Director Sam Pollard constructs a portrait of charismatic trailblazer Maynard Jackson, who became Atlanta’s first black mayor in 1973. The son of pastors raised in the segregated South, Jackson entered college at 14 and took office at 35. During his three-term tenure, he led the city through the traumatic Atlanta child murders scare and triumphantly hosted the 1996 Olympics, all while championing racial equality. Family and colleagues, including Bill Clinton, Andrew Young and Al Sharpton, tell the epic story of a dynamic leader and his legacy of honor and progress.
Adventurer, pilgrim, penitent but above all outstanding writer, Fernão Mendes Pinto left us an unparalleled romance, the living and human palpitation of one of the greatest historical adventures of man.
Rock & Roll spread the sound of freedom across the Iron Curtain and throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR, despite Communist attempts to outlaw it and to crush what they perceived was a contamination of their youth. Over the next thirty years, thousands of underground bands and millions of young fans who yearned for Western values helped fuel the nonvio- lent implosion of the Soviet regime. FREE TO ROCK features Presidents, diplomats, spies and rock stars from the West, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who reveal how Rock & Roll music was a contributing factor in ending the Cold
'Hannah' tells the story of Buddhist pioneer Hannah Nydahl and her life bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West. From her idealistic roots in 1960's Copenhagen to the hippie trail in Nepal, Hannah and her husband Ole became two of the first Western students of His Holiness the 16th Karmapa - the first consciously reincarnated lama of Tibet in 1110. Hannah went on to become an assistant and translator for some of the most powerful Tibetan lamas and a bridge between Buddhism in the East and the West.
An account of the life and work of legendary cinematographer and director Carlo Di Palma (1925-2004) and an emotional journey through the great moments of cinema, from Italian neorealism to the masterpieces of Woody Allen.
In 1936, 18 African American athletes dubbed the "black auxiliary" by Hitler defied Nazi Aryan Supremacy and Jim Crow Racism to win hearts and medals at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin. The world remembers Jesse Owens. But, Olympic Pride American Prejudice shows how all 18 are a seminal precursor to the modern Civil Rights Movement.
The search of several young, white men for blues singers who have been missing for decades coincides with the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1960s.
Medieval art treasures seized by the Nazis go missing at the end of World War II. Were they destroyed in the chaos of the final battles? Or were these thousand-year-old masterpieces stolen by advancing American troops? For over forty years, the mystery remained unsolved. A true detective story, "The Liberators" follows a dogged German art detective through the New York art world and military archives to the unlikeliest of destinations: a small town on the Texas prairie. Featuring interviews with Willi Korte (Portrait of Wally) and Texas attorney Dick DeGuerin, the film raises intriguing questions as to the motivations of the art thief and the whereabouts of the items that, to this day,
Between 1900 and 1920 more than 14 million immigrants arrived in the US, like Howard Zinn's parents. They came fleeing poverty or war, or racism, or religious persecution. They dreamed of a promised land, of wealth, or simply of a better life.
Built in 1942 by a maverick film preservationist, this small Los Angeles theater championed silent film at the very moment when the Hollywood studios across town were busily destroying their nitrate inventories. With hard chairs, phonograph-record accompaniments, and mostly original vintage prints, the dingy mom-and-pop operation was nonetheless a palace to the fanatical few who became its loyal audience.
The modern history of the Congo, the heart of Africa, is a terrifying tale of appalling brutality: how the greedy and incredibly ruthless King Leopold II of Belgium (1935-1909) turned a vast country into his private estate (1885-1908) and how he plundered the land and raped the bodies and souls of its defenceless inhabitants, causing countless victims; and what exactly is the true impact of this often forgotten story of crime and horror today.
The wild Seventies. A quest for higher consciousness, spirituality and sexual freedom. In England, young Hugh Milne hears the voice of spiritual teacher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on an audiotape and travels to India in search of his own self. Sheela Patel, a young Indian woman, is brought to the charismatic guru by her father. At 21, she knows: all she wants is to be with this man. In his Ashram in Poona, Bhagwan urges his disciples to meditate and practise tantric sex in order to reach a higher plane of consciousness. Hugh watches the guru's ascent as his bodyguard. Sheela becomes his secretary and the powerful boss of Bhagwan's model community born in the mountains of Oregon...
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.
Three chords, three countries, one revolution...PUNK IN AFRICA is the story of the multiracial punk movement within the recent political and social upheavals experienced in three Southern African countries: South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Filmmaker Jarreth Merz directs this eye-opening documentary about the 2008 presidential elections in Ghana, chronicling the start-to-finish drama of campaigning in a nation that's long served as a measure of the continent's political stability.
In 1998 former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet visits Britain for medical treatment. On being tipped off, Amnesty International seize the chance to bring to justice a man they insist is guilty of multiple human rights violations. The newly-elected Labour government is initially amenable, and soon Pinochet is under house arrest (albeit in a detached house in leafy suburbia) and awaiting extradition to Spain. However, Amnesty are up against the complexities of British law, the vacillations of Home Secretary Jack Straw, Pinochet's former ally Margaret Thatcher - and the Senator's own vast reserves of cunning.