In 1987, after over ten years of work, Werner Tübke (1929-2004), one of East Germany’s most important painters, completed the monumental, oil-on-canvas painting The Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. Painted in the Renaissance styles of Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer, the painting—measuring 14 meters high and 123 meters wide—is in the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, Thuringia, the site of the last battle of the German Peasants’ War. The museum was specifically built for the painting, one of the most figurative in recent art history.Interspersed with interviews with the artist, the documentary follows the complicated and elaborate creation of the monumental work, from signing the contract in 1976 to the last brush stroke on September 11, 1987. In 2011, the Panorama Museum was awarded the European Seal of Cultural Heritage.
We hear the thoughts of Amy, a girl from a rural area of Senegal who works as a domestic for a well-to-do family in Dakar. She complains about her employer, who continuously criticizes her and gets on her case, and she talks about her dream of one day opening her own eatery. In Dakar, some 150,000 young women work as housekeepers for rich families to survive and help their families instead of going to school.
An examination of the hidden origins of disinformation about the 2020 election and those responsible for some of the core narratives of election fraud.
Tapa cloth, or ngatu as it is called in Tonga, is cloth made from the bark of the mulberry tree. The inner bark is beaten into fine sheets and painted using traditional designs. After centuries of use, ngatu has literally become the fabric of Tongan society. In Tonga and throughout much of Polynesia, bark cloth has deep symbolic and ceremonial use. At birth, babies are swaddled in it. At marriage, newlyweds line their wedding bed, and at death, the departed are buried wrapped in it. This documentary investigates the highly collaborative process of making ngatu and the organizations of women who carry on with the tradition. While the process continues to be passed on from generation to generation, there are signs of change as a cash economy begins to infiltrate Tongan life. Young people show less interest in such labor intensive endeavor in the face of the older generation's belief that this tradition will never die.
10 brave kids, 2 Emmy award winning journalists, 1 clinical psychologist at Columbia University and 1 determined mother take on the fear and stigma plaguing the mental health community, leaving us enlightened, empowered and equipped to either live life or lift up life with these challenging and even life threatening conditions.
On the basis of a social anthropological case study, this film documents the birth practices of the Bunong in Mondulkiri province, located in the northeast of Cambodia. Social, economic, and political changes are transforming the province tremendously and are affecting villagers' beliefs, perceptions and habits regarding pregnancy, delivery and early motherhood. Traditional midwives, pregnant women, mothers and their families give a personal insight into their present decision-making strategies, which are at the crossroads between tradition and modernity.
Jan Karski is a hero of World War II, a member of the Polish Resistance and the author of the first official account of the Holocaust. The film was created jointly by filmmakers from Russia and Poland in the year of the centenary of Jan Karski, on the seventieth anniversary of the victory over fascism.
This documentary explores what happens when different communities get sprayed from above. Whether it is Naled sprayed on Miami residents for the War on Zika, or the neurotoxin Agent Orange sprayed over the Vietcong in the War on Vietnam, or the release of GMO mosquitoes over Brazilians with pyriproxyfen added to their drinking water in the War on Dengue, what are the results for nature and humanity? Sprayed brings the viewer to the Vietnamese detoxification and rehabilitation centers to meet Agent Orange survivors, parents of babies born with microcephaly that triggered the global response to Zika, and to sprayed Florida residents. Perspectives of doctors, scientists, and politicians are balanced with voices of ordinary citizens and victims to explore their concerns about the potential impact on future generations.
Battling subzero temperatures and 40-foot seas, a team of scientists embark on a perilous winter expedition into the darkest regions of the Arctic. Their mission: to understand how trace amounts of light may be radically altering the mysterious world of the polar night. What they discover has implications for the global climate and the future of the Arctic.
Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement 20 years ago, international companies have used the Santiago River as their own “waste canal.” This documentary follows a young woman and her family as they try to save one of the most polluted rivers in Mexico.
Mamie Lang Kirkland still remembers the night in 1915 when panic filled her home in Ellisville, Mississippi. Her family was forced to flee in darkness from a growing mob of men determined to lynch her father and his friend. Mamie’s family escaped, but her father’s friend, John Hartfield, did not. He suffered one of the most horrific lynchings of the era. Mamie vowed to never return to Mississippi – until now. After one hundred years, Mamie’s youngest child, filmmaker, Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, takes his mother back to Ellisville to tell her story, honor those who succumbed to the terror of racial violence, and give testimony to the courage and hope epitomized by many of her generation
Filmed in Palestine by Newsreel, WE ARE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE shows the refugee camps of the Middle East, the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Movement and Israel's relation ship to the Western imperialism. There is footage of the guerrillas in training, and interviews with Palestinian leaders and militants who work in many programs of the liberation struggle of the time.
For centuries Hmong people have lived in the mountains of China and Southeast Asia. They have in more recent history fled Laos as refugees and resettled in the Americas, Australia, and Europe. This documentary was filmed in Chang Khian, a village in the mountains of Northern Thailand. With the traditional, year-long process of transforming the bark of hemp plants into cloth, the complex relationships of men and women are revealed. Women produce the cloth and clothing as the men perform healing ceremonies, settle marriage agreements, and conduct funeral rights. The ready availability of mass-produced, inexpensive cloth combined with the fact that the cultivation of hemp is now illegal has brought the continuation of this traditional practice into question. This film is of great interest to the study of gender and kinship, textiles, traditional crafts, shamanism, and social change.
Join the quest with 25 intrepid history students – mostly Mexican American – who drive 2,000 miles from the Alamo in Texas to a Springfield, Illinois museum. Their mission? Asking to repatriate General Santa Anna’s prosthetic leg to Mexico and honor Abraham Lincoln with a Day of the Dead altar.
A 1970s American elementary school program encouraging students to figure out for themselves the universal building blocks of human community — family, work, faith, etc. — inflamed political sensitivities so intensely it was shelved and forgotten. Archive footage of the documentary film series at the program's core, classroom exchanges, and the ensuing controversy frames larger issues of education, politics and ideology.
A group of longtime Chicago residents born in the Mississippi Delta returns to Greenville, Mississippi, for a reunion with family and friends. Participants talk about their lives and reasons for migrating north as part of "The Great Migration." Archival footage of Mississippi and Chicago is included.
An in-depth portrait of memoirist George Crane and poet Barry Tagrin, two renegade American intellectuals who have made homes on the beautiful, rugged and isolated island of Paros, Greece.