As a young father, watching his daughter go through her life experiences, film director Alexandre Mourot discovered the Montessori approach and decided to set his camera up in a children's house (3 to 6 years of age) in the oldest Montessori school in France. Alexandre was warmly welcomed in a surprisingly calm and peaceful environment, filled with flowers, fruits and Montessori materials. He met happy children, who were free to move about, working alone or in small groups. The teacher remained very discreet. Some children were reading, others were making bread, doing division, laughing or sleeping. The children guided the film director throughout the whole school year, helping him to understand the magic of their autonomy and self-esteem - the seeds of a new society of peace and freedom, which Maria Montessori dedicated her life work to.
There’s high school football, and then there’s Texas high school football. Oddly enough though, one of the greatest teams in state history has been lost to time—and fate. “What Carter Lost” is the saga of that team, the 1988 Dallas Carter Cowboys. With 21 players who were offered college scholarships and several who went on to the NFL, Carter took on the best that Texas had to offer, including the Odessa Permian team that inspired Friday Night Lights, as well as the worst: in a racially charged state-wide dispute over one player’s algebra grade and Carter’s legitimacy. Somehow, the team won the championship that year. Yet not too long after, the legacy they worked so hard for was thrown away after a group of players made a terrible decision. With personal interviews with players, coaches and family members, as well as glimpses of their lives today, “What Carter Lost” is ultimately about what Carter found.
On May 8, 1989, Sports Illustrated ran an article about Ultimate frisbee… about a team with no name hailing from New York City that was about to change the sport forever. From its 1968 New Jersey birth to its unanimous 2015 recognition by the International Olympic Committee, FLATBALL circles the globe to showcase four decades of world-class Ultimate and goes even further: to a set of fields in the Middle East to understand and demystify the unique spirit of the game.
Departing from material records of the early colonial “scientific expeditions” and “taming campaigns” led by the French colonizers in North Africa, the story follows a community of young nomads and wanderers as they form an imagined utopian society. Reenactments, improvisations, and interviews performed and conducted with the inhabitants of Algiers, Kythira Island, and the Prosfygika community in Athens inform this work as instances of alternative temporality and autonomous space.
Moscow, Russia, December 2016. Edward Snowden, Larry Lessig and Birgitta Jónsdóttir meet for the first time in a secret place. Apparently, Russia is interfering in the US presidential elections while it mourns the death of its ambassador to Turkey. Snowden carefully chooses his interviews, so nobody really knows something about him. As the world prepares for Christmas, they gather to discuss the only issue that matters, their common struggle: how to save democracy.
Unrest is the third movement of a triptych by Philippe Grandrieux whose common thread is anxiety. A body as a return from the depths of time, an archaic body that we do not know and which nevertheless continues to project in us its shadow, its anxiety.
What do you think of when you think of a grain of rice? Let It Be is a documentary that records the daily labor and lives of three elderly rice farmers in Tainan County’s Houbi Township. In the heart of Taiwan’s rice-producing country, they have passed their days shedding a bead of sweat to match each grain of rice. The film depicts their lifestyles which have changed little over the last half-century. Observing their toil at work and the way they go about their lives allows the viewer to appreciate the wisdom that imbues their lives and the fascinating dynamics of their relationships with each other, their animals, the gods, the weather, and the land. Between the vastness of the heavens and the joys and sorrows of the earth and its inhabitants, each farmer fulfills his unique destiny.
Fulton made the film during his brief time at Harvard, where he had been invited to teach by Robert Gardner, his friend and collaborator (Fulton would later serve as a cinematographer on Gardner’s 1981 documentary Deep Hearts, among others). Reality’s Invisible could be described as a portrait of the Carpenter Center, yet it is a portrait of an extremely idiosyncratic and distinctive sort. Fulton moves us through the concrete space of the Center’s Le Corbusier-designed building—the only structure by the architect in North America—but, more centrally, presents us footage of students making and discussing their work alongside figures like Gardner, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, artist Stan Vanderbeek, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and graphic designer Toshi Katayama.
This film is a letter to my friend Vincent who died ten years ago. Vincent was Deaf. He introduced me to his language, his culture, his world. Through Vincent ‘s life, the film will examine the roots of the distress that plagues the Deaf, and also explore a rich and fascinating world, a people that struggles to preserve its Sign Language and Culture.
The challenges of the present, expectations for the future, and the dreams of those who experience the reality of public high school in Brazil. Through the voices of students, principals, teachers and experts, "Not Even In a Wildest Dream" offers a reflection on the value of education.
You could be forgiven for mistaking Charlie Siem for James Bond. Whether he's driving an orange Porsche to his cliff-top Monaco mansion, ordering martinis or looking suave in a designer suit, he is a man on a mission. It isn't to hunt down SPECTRE, but to find perfection in everything he does. Whether it's performing on stage, recording albums, or selecting a suit, Charlie demands the best, of himself and others. Despite an entourage dubbed ‘Charlie's Angels', he's lonesome, and complains that people can't relate to him. Danish filmmaker Eva Mulvad, with patience and panache, delves into this life of privilege to find commonalities of ambition and desire.
In rural Iowa, a beloved history teacher uncovers the century-old showreels of one of America's first motion picture impresarios and sets out to premiere the films at a historic local opera house.
During one year, Joseph Paris filmed from the inside the Femen movement; its acts, its shocks and confrontations, its smokes and noises, but also its circumstances, its doubts, and sometimes its contradictions. One year at the heart of a overexposed activism in mass-media, where its deep reasons remained under silence or sometimes misconceived.
A tarot card reading as a starting point. A disruptive relationship as a point. Translation of the cards' symbols to a joint.
Of the domestic exploration for finding my voice.
Science fiction has become a reality in our modern criminal justice system. A term originally coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick, “pre-crime” is a policing technique now used in both the US and Europe to identify “hot people”—those most likely to be victims or perpetrators of a crime. Forecasting software and algorithms that have been criticized as inaccurate and arbitrary are used to collect information, and monitor and flag people. But predictive tools are only as good as the data they’re fed. With scant evidence of the reliability of the data sources or the accuracy of the data crunching, misfires are a guarantee. In this chilling and explosive in-depth examination into the modern age of policing, directors Monika Hielscher and Matthias Heider pose an important question: How much freedom and human awareness are we willing to give to the limited logic of technology?