Based on the popular book of the same name, the film begins with author Brian Zahnd some 350 miles into his 500-mile pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He walks “the Camino” in spiritual pilgrimage as preparation for the mental mayhem of the polarized political climate in America. It’s against the backdrop of the elections that Zahnd exposes how the church in America has succumbed to the seduction of empire and has entangled Christianity with the Red, White, and Blue.