One last trip down the rabbit hole before it gets paved over. A deep geography. What is above and what is below. What came before and what will come after. Agrarian fantasies, sacrificial rites, and excavations. A story told with maps, dreams, and prayers. A map lesson in three parts. A history of the State of Georgia - or Anywhere.
Through the intimate portraits of five student survivors, IT HAPPENED HERE exposes the alarming pervasiveness of sexual assault on college campuses, the institutional cover-ups and the failure to protect students, and follows their fight for accountability and change on campus and in federal court.
With rare film material, this documentary creates a unique portrait about The Beatles, as John Lennon, PaulMcCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are back to conquer the United States with their first full fledged North American tour in 1964.
This Albuquerque music documentary was filmed during the Summer and Fall of 2022 and captures a sample of bands, venues, characters, and history that make up the DIY scene. Featuring Los Mocos, Cracks in the Sidewalk, Nomestomper, Crushed!?, Sabertooth Cavity, Raven Chacon, Manny Rettinger, Gordy Andersen, and many more.
Lynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painter's chiaroscuro. Woven into this cinematic landscape, we hear sound artist Stephen Vitiello's delicate yet soaring musical track which seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky. — “I spent a morning this winter in Central Park shooting film in the snow. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness creates the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro, or a monochromatic ‘tableau-vivant.’ When I am holding my super 8mm camera, I am able to see these graphic explosions of dark and light” (Lynne Sachs).
Artist Dryden Goodwin's first feature-length essay film, focuses on four individuals with extraordinary relationships to looking: an international eye surgeon, a NASA planetary explorer, a leading human rights lawyer and the artist/filmmaker himself. Mixing Goodwin's closely observed drawings, live action and intricately woven soundtrack, the film explores different scales, forms and reasons for looking, in a poetic and metaphysically charged journey.
In the early 1960's the "folk music revival" had a strong impact on bluegrass music across the country including San Diego, California, where a group of young men from different backgrounds gathered to make this traditional music.
Stop-motion animation on the arranging of marriages in 1950/60s set in the Eastern-Polish borderland. The script is based on a part of Mikołaj Smyk's diary, the director's grandfather. The biographical objects used in the animation, such as an authentic headscarf, Polish and Russian books, the copy of Mikołaj Smyk's diary and photographs help situate the story in its original environment.
Larger-than-life actress, cabaret performer, activist, and proud sex professional since the age of eleven, Luana Muniz - arguably one of Brazil’s most recognizable transgender personalities, shapes a new reality for a new generation of transgender sex workers in her hostel by providing a safe working environment in the dangerous neighborhood of Lapa in Rio de Janeiro. Queen of Lapa explores the day-to-day lives, quests for love, housemate rivalries in a turbulent political climate under matriarch Muniz’s watchful and guiding eye.
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium.
The winner of numerous festival prizes, this early work by Lynne Sachs is a provocative film essay on women's perspectives on their bodies in a "man's world." It touches on everything from the female form's depiction in Renaissance art to the school of 19th century "scientific" thought equating "abnormal" physiognomy with criminality. This adventurous collage also features the filmmaker's own diaristic recollections (notably of being fitted for a diaphragm by a cold, intimidating doctor), poetical staged sequences, other women's audio testimonies, an old classroom instructional reel about menstruation, prose by Gertrude Stein and feminine "ideals" like the undulating young woman performing in fish-tail costumes at Florida's kitschy Weeki-Wachee Springs "Underwater Mermaid Theater." - Dennis Harvey
A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper: simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery within and beyond the image. Sometimes one hears the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets in a Baltimore summer night. Other times jangling toys dissolve into the roar of a jet overhead, or children tremble at the sound of thunder. These disparate sounds dislocate the space temporally and physically from the restrictions of reality. The small home-movie boxes within the larger screen are gestural forms of memory, clues to childhood, mnemonic devices that expand on the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” These miniature image-objects represent snippets of an even earlier media technology: film. In contrast to the real time video image, they feel fleeting, ephemeral, imprecise.
Lynne Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay "The Task of the Translator" through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. Finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
In this illuminating study of cultural contrasts, American filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her sister, Dana, travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, recording conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends. The sisters' expansive travel diary covers tourism, insights into city life, pervasive culture clashes and a bracing historic inquiry. What begins as a picaresque road trip soon blossoms into a richer social and political discourse.
Argentina may lead South America in terms of progressive social politics, but the gap between cultural values and recently accorded rights to gays, lesbians and transsexuals is palpable and persistent. A toxic atmosphere is created from the all- encompassing Catholicism and Machismo along with the complexity of class, historical and rural-urban divides, as well as aboriginal-settler tensions.