An abstract narrative, diary film and travelogue reminiscing on the quotidian. My day to day routines and deviations from it are captured as 6 months pass on the screen in a blur. Musique concrète accompanies the visuals taken from vocal samples of myself as a child and repurposed. Ruminations on nostalgia, film as material and 16mm as a particularly evocative medium with a long history of home movies and nonprofessional filmmaking. The film acts as a document, archiving time and place, as a way for me to recount where and what I did at this point in my life-a point where I still feel an existential drifting and listlessness. Something to look back at and only make sense of after the fact.
Paragliding high above the wetlands of Southern Louisiana, Ben Depp photographs the sublime complexity of the Mississippi River Delta. His awe is mixed with sadness, however. The wetlands are rapidly disappearing, largely due to environmental damage caused by pipeline canals. His is just one of the five stories this film intimately follows: from a local fisherman, to a biological scientist, to the Native American people of the United Houma Nation who call the wetlands home. By capturing the lives, livelihoods, and cultures facing extinction along with this precious ecosystem (and the city of New Orleans that it protects), Last Call For the Bayou is a cinematic call to action: act now, or let these myriad histories be lost forever.
A documentary examining the life of civil rights organizer, Jack O'Dell, a close colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a force in his own right.
For three decades, Jean Aspen and Tom Irons called Alaska's remote Brooks Range home. Choosing to live lightly with the land, their family built a log cabin and explored the valley on foot-a journey they shared in books and documentaries. Now elders, the couple decide to close the circle and erase their footprints. In their third documentary, they dismantle their home and carefully restore the site to intact wilderness while exploring stewardship, responsibility, and human belonging to our living Earth. ReWilding Kernwood is a layered conversation on release, completion, and finding purpose in the shifting mystery of life.
America Lost is a feature documentary that explores life in three "forgotten American cities"-Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California. The film reveals the dramatic decline of the American interior through a combination of emotional personal stories and thoughtful conservative commentary. Filmmaker Christopher F. Rufo spent five years gathering these intimate portraits of Americans on the edge, including an ex-steelworker scrapping abandoned homes to survive, a recently incarcerated father trying to rebuild his life, and a single mother dreaming of escaping her blighted urban neighborhood. Ultimately, despite these grave challenges, the film offers a glimpse of hope for rebuilding America's families and communities from the bottom up.
In 1985, Kathleen lost her brother Eddie, an American soldier, at the hands of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German leftist terrorist organization. Now, decades later, she decides to seek out the group responsible for his murder.
In a life that has spanned 92 creative years, ruth weiss is one of the most influential writers of the Beat Generation. Born to a Jewish family during the rise of Nazism, as a 10-year-old refugee, she escaped to the United States. ruth became a Jazz troubadour exemplifying the zeitgeist of Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco. The film further highlights ruth weiss' electrifying and intimate poetry with breathtaking images of exquisite modern dance, art, animation, and music to embody her oeuvre. This film documents not only weiss' gift to humanity but archives significant historical moments in our world's social and literary movements. As a contemporary of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac, she innovated poetry to jazz.
It explores the magical bond between people and dogs. A documentary that was intended to help you choose the right dog became one of the most heart warming feel good stories. Join us for the adventure.
UnRepresented is an award-winning documentary that uncovers the mechanisms that drive the cycle of corruption in Congress — giving political insiders enormous, unchecked power. The film explores how special interests bankroll political campaigns and relentlessly lobby to rig the system in their favor, all while following the letter of the law. Featuring luminaries and leaders including Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig and sitting member of Congress Rep. Justin Amash, the film reveals the powerful possibilities to reform our government to better represent the people. UnRepresented serves as a rallying call to bring committed public servants, activists and everyday Americans together to take action across partisan lines to change our flawed political system.
People from all over the world gamble on when the ice in the Tanana River melts. This hundred year old tradition in the city of Nenana, Alaska, is an important source for the small town of about 500. It's also a point of local pride and amusement.
The heroes of this picture are the winners. They were able to cope with a deadly disease, and it seems that they came out of this fight changed. They, their relatives, their doctors, and their donors talk about what and who helped them recover, about what it is like to endure cancer, about how their attitude towards life is changing. These stories, which happened almost simultaneously, are somewhat similar and at the same time very different, because each person has taken something different from the field of pain.
When an extraordinary new resident – Balakrishna, an Indian elephant – arrived in the town of East River, Nova Scotia, in 1967, no one was more in awe of the creature than young Winton Cook, who became inseparable from his mammoth new friend. Using painterly animation, photographs and home-movie treasures, Balakrishna transmits the wistfulness of childhood memories, while evoking themes of friendship and loss, and issues of immigration and elephant conservation.
Do ghosts exist? In this new documentary, a filmmaker travels to rumored haunted places interviewing psychics, scientists, and skeptics in search of the truth. Along the way, his crew captures unexplained phenomena including a box that allows the dead to speak.
Over the past few decades, significant discoveries have been made on the very site where the pyramids were built. But now, hundreds of kilometers from the pyramids themselves, we are gaining more insight into just how they were built. Two teams of Egyptologists, one based in the middle of the desert, the other located on the Red Sea coast, are currently discovering more about the Egypt of Khufu’s time, than at the foot of the pyramids. What they found help them figure out how ancient Egyptians worked. This film has been shot from within, immersed for several weeks within these 2 archaeological missions. Authentic archaeological experiments have been filmed in real time, revealing ancient techniques and methods, unlocking certain secrets of these ancient great builders.
In 1986 a London-Irishman by the name of Larry Tracey took it upon himself to form the Irish Bobsleigh and Luge Association. He recruited a group of elite Irish rowers and set his sights on qualifying the team for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Having achieved qualification for the games, the stage was set for an historic Olympic debut. But one thing stood in their way; the Olympic Council of Ireland. Despite qualifying for the games, the OCI refused to allow them to compete at the games in Calgary, which saw the famous Jamaican bobsleigh team become Olympic heroes. Undeterred, the team evolved and set their sights on the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville, France.
Vespasiano, in the interior of Minas Gerais, is home to one of the few national penitentiaries specifically for pregnant women and mothers with young children. Guided by these women, we entered fragments of the daily life of the prison unit: evangelical services, conversations, confessions, doodles, vanity, fear, censorship, punishment, longing, memory and the constant struggle for the experience of motherhood.
Over the course of the last several decades, the world has changed its views on a plant known as Cannabis. No matter what you call it, cannabis, marijuana, pot, herb, hemp, or by any other name, one thing is quickly becoming crystal clear: cannabis is fast becoming one of the single most beneficial substances in the world. Join us for a deeper look into this leafy wonder in Cannabis.