'Oski' is an intimate portrait of a young prodigy and the culture that surrounds him. A film documenting a year in the life of skateboarding sensation Oskar ‘Oski’ Rozenberg as he transforms from cool street skater to celebrity sportsman competing in the Olympics. The demands of being a sportman with a shot at the gold medal in Tokyo weighs hard on Oski. It’s obvious that he is not your everyday athlete. Can his sport, and his culture survive the transition from underground to mainstream? And will he loose himself and everything dear to him in the process? 'Oski' explores the history of a subculture at a pivotal point in its history and how a humble and different thinking athlete, loved and adored by thousands of skateboarders all around the world, struggles to find his own path in life as an adult and sportsman.
The secrets of film financing from insiders and the untold story of funding “The Blair Witch Project,” the most profitable independent film in history. Insight into funding films, how it’s done, what works, what doesn’t and how to find investors.
This powerful, nuanced portrait arrives just in time celebrate the bicentennial of American abolitionist and political activist Harriet Tubman. Parts of her story are well known; born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of anti-slavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. But the film delves deeper, illuminating her spirit and strength through exploits as a union scout and spy during the Civil War, an activist for women's suffrage and a singular figure who defied categorization at every turn. The foremost chronicler of the Black experience working in nonfiction film today, Stanley Nelson, alongside co-director Nicole London, brings rich, deeply researched historical detail to the story of this remarkable woman.
Dewayne Johnson, a Bay Area groundskeeper, suffered from rashes in 2014 and wondered if they were caused by the herbicide he'd been using for the past couple years. As his health deteriorated, Johnson became the face of a David-and-Goliath legal battle to hold a multi-national agrochemical corporation accountable for a product with allegedly misleading labelling.
Ukraine is a country that was unknown to most citizens of the United States, but it was always known to the political establishment of the USA. But since February 22, 2014, Ukraine quickly came to the attention of Americans, as well as the entire world. Ukraine - 30 Years of Independence explores the competing narratives about country's journey through the eyes of an American filmmaker as it is being told through the words of the men who governed the country.
A filmmaker unearths a pervasive history of multigenerational trauma in her Italian-American family. As decades of secrets, home movies, and long-avoided conversations surface, a family once bound by tradition forges a new path forward.
A hybrid doc/narrative following Tony winning performer and comedian Sarah Jones. As a mixed-race Black woman in America, Sarah, alongside the multicultural characters she's known for, explores her own personal relationship to one of the most relevant issues in our current cultural climate: the sex industry, and the surprisingly diverse range of people whose lives it touches. Through interviews and monologues, this film poses the question: how can we as a society have a healthy relationship to sex, power, race and our economy, without exploitation or stigma? The goal is not to prescribe solutions, but to highlight the human faces and voices at the center of this subject.
These film reels had vanished for decades and no one knew about the secret passion of Hitler's second man Hermann Goering. This footage from his private collection shows for the first time how he preferred to see himself: at the height of his power, acclaimed by the masses - as in the annexation of Austria in 1938, as Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe.
In the wake of the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, Indigenous People across the nation are using their newfound platform to shed light on the wide array of injustices committed against them for centuries in an effort to wake up the world and embark upon the process of decolonization.
Based on Mallory Smith's posthumously published memoir, Salt In My Soul offers a look inside the mind of a young woman trying to live while dying. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, Mallory turned to a secret diary to record her thoughts.
The fall of 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of Fiddler on the Roof, the film Pauline Kael (The New Yorker) called "the most powerful movie musical ever made." Narrated by Jeff Goldblum, FIDDLER'S JOURNEY TO THE BIG SCREEN captures the humor and drama of director Norman Jewison's quest to recreate the lost world of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia and re-envision the beloved stage hit as a wide-screen epic. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Daniel Raim puts us in the director's chair and in Jewison's heart and mind, drawing on behind-the-scenes footage and never-before-seen stills as well as original interviews with Jewison, Topol (Tevye), composer John Williams, production designer Robert F. Boyle, film critic Kenneth Turan, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and actresses Rosalind Harris, Michele Marsh, and Neva Small (Tevye’s daughters). The film explores how the experience of making Fiddler deepened Jewison as an artist and revived his soul.
Brash and opinionated, Christine Choy is a documentarian, cinematographer, professor, and quintessential New Yorker whose films and teaching have influenced a generation of artists. In 1989 she started to film the leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests who escaped to political exile following the June 4 massacre. Though Choy never finished that project, she now travels with the old footage to Taiwan, Maryland, and Paris in order to share it with the dissidents who have never been able to return home.
Just before the 2018 CrossFit Games, a new direction was handed down from the leadership team, instigating an overhaul of the sport. Big changes were on the horizon for 2019, and the focus now turned to making the 2018 Games the best yet.
Planned by Britain’s MI6 and then executed by America’s C.I.A., the coup d’état which follows will destroy Iran’s last democracy, and relations between Iran and the West until the present day. Most shocking of all, the truth about Her Majesty’s role will be hidden from the Queen herself, and even the all-powerful Shah who will be used by Britain and American to replace Iran’s last democratic Prime Minister. The coup will lead to political upheaval all over the Middle East for decades to come, eventually resulting in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 which will end the reign of the Shah, and British and American influence in Iran, inspiring countless other Islamist revolutions around the world.
In Brussels, Belgium, the Royal Museum of Central Africa is undertaking a radical renovation, both physical and ethical, to show with sincerity, crudeness and open-mindedness the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against the inhabitants of the Belgian colonies in Africa, still haunted and traumatized by the ghost of King Leopold II of Belgium, a racist and genocidal tyrant.
The life and legacy of Helen Keller, including how she used her celebrity to advocate for human rights and social justice for women, the poor and people with disabilities.
To historians, physicist Lise Meitner deserves to be placed on a par with Einstein, Heisenberg and Otto Hahn. In the 1930s on the verge of World War II, she led a small group of scientists who discovered that splitting the atomic nucleus of uranium releases enormous energy. This extraordinary film tells the story of a woman who was far ahead of her time as a scientist and a pioneer of feminism.
Danny Abel’s documentary tells the incredible, all-American story of Jeremiah Heaton and his geographical conquest. It all starts in 2014, when Heaton lays claim to 500,000 acres of desert land between Egypt and Sudan; his initial aim is to establish a kingdom so that his daughter can be made a princess. What follows is media attention, a movie deal with Disney, and a shift in motivation: Heaton decides to create a bonafide nation, with industry, a military, and more.