For decades, performance artist and writer Kate Bornstein has been exploding binaries and deconstructing gender. And, her own identity. Trans-dyke. Reluctant polyamorist. Sadomasochist. Recovering Scientologist. Pioneering Gender Outlaw. Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, joins her on her latest tour capturing rollicking public performances and painful personal revelations as it bears witness to Kate as a trailblazing artist theorist activist who inhabits a space between male and female with wit, style, and astonishing candor. By turns meditative and playful, the film invites us on a thought provoking journey through Kate's world to seek answers to some of life's biggest questions.
Learn the origins and rise of modern day hula-hooping through eight extraordinary stories of hoop devotees who have embraced it as an art form, a teaching aid, and even an instrument of redemption. From the streets, to intimate clubs, to giant arenas, we alternate between self-filmed video diaries, verité documentary footage, and spectacularly filmed performances in an attempt to celebrate the healing power of movement and the spirit of human inventiveness.
Powerful, direct and heartrending, The Starfish Throwers explores how three of the world's most fiercely compassionate individuals struggle to restore hope to the hopeless in unexpected and sometimes dangerous ways. Continents apart, a sixth grader, a top chef and retired school teacher fight what seems an unwinnable war until they discover their impact may reach further than their action
Thomas Hart Benton's paintings were energetic and uncompromising. Today his works are in museums, but Benton hung them in saloons for ordinary people to appreciate.
It's been 20 years since an Australian film has reached number one at the yearly Box Office and our films have consistently grossed under 5% for the years. So what can we do to make a change?
Paying tribute to Swiss photographer Robert Frank's groundbreaking 1958 book The Americans, French filmmaker Philippe Seclier retraces Frank's footsteps across America with camera in hand, capturing images of contemporary America 50 years later.
After selling herself at fourteen to a brothel inside her home town of Svay Pak, Mien takes an undesired path all over Cambodia for the remainder of her teenage life. At twenty, her path crosses with a group of people fighting to make a difference, bringing her long and onerous journey back to face where it all began. The Pink Room is an intertwined story of the heart-rending, epic battle to end sex slavery, from rescue to prevention, and experiencing first hand, the need to change not just individuals, but the communities they come from. Most documentaries on trafficking only bring awareness to the problem. This film bring awareness to the solutions.
From oratory classes to operating room, Beauty Factory follows five girls for four months as they compete for the coveted Miss Venezuela crown; revealing the process that has won Venezuela more international beauty pageants than any other country.
In rural Nicaragua, Dulce Maria and her brother Francisco are Deaf adults who know no language at all--spoken, written or signed--until Tomasa, a Deaf sign-language teacher, arrives determined to teach them their first words.
On July 14, 1789, a mob of angry Parisians stormed the Bastille and seized the King's military stores. A decade of idealism, war, murder, and carnage followed, bringing about the end of feudalism and the rise of equality and a new world order. The French Revolution is a definitive feature-length documentary that encapsulates this heady (and often headless) period in Western civilization. With dramatic reenactments, illustrations, and paintings from the era, plus revealing accounts from journals and expert commentary from historians, The French Revolution vividly unfurls in a maelstrom of violence, discontent, and fundamental change. King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Maximilien Robespierre, and Napoleon Bonaparte lead a cast of thousands in this essential program from THE HISTORY CHANNEL®. Narrated by Edward Herrmann (The Aviator, Gilmore Girls), The French Revolution explores the legacy that--now more than ever--stands as both a warning and a guidepost to a new millennium
Half a million people descend upon a tiny Serbian village for the 50th anniversary of the world's largest trumpet festival. Brasslands chronicles the cultural and musical collisions through the personal journeys of 3 musicians - American, Serbian, Roma - whose lives are bound to Balkan brass for very different reasons.
At a time when the world is discussing the impact of human actions on the environment, Amazônia Eterna presents a critical analysis of how the world's largest tropical rainforest is understood and appreciated.
Being human is a fragile and fleeting opportunity to experience life and the universe around us. In the face of overwhelming darkness all we can do is to rely on and find solace in one another. The film is based on authentic emergency calls and radio traffic.
German filmmaker Niko von Glasow embarks on a very personal project with this documentary that profiles thalidomiders: people born with malformed or missing limbs because their mothers took thalidomide for morning sickness during pregnancy.
Narrated by Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman, "JFK: A President Betrayed" uncovers new evidence that reveals how JFK embarked on secret back channel peace efforts with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro and was determined to get out of Vietnam despite intense opposition inside his own government.
Documentary about the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 and the aftermath. The documentary also explores the modern Asian-American identity when so few Asian-American youths are aware of who Vincent Chin is.
'Pleasures' profiles legendary jazz critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, whose pioneering career tracks the greatest cultural and political movements of the last 65 years. The film is about an idea as well as a man - the idea of free expression as the defining characteristic of the individual. Hentoff is a pioneering journalist who raised jazz as an art form and was present at the creation of 'alternative' journalism. 'Pleasures' wraps the themes of liberty and identity around a historical narrative that stretches from the Great Depression to the Patriot Act. With a mix of interviews, archival footage and music, it employs a complex non-linear structure to engage the audience in a life of independent ideas and the creation of an enduring voice.