The arrival of the European button accordion to Texas and its merging with traditional Mexican songs gave birth to an explosive new sound called conjunto. From the early pioneers to the new generation of accordionists experimenting with rock, blues, and metal, ACCORDION DREAMS captures yesterday's and today's squeezebox trailblazers. Produced and directed by critically-acclaimed filmmaker Hector Galan and narrated by singer/songwriter Tish Hinojosa, ACCORDION DREAMS features performance footage of conjunto greats like Valerio Longoria, Mingo Saldivar, Ruben Vela, Eva Ybarra, and Flaco Jimenez and the newer generation of accordionists like Joel Guzman, Jaime De Anda, Albert Zamora, and Jesse Turner.
FRONTLINE and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters from local journalism partner Star Tribune examine one of the most pivotal events in the history of race and policing in America.
This film portrays everyday life inside and around a Kali temple in the city of Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh (India). Its central characters are a priest and three devotees, who show why this temple is so important to them. The film offers a counterpoint to assumptions about religious differences and shows a more complex relationship informed by mutual friendship and shared religious aspirations.
Once entertainers and employees of the royal courts, they were believed to have mystical powers. Today they fight for dignity in life and death. This film is about the extreme hardships, resilience and beauty of Kashmir’s Hijra (transgender) community and their growing movement for basic human rights.
Vertical Freedom is an epic, feature-length documentary film highlighting the professional and personal lives of six communications infrastructure workers in the United States who possess diverse backgrounds and compelling stories, on and off the job.
The story of the artists, rebels, and bohemians who came to New York’s Greenwich Village over many decades, and changed the face of American culture through their art and politics. The film portrays important political and social movements that started in the Village - such as the first interracial jazz club, the earliest Socialist newspapers from before World War I, and the Stonewall rebellion that sparked gay liberation.
Featuring sit-down interviews with experts and historians, follows the story of the Japanese American soldiers of WWII who fought for the ideals of American democracy.
Mammy Water is a pidgin English name for a local water goddess worshipped by the Ibibio, Ijaw, and Igbo speaking peoples of southeastern Nigeria. The water goddess traditionally gives wealth and children, compensates for hardships, and is sought in times of illness and need, especially by women. Her various cults are led, predominantly, by priestesses.
This acclaimed documentary explores the revolutionary movement fighting for democracy in Burma and depicts how young people, in particular, are affected by the human rights abuses of Burma’s military government. Burma Diary focuses on the story of Tint Aung, a young Burmese man who was actively involved in the protest movement while in college. He is forced to flee from his home and take refuge in the jungles of the Burmese-Thailand border along with his wife and his two young daughters. As the film chronicles four harsh years of Tint Aung’s struggle to survive, it provides a passionate and at times heartbreaking study of the hopes of and the obstacles facing the Burmese democracy movement.
We hear the thoughts of Amy, a girl from a rural area of Senegal who works as a domestic for a well-to-do family in Dakar. She complains about her employer, who continuously criticizes her and gets on her case, and she talks about her dream of one day opening her own eatery. In Dakar, some 150,000 young women work as housekeepers for rich families to survive and help their families instead of going to school.
In the shadow of the pandemic, a small town rallies to protect a beloved local bookstore. A landmark in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Bookstore is a magical, beatnik gem thanks to its owner Matt Tannenbaum, whose passion for stories runs deep. This portrait of The Bookstore and the family at its heart offers a journey through good times, hard times, and the stories hidden on the shelves.
When a thriving, top-ranked African American elementary school is threatened to be replaced by a new high school favoring the community’s wealthier residents, parents, students and educators fight for the elementary school’s survival.
This multi-faceted film, photographed in both 1969 and in Paris in 1982, illustrates an anthropologist's actual fieldwork methods and personal relationships among the Baruya, and provides an in-depth view of the Baruya's traditional salt-based economic system. The film follows Dr. Godelier as he explores the complexities of food production and the effects of new technologies. He comments: "I have to find and bring together the different pieces of Baruya culture... That's my job, to find the story."
A compelling account of the return by a group of dispossessed Aboriginal people to their ancient tribal grounds in the Northern outreaches of this continent.