In 2011, Pocomoke City a small town on Maryland's Lower Eastern Shore hired Kelvin Sewell, its first African-American police chief. Sewell, a former Baltimore city homicide investigator and narcotics officer had grown tired of the aggressive tactics used by the Baltimore Police Department...particularly those targeting black communities. Determined to deploy a different approach to law enforcement, Sewell implemented an intensive community policing plan. He and his officers parked their cars and walked the streets. Sewell's system worked: crime plummeted. Residents both black and white became ardent supporters of Sewell's new paradigm of policing. But a conflict was brewing; an ongoing dispute over racial discrimination engulfed Sewell and his officers in a battle that would not only cost them their jobs and professional reputations, but would thrust them into an emotional legal battle that would touch all segments of the community.
A raucous, visceral Los Angeles tale—seen through the story of a 20th Century fight palace and the remarkable woman who ran it-—reveals battles over race, gender and identity that still roil America.
When Renny Yater and George Greenough made surfboards for one of the best waves on earth, they helped kickstart a revolution and influence generations of surfers and shapers.
Explore the filmmaker’s life and career in interviews with colleagues, friends and Burns himself. The importance of place emerges as a theme as he reflects on his own geographic touchstones, from the Brooklyn Bridge to small-town New Hampshire.
The rubber met the road in the early 1970s for Bill Costen. After being drafted by the Buffalo Bills, tragedy forces him out of his dream. Saying goodbye to a career on the turf, Bill takes to the air, becoming the first African American Hot-Air Balloon Master Pilot in the world.
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.
Thunderbird is a short documentary exploring the story of Steven Collins, an international Olympic ski jumper. Using archive footage and photos, Thunderbird gives a genuine look at Steven’s story.
A short documentary containing images of a ghost town juxtaposed with a day in the life of a father coping with loss and old age. A story about absence.
Earth is a volcanic planet, with over 1,400 active giants spread across the globe. But what would happen if all of them were to erupt at once? From rivers of lava, towering ash clouds, and pyroclastic flows to tsunamis and super-sized climate change, we explore the powerful volcanic forces that fascinate today's scientists. Join us as we conduct a thrilling thought experiment with leading volcanologists that reveals the inner workings of some of the world's most magnificent volcanoes.
Five women experience traumatic blows to their self-image after unexpectedly losing their hair. Through the subsequent mental health, relationship, financial, and social impacts, they cope with these challenges in dramatically different ways. The Director also grapples with her own identity and what it means to be authentic.
The heroes of this picture are the winners. They were able to cope with a deadly disease, and it seems that they came out of this fight changed. They, their relatives, their doctors, and their donors talk about what and who helped them recover, about what it is like to endure cancer, about how their attitude towards life is changing. These stories, which happened almost simultaneously, are somewhat similar and at the same time very different, because each person has taken something different from the field of pain.
After selling out her first show in LA, artist Reine Paradis, embarks on a surreal road trip across the U.S. to complete her next body of work. It’s an all out adventure, an intimate story, and a bold look at what it takes to make art today.
Rikuzentakata and Crescent City are half a world apart, but connected by tragedy, chance and a 10,000-mile journey across open waters; the unlikely friendships that blossom between parallel towns are a reminder of humanity's best instincts.
In 1974, a local TV news station crew came into the filmmaker Daniel Robin’s home during the Rosh Hashanah celebration to document it and learn about Jewish rituals. A narrative begins with the formation of American-Jewish identity. But then the director of this unexpected autobiography draws an analogy with the current rise in anti-Semitism and nationalism. He believes that in the United States the attitude towards unfamiliar cultures resembles the one people take towards animals in petting zoos, where one can safely touch and pet them.
A documentary film focusing on the current state of the music business and on how "the brand" of a rock group, in many cases, has more power than the band members themselves.