The world's greatest pin-up model and cult icon, Bettie Page, recounts the true story of how her free expression overcame government witch-hunts to help launch America's sexual revolution. When she saw the film The Notorious Bettie Page, produced by HBO in 2006, the main person concerned reacted unequivocally: “Lies! Lies!” In a long interview recorded shortly before her death, the woman who entered the collective unconscious as the ultimate pin-up gave her version of events to director Mark Mori. In a gravelly voice, Bettie Page tells her own story and lifts the veil on areas often hidden by images that have made so many men and women fantasize since the 1950s: her abused childhood, an eclipse that lasted forty years, her mental illness. Through testimonies and unpublished archives, this documentary brings back to life a body and a face endlessly declined before our eyes, just as Bettie wanted: “I would like people to remember me as I was in the photos.”
Set at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, this documentary mixes images of water and the town with performers and audience. The film progresses from day to night and from improvisational music to Gospel. It's a concert film that suggests peace and leisure, jazz at a particular time and place.
After starring in a dozen or so HBO Special Presentations, comedian George Carlin has amassed a substantial body of work in the cable channel's vaults. Personal Favorites is a greatest-hits package, a selection of some of Carlin's best moments on HBO from 1977 to 1998 and, not coincidentally, some of his most enduring comic routines from any medium.
Memphis, a young man with cerebral palsy, is caught between the world’s expectations and his own ambitions. His story is an odyssey of dogged determination: a search for work, love, and freedom – no matter what.
Dark City Beneath The Beat is an audiovisual experience that defines the soundscape of Baltimore city. Inspired by an all original Baltimore club music soundtrack, the film spotlights local club artists, DJs, dancers, producers, and Baltimore’s budding creative community as they are realizing their life dreams. Rhythmic and raw, these stories illustrate the unique characteristics of the city’s landscape and social climate through music, poetry, and dance. From the city’s social climate to its creative LGBTQ community, Dark City Beneath The Beat showcases Baltimore club music as a positive subculture in a city overshadowed by trauma, drugs, and violence.
By the time he died in 1931, Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most famous men in the world. The holder of more patents than any other inventor in history, Edison had achieved glory as the genius behind such revolutionary inventions as sound recording, motion pictures, and electric light. Born on the threshold of America's burgeoning industrial empire, Edison's curiosity led him to its cutting edge. With just three months of formal schooling, he took on one seemingly impossible technical challenge after another, and through intuition, persistence, and a unique team approach to innovation, invariably solved it. Driven and intensely competitive, Edison was often neglectful in his private life and could be ruthless in business. Challenged by competition in the industry he'd founded, Edison launched an ugly propaganda campaign against his rivals, and used his credibility as an electrical expert to help ensure that high-voltage electrocution became a form of capital punishment.
Filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky aims her camera at her own life to capture the remarkable transformation of her deaf parents, who decided to undergo a life-changing procedure to restore their hearing after spending 65 years in silence. Chronicling her parents' experiences over their first year of having sound in their lives, Brodsky tells a deeply personal tale that moved viewers to bestow it with the Documentary Audience Award at Sundance 2007.
8-year-old Aaron Averhart was just a year shy of being able to move up from Cub Scout to Boy Scout when he received a special request from an admired Boy Scout leader, William (Bill) Sheehan. As Aaron rose up the Boy Scout ranks, he slowly became aware of Sheehan’s grooming techniques and began to realize he had much more sinister intentions in store for him. If Aaron’s parents had known that since the 1920s the Boy Scouts of America had been keeping hidden files on dangerous pedophiles in their ranks while failing to warn the public, the police, the scouts, their parents, or even fully removing them from the Boy Scouts program, they would have never allowed young Aaron to be part of such a complicit and corrupt organization.
Heavy snow falls from the sky as heavily-armed guards patrol the walls of an Iranian centre of correction and rehabilitation. Inside, the girls are waiting at the food counter. Among them are underage mothers and others who are married. All of them ended up here after becoming involved in crime. Drug dealing, assault, murder. Yet instead of cold-blooded criminals we discover friendly, warm young people who laugh, sing and cry together. Their close bonds have been forged by the troubled past they share. We learn of their fears of having to return to the lives they once left behind. The documental camera is intimate but respectful, the resulting portraits are full of dignity.
Featuring never before seen footage uncovered from the archives and interviews with Paul McCartney, Tommy Lee and others, God Bless Ozzy Osbourne is the first documentary to take viewers inside the complex mind of rock's great icon.
FRESH is more than a movie, it’s a gateway to action. Our aim is to help grow FRESH food, ideas, and become active participants in an exciting, vibrant, and fast-growing movement.
Ukrainian musicians of all genres, from metal to opera, transform their passion for music into devotion to their country in this moving documentary. Beginning on the very first day of the Russian invasion, Soldiers of Song documents how the lives of its cast of Ukrainian musicians have irrevocably changed and how they use their musical talents to support themselves and their communities. Using shocking footage from the frontlines, this film reminds us not only of the ongoing tragedies that continue to happen during this war, but also of the resilience of Ukraine and its cultural forces. Here music functions not only to lift the spirits of the soldiers, but also as a cultural export to raise awareness of the war, a tool for raising humanitarian and military funds, and a valuable cultural artifact for everyday Ukrainians to rally around and protect. The musician’s commitment to their craft reminds us of the real power art has and the impact of beauty under catastrophic circumstances.
Celebrates Sister Rose Thering, for 67 years a Dominican nun. Her passion is fighting anti-Semitism. Archival footage looks at her growing up in Wisconsin and taking the veil in her teens. Interviews with scholars and common people capture the extent to which "Christ killers" was a standard Catholic description of Jews. Sister Rose's research at Saint Louis University in the 1950s into the presentation of Jews within Catholic educational materials leads to the publication of "Nostra Aetate," a document released in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council. Since that time, she's dedicated herself to eradicating anti-Semitism. The film ends with a critique of Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ."
Little Empty Boxes is a feature length documentary from Max Lugavere, a filmmaker who chronicles his mother’s life as she battles a mysterious form of Dementia.
The rise and legacy of Canada’s most decorated Caribbean Carnival Queen, Joella Crichton, as she aims to win a historic tenth title in her last ever competition. This immersive arts and cultural documentary explores expressions of cultural identity, Caribbean artistry and a community’s struggle against a lack of understanding of Carnival in the larger society.