Imagine hanging out with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, hearing them jam together, trading riffs, then riffing with words and trading stories. Bird and Diz are gone, but giants still walk among us. One of those giants is Buster Williams. Buster has played with everyone - Miles, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Art Blakey, and on. In this intimate portrait, Buster trades stories, and plays, with some of the world's greatest musicians - Benny Golson, Herbie Hancock, Christian McBride and others, and takes us on a journey through his life, legacy, and America's greatest art form - the truly universal music called Jazz.
This documentary film investigates and reviews this part of Young's career with the help of obscure archive footage, rare film of Neil Young in performance and in studio, contributions from those he worked closely with during this era, and with those who have studied his career in depth, plus a host of other features all of which make for one of the finest films yet produced about this musician.
PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE looks at the war on drugs from 1968 until today and looks at trigger points in history that took cannabis from being a somewhat benign criminal activity into a self-perpetuating constantly expanding policy disaster.
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.
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.
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.
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 film documents Bill Bennett's journey to find the source of a mysterious voice which saved his life. It features some of the world's leading experts on intuition spanning the fields of science, religion, and spirituality.
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.
Steve Talt used to bodyguard Farah Pahlavi, the exiled Queen of Iran. So when he discovers that her art was stolen by the Mafia in 1980, he sets out on a quixotic quest to recover it.
In this utterly heart-affecting and enthralling film, two Holocaust survivors in South Florida form a klezmer band and begin an extraordinary musical journey that celebrates life and the transcendent power of music to heal.
A documentary film which explores the racial disparity and corporate exploitation of African-American and Latino prisoners within the United States Justice System.