The boundless joy and unabashed passion of master gelato-maker Sergio Dondoli take center stage in this exuberant tribute to the delights of food, creativity, and a life well-lived. 'Sergio Dondoli's Happy Life' chronicles the rise of Dondoli and his world-famed Tuscan gelateria. What emerges is a portrait of a man who started from the humblest beginnings yet found a way to cultivate sweetness in all its forms through his life's work.
Indianapolis has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the country. Night School follows three adult students living in the city’s more impoverished neighborhoods as they attempt to earn their diplomas while juggling other difficult responsibilities and realities. Through their stories, the filmmakers explore many issues that low-income Americans deal with, including unjust minimum wage and working conditions, arbitrary legal hindrances, and race and gender inequality.
Narratives of ecologists and conservationists are pitted against the human tendency to engineer and control in this probing documentary on the lucrative salmon-hatchery industry.
Drawn from the backstories of four very different individuals, The Journey from Unbelief to Faith shows God at work in the world. Regardless of our troubled pasts, entrenched beliefs, willful antagonisms, or pre-conceived notions, God can cut through our callous exteriors, making a shambles of the self-deluding facades we erect to keep Him out.
“Faster Than Light” explores the longstanding quest to develop spacecraft with enough power and speed to reach the stars. The film asks: What will it take to reach a newly discovered planet circling our Sun’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri? Based on real science and engineering, “Faster Than Light” takes audiences on a thrilling journey into the future, aboard laser-driven space sails, antimatter engines, and even warp drive – right out of science fiction. “Who can say how far, and how fast, our technology will one day take us?” said director Thomas Lucas.
This documentary traces the alteration, through economic and political influences, of the Parker Hill area of Roxbury in Boston. An ethnically mixed family neighborhood, at present largely Irish Catholic, is now the location of a racially tense public housing project (named Mission Hill for a local church) which is occupied mainly by blacks.
Many people may see shipping containers as simple components in a vast global economic and supply chain system, but LOT-EK, a renowned architectural studio, has reimagined these industrial bins to have many purposes. Over the past three decades, LOT-EK has envisioned alternative uses for containers and other discarded materials from our industrialized economy, transforming them into unique architectural and artistic spaces.
The subversive masterpieces of Russian-Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel challenged the reality of life under rising totalitarianism, and led to his arrest and execution in 1940. In Finding Babel, Andrei Malaev-Babel confronts complex traces of a turbulent history that echo in his grandfather's writing and in the conflicts of today's Ukraine and Russia. Babel's fiction is woven into Andrei's search with ethereal animation that puts the viewer, like Babel's readers, between fantasy and reality.
What happens when love runs out of time? For a 92-year-old mother, Mimi, who has cared 64 years for her daughter, Dona, who has an intellectual disability, it means facing the inevitable -- she will not outlive her daughter -- and finding her daughter a home. This poignant, heartbreaking and, at times, humorous documentary traces this process through the story of a wonderfully quirky and deeply connected mother-daughter duo. The film spotlights the challenges of aging caregivers of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities -- some 4.6 million Americans, 75 percent of whom live at home with family -- and details the ripple effects of Dona's disability on three generations of a Texas family.
During the time of the Stolen Generations, thousands upon thousands of Aboriginal girls were taken from their families and pressed into domestic servitude by the Australian Government. They were supposedly employed as servants, but with total control over their movements, wages and living conditions, their lives all too frequently became an inescapable cycle of abuse, rape and enslavement, with consequences that echo powerfully to this day. Recounting the stories of five of these women – Rita, Violet and the three Wenberg sisters – Servant or Slave is a commanding piece of first-person testimony to a dark and unacknowledged corner of Australian history. Shot with admirable craft and humanity by documentarian Steven McGregor (Croker Island Exodus, MIFF 2012), Servant or Slave is a work of great sadness and urgency, bringing to forceful life the human tragedy of Australia's Indigenous history in the unadorned words of those who lived it.
Filmed over the course of three years and spanning shoots in more than 100 cities around the globe, Away Days is the first full-length skateboarding film from Adidas. Anchored by unique team chemistry and creativity inspired by life on the road, Away Days showcases the raw talent, style, and personalities of its global and international teams including legacy pros Mark Gonzales, Dennis Busenitz, Silas Baxter-Neal and Lucas Puig and rising stars Alec Majerus, Miles Silvas, Na-kel Smith and Tyshawn Jones.
Wiseman enumerates the sights and sounds of Talladega, Alabama – the railroad tracks, quiet streets and homes, a few shops downtown – almost as if to list those things most of us might take for granted. Of the four films in this series, Adjustment & Work is the only one that focuses entirely on adults—specifically adults who have recently lost their sight (and hence are adjusting to this change) and those without sight or hearing who are learning skills in order to enter the workforce.
The intimate journey of Caroline, a flamboyant grandmother, and Stéphane, her filmmaker grandson, exploring the development and transmission of gender identity.
In Beirut, Syrian construction workers are building a skyscraper while at the same time their own houses at home are being shelled. The Lebanese war is over but the Syrian one still rages on. The workers are locked in the building site. They are not allowed to leave it after 19.00. The Lebanese government has imposed night-time curfews on the refugees. The only contact with the outside world for these Syrian workers is the hole through which they climb out in the morning to begin a new day of work. Cut off from their homeland, they gather at night around a small TV set to get the news from Syria. Tormented by anguish and anxiety, while suffering the deprivation of the most basic human and workers right, they keep hoping for a different life.
A documentary propaganda film produced by the U.S. Army Signal Corps about the Aleutian Islands Campaign during World War II. The film opens with a map showing the strategic importance of the island, and the thrust of the 1942 Japanese offensive into Midway and Dutch Harbor. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
REJOICE AND SHOUT traces the evolution of Gospel through its many musical styles – spirituals and early hymns, four-part harmony-based quartets, the integration of blues and swing into Gospel, the emergence of Soul, and the blending of Rap and Hip Hop elements. Gospel music also walked in step with the story of African-American culture – from slavery, hardscrabble rural existence and plantation work, the exodus to major cities, the Depression, World War II, to the civil rights movement and empowerment. REJOICE AND SHOUT connects the history of African-American culture with Gospel as it first impacted popular culture at large – and continues to do so. Years in the making, REJOICE AND SHOUT captures so much of what is special about this music and African-American Christianity – the sermonizing, the heartfelt testimonials, getting “slain in the spirit,” the hard hollerin’, and of course the inspiring music. Dare yourself not to be moved.
Joy grew up in a typical American family. She always wanted to be a ballet dancer and moved to Russia when she was 15 to follow her dream. Without a word of Russian, not completely fit for the physical requirements of Russian ballet dancers, Joy shows her strength and dedication to ballet and accomplishing her dreams. We follow Joy’s personal and professional life: from her daily challenges, injuries, performances to becoming a ballet dancer with Bolshoi Theatre group and then prima ballerina of Kremlin Ballet, where she has performance of her lifetime - Swan Lake, before closing this chapter of her life and leaving Russia to pursue new opportunities.