In the fall of 2013 the homeless Seegers is playing the streets of Nashville, just as usual. But one day he is suddenly discovered by Swedish country star Jill Johnson and her TV crew. Johnson immediately recognizes the magic of Seegers voice and offers him to record his song “Going Down to the River” in Johnny Cash’s legendary studio The Cabin. When the Doug Seegers episode of the TV series “Jill’s Porch, Nashville” is aired in March 2014 the audience just goes crazy. “Going Down to the River” instantly hits the top spot of the Swedish iTunes-list, and stays there for 12 consecutive days. Doug Seegers now gets to record an album together with Emmylou Harris’ band and to tour Sweden, from north to south. This film tells the unlikely story of Doug Seegers late breakthrough and we get to follow him on his Sweden tour in the summer of 2014.
The NCAA is the face for college athletics, and it generates billions of dollars every year for the top universities in the United States. This is the first documentary that challenges the NCAA from the perspective of former student-athletes. Director Bob DeMars, a former USC football player, interviewed former student-athletes to find the problems and potential solutions regarding players' rights.
This film documents the life and career of legendary baseball broadcaster Harry Caray. His broadcasting career, which involved stints on radio and television, featured tenures as the play-by-play man for such respected franchises as the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs.
Close to 80,000 Syrian refugees live in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, the second-largest such camp in the world. Fifty-eight percent of its inhabitants are children. After Spring immerses us in the rhythms of the camp, the role of the aid workers, and the daily lives of two families as they contemplate an uncertain future.
A people's struggle to save the animal at the heart of their culture. For centuries the Bunong indigenous people on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border lived with elephants, believing they shared the same destiny. Today, as the forests and rivers both man and animal depend on are threatened, their fates seem even more inseparable. Last of the Elephant Men follows over a period of time several members of the tribe as they attempt to save the animal that once defined their way of life and may hold the key to their own survival.
At the age of 26, innovative chef and inventor Homaro Cantu helped put Chicago on the culinary map when he opened his first restaurant “Moto” in the city’s untapped Fulton Market meatpacking district. Virtually overnight, Cantu rose to the rank of celebrity chef and became famous for his “molecular gastronomy” approach to cooking. Cantu’s meteoric rise to fame masked an early life of poverty, homelessness, and even physical and emotional abuse. Filmed over a period of three years with remarkable access, INSATIABLE follows Cantu at a pivotal moment in his career and takes you on a dizzying and thrilling ride, in a story that moves from redemption and inspiration to tragedy and back again.
Follow Chris Cotter, an American traveler, as he explores a common migration path through Ethiopia and into Israel, tracking the plight of Eritrean refugees. Chris and his crew visit several refugee camps, including the never-before-documented Afar region. The refugees tell stories of oppression, torture, and survival. Searching for solutions, Chris speaks to various NGOs and experts, including Assistant Secretary of State, Anne Richard. The outlook is bleak, but the spirit of the Eritrean refugees is hard to ignore.
Circus Without Borders tells the inspiring story of two youth circuses from remote corners of the world – an Inuit village in Canada, and Guinea in West Africa. The film traces their intersecting journeys as troupe members confront heartrending challenges and become internationally-known performers who return home to transform their communities. We record the troupes’ triumphs and struggles, many of which are the enduring legacy of a history of colonization.
An intimate portrayal of life on the edge in the war-torn city of Sderot. Once known for its prolific rock scene that revolutionized Israeli music, for thirteen years the town has been the target of ongoing rocket fire from the Gaza strip. Through the personal lives and music of Sderot's diverse musicians, and the personal narrative of the filmmaker, who ends up calling the town home, the film chronicles the town's trauma and reveals its enduring spirit.
Strathewen: a lush green paradise where families built their homes to raise their children, close to nature. But at 3am one summer morning residents are woken by the trees thrashing in the hot northerly wind. "It felt like we were in a tinderbox". The lucky ones drive out before the firestorm spreads across the darkened countryside and the trucks start to explode.
Frank and the Wondercat is a creative personal documentary that follows Frank Furko, an 80-year old eccentric living in the Pittsburgh suburb of Plum, and explores the themes of memory, loss, friendship and mortality. Taking stock of his life, Frank tries to reconcile with the forty years working on the family farm with his domineering father, the end of his 20 year marriage and his role as a celebrity derived from an unusual but deeply felt friendship with Pudgie Wudgie, his twenty pound performing house-cat. Supported by Frank's twenty years of VHS video archives, mesmerizing footage that is strange, oddly beautiful, and often hilarious - this is an intimate and thoughtful portrait of an older man struggling to reconcile with his past.
Kein Zickenfox! Is about the biggest women's orchestra in the world and how 66 "normal" women manage to put something great together on the stage! Once a week they all meet in Berlin-Kreuzberg: These 66 women between the early 20s and the mid-70s, their 21 instruments and with them the most varied female biographies and life plans.
From toponymy, a branch of linguistics, to politics, the links can be quite unexpected. These are which are sought to be revealed in the new fi lm by Jonathan Perel who uses his filmwork as a tool to explore and accurately document the marks left by previous dictators of Argentina. We are in the province of Tucuman, in the north of Argentina, an emblematic region where the fi rst Act of Independence in South America was signed in 1816 and where the “Operation Independence” took place in 1974, during which the guerillas’ insurgence was violently repressed.
Hunter S. Thompson meets Barry McKenzie in this dark nonfiction comedy about a real-life, legendary but down-and-out tabloid television journalist who heads to Hawaii to film a marijuana travel series, only to become lost in a fog of drugs, sex and paranoia as he uncovers a secret government war to control the marijuana trade. - Written by Sam Peters
In 2012, one in three babies in America were delivered by c-section, despite the World Health Organization's recommendation that Cesarean births remain below 15 percent. How can these disturbing trend be reversed? In recent years, the idea of a collaborative care practice where doctors and midwives manage women's care together has begun to gain traction in the United States. The Mama Sherpas is a feature-length documentary film about women receiving their maternity care through midwife-doctor teams. We follow nurse midwives, the doctors they work with, and their patients to provide an investigative lens into how midwives work within the hospital system.
An abalone poacher, a dead son, and a broken love story are all bound together by a single theme: the curse of the abalone - an endangered marine snail prized as an aphrodisiac in China, but illegal harvesting has disastrous effects on the traditional fishing community near Cape Town, South Africa.