During the spring of 2000, eleven girls aged 8 to 16 from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds and two classrooms of middle and high school students were interviewed about their views on media culture and its impact on their lives. Their insightful and provocative responses provide the central theme of the film, a half-hour examination of how the media presents girls. Juxtaposing footage culled from a typical week of TV broadcasting with original interviews, WHAT A GIRL WANTS will provoke debate and, ideally, act as a catalyst for change in media content.
Every year, thousands of Shia Muslims meet in the village of Nabatiyyeh in Lebanon to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, assassinated in 680 A.D. It is by far the most important religious event in the Shia cult, and leads to the formation of immense mass movements all around the world. Mystic Mass describes extensively this 24h ceremony, and deconstructs its indivisible, ever united, mystic mass, since its formation early in the morning of Ashoura, up to its dissolution in the afternoon of the same day.
A collage of daily life in Aq Kupruk builds from the single voice that calls the townspeople to prayer, the brisk exchange of the baazar, communal labor in the fields, and the uninhibited sports and entertainment of rural Afghans. The theme of the film focuses on rural society. The film and accompaning instructor notes explore concepts of development, modernization, environmental equilibrium, and especially change, identifying change agents, and analyzing barries and stimulants to change.
Spiritual cousins of the Mennonites and Amish, the Hutterites live simply with austerity. By a way of life that is supremely communal rather than individualistic, the Hutterites have rid themselves of poverty, homicide and anxiety about the future.
At dawn a nomad caravan descends on Aq Kupruk from the foothills of the Hindu Kush. In their camp, and in commerce with the townspeople, the Maldar reveal the mixture of faith and distrust that has kept nomads and sedentary people separate and interdependent over the centuries. The theme of the film focuses on political and religious beliefs. The film and accompanying instructor notes in this series embrace five different and complex units of analysis concerning how political change occurs; individual attitudes, ethnic identity, national loyalties, institutional affiliations, and ideological beliefs.
This classroom training film was designed to show the achievements of Roman culture in the areas of government, architecture, engineering, language and writing. It was aimed at intermediate and high-school students.
Gathering inspiration from the world around him, Claes Oldenburg has dedicated his career to giving objects life. What many would see only as their mundane, everyday tools Oldenburg sees as an opportunity for art. His famed large scale sculptures stand with such stature and force that the viewer has no choice but to become involved with the piece.
The filmmaker questions her sister, herself and others about the dreams and hopes they had growing up as girls in contrast to the reality they face as women.
Driven by their mutual admiration of classical architecture, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown have worked together to create a space of unique post-Modernist construction. Filmed during the design and realization of the Sainsbury extension to the National Gallery in London, the husband and wife team discuss their past work and the shared principles that led to their precise, historically inspired approach to modern architecture.
Kalliopi Kalogerou has spent her whole life in the Greek village of Ano Ravenia where she was born in 1900. Simple witness of the century, she lived through Turkish domination and successive occupations linked to different wars. Most of her family stays elsewhere, in Greece or abroad (USA, Canada, Germany, Bulgaria); her shattered family world is representative of the Greek diaspora. The film is exclusively devoted to her life story, told to a young Epirot friend, Eleni Pangratiou-Alexakis, and to her daughter, Evguenia, both of whom have settled in the States. The result is a rich, yet austere film where nothing distracts the viewer from the dialogue and the face of the storyteller. It also constitutes an ordinary yet important testimony on this long and painful page of Greek history (1900-1983).
Martha Kearney is joined by a panel including the program makers, historians and cultural commentators, to examine the historical facts behind the German drama Generation War.
Every year many new drugs come to market which offer hope to the sick and dying. This documentary film investigates just how far drug companies are prepared to go to get their drugs approved, what they will do to make sure they get the prices they want, and what happens when profits are put before people.
This film illustrates the field techniques used by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Michigan in collaboration with their Venezuelan colleagues. The film also includes a brief sketch of Yanomamo culture and society.
This is Just To Say was made in the summer of 1999 through a workshop opportunity offered by Inside Out Toronto Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival for queer youth. This is Just to Say documents several young men and women’s first queer experiences through interviews accomplished by simply approaching strangers on a busy Toronto street on a Sunday afternoon. Through invasive conversation This is Just to Say explores personal narrative and identity politics in the "post" era; a testament about being young and queer in 1999.
A documentary taking critical aim at Hollywood's abiding fascination with and fantasies about all things eastern. Juxtaposing film clips from the 20s through the 80s, HOLLYWOOD HAREMS explores the organization of gender, race, and sexuality in Hollywood's portrayal of the exotic east an indiscriminate fusion of things Arab, Persian, Chinese and Indian. In abridging cultural plurality and difference, these technicolor fantasies have worked both to shape and reinforce often derogative assumptions about peoples of the east while at the same time reinscribing the moral, spiritual, and cultural supremacy of the Anglo-European west.
J.W. Marriott features informative interviews with his sons J.W. Marriott, Jr. and Richard Marriott, granddaughter Debbie Harrison, friends the Reverend Billy Graham and Sterling Colton, a former employee and others.
A portrait of the artist at work. The film begins in 1972 with Johns repainting Air Ocean World based on Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion map. Johns work is traced over the next eighteen years. His Untitled, 1973, with its cross-hatching, flagstones, and anatomical parts become recurrent motifs, as Johns begins to imbed skulls and severed arms in them. The paintings become more personal as Johns gradually "drops the reserve" in his recent series, "The Seasons." The film culminates with Johns working on the final state of the etching based on "The Seasons."
Johannesburg is considered the most uranium-contaminated city in the world. Waste dumps from around 600 abandoned mines sit next to residential communities, blowing polluted dust into homes and contaminating the soil and water supplies. To get a sense of the sheer extent of the problem, Martin Boudot and his team of researchers investigate. Equipped with a Geiger counter, they uncover some dangerous realities...
A small group of Pintupi living in west Central Australia today can remember their first meeting with a white man, their first impressions of the white man's world and their expectations of what the white world had to offer.