Asalif and his mother defy Ethiopia’s omnipresent modern housing development culture, by continuing to live a life characterised by proximity to nature and rootedness in community. The boy counters the ruptures in his accustomed surroundings and the threat posed by the hyena that haunts his neighbourhood by reinventing himself as a hero: as Anbessa, the lion.
Starring former world champions Bret Hart and Billy Graham, 350 Days is a true look behind the curtains at the grueling life they led on the road 350 days a year and the effect that lifestyle had on their marriages, family, physical and mental health. Featuring Greg Valentine, Tito Santana, Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff, Abdullah The Butcher, Wendi Richter, Bill Eadie, Nikolai Volkoff, Stan Hansen, Angelo Mosca, Lex Luger, and more, this film also includes some of the last interviews ever done with George “The Animal” Steele, Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, Ox Baker, The Wolfman, Don Fargo, and 99-year-old Angelo Savoldi.
A son seeking to fulfill his late father’s dream takes his band from the storied city of New Orleans to the shores of Cuba, where — through the universal language of music — dark and ancient connections between their peoples reveal the roots of jazz.
In 2013, Dima Ilukhin, the cousin of the film’s director and a soldier in the Russian army, died on duty in the Republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus. He was 21 years old. This incident marks the starting point for Abaturov’s reflection on the military. He films the training of new recruits in Siberia, as they bid farewell to their mothers and girlfriends, learn the mechanics of a Kalashnikov, or how to throw a hand grenade and administer first aid. While his parents try to cope with their loss, Dima’s former fellow recruits have to return to battle.
Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists. The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice. The film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story.
An insightful look at the history of Hong Kong's exploitation cinema, from the early days of the Shaw Brothers and such shockers as "Killer Snakes" through to the advent of the Category III rating in 1988 and then the June 4th massacre in Beijing. The latter led to a panic in Hong Kong, before the Handover of the former UK colony to Mainland China, and a number of motion pictures proceeded to take freedom of speech (and sometimes political symbolism) to the extreme. This is the story of one of the most curious and invigorating periods in exploitation filmmaking.
At the height of the Cold War, Gilligan's Island depicted seven Americans living in an analogue of a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors have to rebuild civilization. Remarkably, the society they create is pure communist. Interviews with the show's creator and some of the surviving actors, as well from professors from Harvard, reveal that Gilligan's Island was deliberately designed to be dismissed as low brow comedy in order to celebrate Marxism and lampoon Western democratic constructs.
Church & State is the improbable story of a brash, inexperienced gay activist and a tiny Salt Lake City law firm that joined forces to topple Utah’s gay marriage ban. The film’s ride on the bumpy road to equality in Utah offers a glimpse at the Mormon church’s influence in state politics and the squabbles inside the gay community that nearly derailed a chance to make history. Church & State is a story of triumph, setback and a little-known lawsuit that should have failed, but instead paved the way for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized gay unions nationwide.
Calling All Earthlings explores a mid-century UFO cult led by one-time Howard Hughes confidante, George Van Tassel. Van Tassel claimed to have combined alien guidance with the writings of inventor/physicist Nikola Tesla, and other controversial science, to build an electromagnetic time machine he dubbed “The Integratron.” Was he insane? Or could the dome really break through the boundaries of space, time, and energy? FBI agents worked against Van Tassel and the alternative community that formed out of his work. Would he finish the Integratron before the government finished him?
Dolours Price, the infamous IRA radical convicted of bombing England's Old Bailey in 1973, granted a series of revealing interviews in 2010 on the strict condition of their posthumous release. The interviews, brought to life through vividly cinematic reenactments, uncover the birth of her fierce commitment to Irish Republicanism. Price revisits the bombing and the 200-day hunger strike that followed, and discusses her role in the disappearances of some suspected Republican informants. With 2018 marking the 20th anniversary since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, and 50 years since the start of the Troubles, filmmaker Maurice Sweeney presents an eye-opening portrait of a once passionate, now disillusioned nationalist whose clarity of purpose both inspired allegiance and promised terror for so many.
This lively and intimately-crafted documentary immerses the audience in rock icon Carlos Santana's life and musical trajectory. Filmmaker Rudy Valdez bolsters this personal narrative with pulsating, never-before-seen footage — guided by Santana himself, in his own words.
Circumcision is the most common surgery in America, yet America is the only industrialized country in the world to routinely practice non-religious infant circumcision. Why does America continue to cut the genitals of it's newborn baby males when the rest of the world does not?
Expedition China invites you on location in some of the world's most intense, hard-to-reach environments with the filmmakers of Disneynature's big-screen adventure Born in China.