The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 is the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history. This documentary explores how a series of deadly encounters between American citizens and federal law enforcement—including the standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco—led to it.
On December 10th, 2006, General Pinochet dies unexpectedly at Santiago's Military Hospital. His decease triggers a 24 hours revival of political divisions that marked with violence and death Chilean recent history. With high quality original footage and testimonies of four characters that deeply experienced a journey of strong contrasts and surrealistic nuances, the film narrates in an innovative, exciting way the ending of a key chapter in Chilean history.
Now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Yayoi Kusama broke free of the rigid society in which she was raised, and overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness to bring her artistic vision to the world stage. At 88 she lives in a mental hospital and continues to create art.
The film captures a pivotal moment in Afghan history and offers a rare and visceral look at a ruthless sports culture where champions become marked men.
Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world. Consuming Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids.
Drawing on the collections of major Russian institutions, contributions from contemporary artists, curators and performers and personal testimony from the descendants of those involved, the film brings the artists of the Russian Avant-Garde to life. It tells the stories of artists like Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich - pioneers who flourished in response to the challenge of building a new art for a new world, only to be broken by implacable authority after 15 short years and silenced by Stalin's Socialist Realism.
In 1987, Marlee Matlin became the first Deaf actor to win an Academy Award and was thrust into the spotlight at 21 years old. Reflecting on her life in her primary language of American Sign Language, Marlee explores the complexities of what it means to be a trailblazer.
A personal documentary about a public subject, My Father's Vietnam personifies the connections made and unmade by the Vietnam War. Featuring never-before-seen photographs and 8mm footage of the era, My Father's Vietnam is the story of three soldiers, only one of whom returned home alive. Interviews with the filmmaker's Vietnam Veteran father, and the friends and family members of two men he served with who were killed there, give voice to individuals who continue to silently carry the psychological burdens of a war that ended over 40 years ago. My Father's Vietnam carries with it the potential to encourage audiences to broach the subjects of service and sacrifice with the veterans in their lives.
During the 1990s, David Lee Hoffman searched throughout China for the finest teas. He's a California importer who, as a youth, lived in Asia for years and took tea with the Dali Lama. Hoffman's mission is to find and bring to the U.S. the best hand picked and hand processed tea. This search takes him directly to farms and engages him with Chinese scientists, business people, and government officials: Hoffman wants tea grown organically without a factory, high-yield mentality. By 2004, Hoffman has seen success: there are farmer's collectives selling tea, ways to export "boutique tea" from China, and a growing Chinese appreciation for organic farming's best friend, the earthworm.
In the summer of 1942, Rommel's Afrika Korps swept across the Western Desert, sending the Allied forces into full retreat. Driven back deep into Egypt, Montgomery's 8th Army dug in along the El Alamein Line, prepared for battle. This factual film portrays the events leading up to and during, one of the greatest battles in the Second World War, the Battle of El Alamein.
'What Are You' is a short twenty-minute personal documentary that uses interviews and poetic images to explores the lives of multiracial people as they reveal the struggles and challenges of living in a racially divided world.
Don Alfonso plays marimbas, the traditional Guatemalan instrument. Facing extortion and without work due to the population's lack of interest for his instrument, he seeks refuge with his godson Chiquilín. Blacko is a pioneer of the Heavy Metal Guatemalan underground stage. He is also a doctor in the public hospital but nobody wants to be treated by him because of his long hair and his tattoos. Chiquilín makes connections for Don Alfonso and Blacko to combine their talents and create a brand new band called Marimbas from Hell.
Two Danish comedians join the director on a trip to North Korea, where they have been allowed access under the pretext of wanting to perform a vaudeville act.
Shut up, Sona is a tongue-in-cheek take at a feisty female singer's unrelenting fight for an equal space in modern day India, a country deeply uncomfortable with her emancipation.
When Portugal was a great power bridging the Old and New Worlds, wild mountain horses, small enough for large ships, were captured and exported to gold-hungry conquerors. Now the seahorses of the Algarve in Portugal are threatened by the excesses of tourism: sinking anchors, noisy jet skis, illegal fishing...
In this documentary companion to CHARLIE'S COUNTRY, Australian actor David Gulpilil tells the story of when his people's way of life was derailed by ours.
This illuminating documentary explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography. Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, both memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942. This colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective.