A fascinating look at how American agricultural policy and food culture developed in the 20th century, and how the California food movement rebelled against big agribusiness to launch the local organic food movement.
SERVING LIFE documents an extraordinary hospice program where hardened criminals care for dying fellow inmates. Narrated and executive produced by Academy Award®-winner Forest Whitaker, the film takes viewers inside Louisiana's maximum security prison at Angola, where the average sentence is more than 90 years.
A documentary on Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin, examining his tumultuous career, the rediscovery of his masterpiece Happiness, and Russia's struggles over the course of the 20th Century.
How To Re-Establish a Vodka Empire is a feature documentary charting the journey of the film director Dan Edelstyn as he tracks down his long lost Jewish Ukrainian heritage and then attempts to relaunch his great grandfather's once glorious vodka empire. The film consists of a whirlwind journey through European time, space and the great events of the 20th century. The story has it all: revolution and romance, exile and entrepreneurship, and at its heart lies a life changing discovery of a vodka distillery in Ukraine.
Otto Skorzeny was one of the most hidden in mystery 'War artisans' of Hitler. His commando operations (including the liberation of Mussolini from Gran Sasso) have significantly affected the course of the 2nd World War. The myth developed around Skorzeny had its effect: the German propaganda made him a kind of "Nazi James Bond"'. For the first time, this film tells the true story of this brutal and fanatical man.
An experimental short film by John Whitney Sr. which combines animated shapes and colors; Computer graphics as dynamic, swirling art. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.
Purporting to be an investigation into the UK's contemporary "brain drain", Alternative 3 uncovered a plan to make the Moon and Mars habitable in the event of climate change and a terminal environmental catastrophe on Earth.
The story of how one Pittsburgh boy’s fascination with monsters drove him to the very top of the Hollywood food chain. In 1989, Greg Nicotero, much to his parents’ chagrin, quit medical school and headed for Hollywood to pursue a dream of making monsters. Together with gore masters Howard Berger and Robert Kurtzman, Nicotero went on to create KNB EFX Group, one of the most prolific makeup effects studios in the world. After twenty years as the “go to guy” for the world’s most successful horror/sci-fi films, Greg Nicotero is the first one directors like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez call.
University of Texas student Duane Graves chronicles his charismatic childhood chum Rene Moreno, a San Antonio native with Down Syndrome, in this playful, stirring, remarkably unique portrait documentary.
A faux travelogue that mixes documentary and mockumentary footage. The camera looks through a one-way glass into the women's dressing room at a lingerie shop, visits a Kyoto massage parlor, goes inside the mailroom at Frederick's of Hollywood, watches an Australian who sticks nails through his skin and eats glass, checks out the art and peace scene in Los Angeles, takes in Easter week with vacationing college students on Balboa Island, observes a German audience enjoying a play about Nazi sadism, and, with the help of powerful military lenses, spies on a Lebanese white-slavery auction.
This documentary offers a glimpse into the life of an English neurosurgeon (Henry Marsh) situated in Ukraine as we are exposed to the overwhelming dilemmas he has to face and the burden he has to carry throughout his profession.
Just days before Bernard Madoff captured headlines as the largest Ponzi schemer in U.S. history, Marc Dreier, a prominent Manhattan attorney, was arrested for orchestrating a massive fraud scheme that netted hundreds of millions of dollars from hedge funds. Brazen forgeries and impersonations branded the white collar crime spree remarkable. "Unraveled" is set in the purgatory of house arrest -- an Upper East Side penthouse -- where the Court has ordered Dreier confined until his sentencing day. The film weaves Dreier's struggle to prepare for the possibility of life imprisonment with first-person flashbacks, which reveal his audacious path of destruction. Destroyed by his own hubris, Dreier attempts to grasp his tragic unraveling. With unprecedented access, "Unraveled" exposes a mastermind of criminal deception.
In the wake of World War II, most Germans have been raised with the mistaken belief that the Holocaust had been planned and executed by just a tiny minority of Nazis, namely, the Gestapo and the SS. The sad truth, however, is that Hitler's philosophy of ethnic cleansing, as the Fuhrer so brazenly espoused in his frightening manifesto, "Mein Kampf," had been enthusiastically embraced not only by the entire military but also by most of the civilian population. The long-suppressed proof of their widespread collaboration and participation was unveiled in The Wehrmacht Exhibition, a damning collection of photographs and film footage that toured Deutschland between 1999 and 2004. The show shook the country to its core because it forced folks to face up to the fact that it took much more than a madman and his henchmen to wipe out six million.
How does art survive in a time of oppression? During the Soviet rule artists who stay true to their vision are executed, sent to mental hospitals or Gulags. Their plight inspires young Igor Savitsky. He pretends to buy state-approved art but instead daringly rescues 40,000 forbidden fellow artist's works and creates a museum in the desert of Uzbekistan, far from the watchful eyes of the KGB. Though a penniless artist himself, he cajoles the cash to pay for the art from the same authorities who are banning it. Savitsky amasses an eclectic mix of Russian Avant-Garde art. But his greatest discovery is an unknown school of artists who settle in Uzbekistan after the Russian revolution of 1917, encountering a unique Islamic culture, as exotic to them as Tahiti was for Gauguin. They develop a startlingly original style, fusing European modernism with centuries-old Eastern traditions.
Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story shows how the classic board game has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon and follows the colorful players who come together to compete for the coveted title of Monopoly World Champion.
A documentary on the work of sex-change specialist Dr. Leo Wollman, including interviews with Dr. Wollman and a few of his patients, with an illustrated lecture on the various aspects of transsexuality plus actual footage of a sex-change operation, which is what gives the film its notoriety