This Academy Award-winning documentary short Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist, narrated by Sidney Poitier, traces the career of Paul Robeson through his activism and his socially charged performances of his signature song, “Ol’ Man River.”
A perfect, fast and hilarious montage. Using images from Artis (Amsterdam Zoo), Bert Haanstra shows that a couple of similarities can be discovered between human and animal. Particularly the manner in which human and ape are confronted with each other, is significant. The images speak for themselves, human voices or commentary is absent. The ironic music of Pim Jacobs does add an extra dimension to the whole. With regards to human and animal Haanstra limits himself for the time being to this short film, recorded with a hidden camera. Later on, in several big films, he would return to this subject.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are stopped by narrator Pete Smith for the purpose of showing the audience how much wood and wood by-products the average person carries.
The desolate and mysterious island of Fårö, Sweden, Baltic Sea, 2004. Swedish master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) looks back on his personal and artistic life; a journey through more than sixty years devoted to film, plays and television programs. (An abridged version of Ingmar Bergman Complete, 2004; a collection of three thematic documentaries: Bergman and Film; Bergman and Theater; and Bergman and Fårö Island.)
A portrait of HPG, actor, director, and producer of pornographic films, entirely conceived from the thousands of hours of making-of recorded during his film shoots. More than a simple archive of the behind the scenes of an X-rated film, this documentary questions pornography and the passion for reality that characterizes it.
The Waiting Room is a character-driven documentary film that uses extraordinary access to go behind the doors of an American public hospital struggling to care for a community of largely uninsured patients. The film - using a blend of cinema verité and characters' voice over - offers a raw, intimate, and even uplifting look at how patients, executive staff and caregivers each cope with disease, bureaucracy and hard choices. It is a film about fighting for survival when the odds are stacked against you.
The incredible rise to fame of 63-year-old aspiring soul singer Charles Bradley, whose debut album took him from a hard life in the Brooklyn Housing Projects to Rolling Stone Magazine's top 50 albums of 2011.
Internationally acclaimed ventriloquist Nina Conti takes the bereaved puppets of her mentor and erstwhile lover Ken Campbell on a pilgrimage to "Venthaven" the resting place for puppets of dead ventriloquists. She gets to know her latex and wooden travelling partners along the way, and with them deconstructs herself and her lost love in this ventriloquial docu-mockumentary requiem. Ken Campbell was a hugely respected maverick of the British theatre, an eccentric genius who would snort out forgotten artforms. Nina was his protégé in ventriloquism and has been said to have reinvented the artform. This film is truly unique in genre and style. No one has seen ventriloquism like this before.
An intimate look inside the private life of award-winning artist Lady Gaga as she performs eight songs in front of a small audience filled with her close friends and family.
In 2008, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova captivated audiences and earned two Academy Awards for their musical collaboration in the film Once. As their fictional romance blurred with reality, they fell in love, recorded an album, and embarked on a world tour.
Raised in the Tennessee mountains, Wayne White started his career as a cartoonist in NYC. He quickly found success as one of the creators of the Pee-wee's Playhouse TV show which soon led to more work designing some of the most arresting and iconic images in pop culture. Recently his word paintings featuring pithy and and often sarcastic text statements finely crafted onto vintage landscape paintings have made him a darling of the fine art world. The movie chronicles the vaulted highs and crushing lows of an artist struggling to find peace and balance between his professional work and his personal art. This is especially complicated for a man who struggles with the virtues he most often mocks in his art...Vanity, ego and fame.
This exceptional, disturbing, and thought-provoking two-part documentary compares the atrocities committed by the Nazis as revealed during the Nuremberg trials to those committed by the French in Algeria and those done by the Americans in Vietnam. The four-hour epic questions the right of any country to pass self-righteous moral judgements upon the actions of another country.
Filmed over five weeks at the Warrendale residential treatment center near Toronto, "Warrendale" observes twelve emotionally disturbed children and the staff who care for them. Working without narration, interviews, or direction, Allan King records daily life as it unfolds, establishing what he later described as “actuality drama.”
In this classic exploration of marriage in conflict, Billy and Antoinette Edwards—as well as their son Bogart and dog Merton—live out their daily lives. Hoping to discover the heart of the trouble in their marriage, Billy and Antoinette offer up their day to day lives to documentary filmmaker Allan King, as laughter, tears, wit, tenderness, anger, patience, pain, and sorrow ensue.
Features conversations with ten of the world's greatest living directors: Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Liliana Cavani, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Todd Haynes, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater and John Sayles. The film documents Ismailos' voyage of discovering the creative personalities behind the camera.