Describing herself as a 'street queen,' Johnson was a legendary fixture in New York City’s gay ghetto and a tireless voice for LGBT pride since the days of Stonewall, who along with fellow trans icon Sylvia Rivera, founded Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), a trans activist group based in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village. Her death in 1992 was declared a suicide by the NYPD, but friends never accepted that version of events. Structured as a whodunit, with activist Victoria Cruz cast as detective and audience surrogate, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson celebrates the lasting political legacy of Johnson, while seeking to finally solve the mystery of her unexplained death.
Satan in the Suburbs tells the shocking story of a grisly ritualistic murder in the quiet bedroom community of Northport, Long Island in the summer of 1984. The killing, it soon emerged, was linked to a teen satanic cult. Perhaps more disturbing than the details of the murder itself was the revelation of a conspiracy of silence among the town's teenagers, many of whom had been aware of the, e killing in the two weeks before an anonymous call finally tipped off local police. 17- year-old Ricky Kasso was arrested and confessed to the crime; five days later, he hung himself in his holding cell. Kasso's friend Jimmy Troiano also. confessed, but was acquitted after jurors learned that he was beaten by local police. The murder shocked the local community and reverberated nationally, with some uninformed observers rushing to scapegoat rock music as the cause.
The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.
A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…
A found-footage essay, Filmfarsi salvages low budget thrillers and melodramas suppressed following the 1979 Islamic revolution.
A father’s heartfelt plea to have lifesaving talks with pre-teens and teens comes after his 12-year-old son’s suicide from COVID-related isolation.
The Bridge is a controversial documentary that shows people jumping to their death from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco - the world's most popular suicide destination. Interviews with the victims' loved ones describe their lives and mental health.
In this film, Laerte conjugates the body in the feminine, and scrutinizes concepts and prejudices. Not in search of an identity, but in search of un-identities. Laerte creates and sends creatures to face reality in the fictional world of comic strips as a vanguard of the self. And, on the streets, the one who becomes the fiction of a real character. Laerte, of all the bodies, and of none, complicates all binaries. In following Laerte, this documentary chooses to clothe the nudity beyond the skin we inhabit.
The cooking show is as old as television itself. But why do we like watching the making of a meal that most of us will never cook, let alone eat? Dirty Furniture’s jam-packed video essay is a rollercoaster ride through the history of the genre, at once a staple of television viewing and a hotpot of shifting perspectives and sociocultural values.
The film examines the death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, who fell from the fourth floor of the police headquarters in Milan December 15, 1969, after being stopped following the Piazza Fontana bombing.
Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.
Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities.
A documentary about the singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt
A personal meditation on Rumble Fish, the legendary film directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1983; the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, where it was shot; and its impact on the life of several people from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay related to film industry.
A fist-person story of the director of the documentary, who talks about the loneliness that entails living with an eating disorder and her vision now thar she is entering into adulthood.
A written testimony by co-director Jin Ryoo on his experience preparing for Korean compulsory military service is juxtaposed with images of an empty UCSD campus, the desolate construction sites sprawling off of it, and the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial.
A personal essay which analyses and compares images of the political upheavals of the 1960s. From the military coup in Brazil to China's Cultural Revolution, from the student uprisings in Paris to the end of the Prague Spring.
A collection of death scenes, ranging from TV-material to home-made super-8 movies. The common factor is death by some means.
The third installment of the infamous "is it real or fake?" mondo series sets its sights primarily on serial killers, with lengthy reenactments of police investigations of bodies being found in dumpsters, and a staged courtroom sequence.
Traces the life and mental illness of New York artist and photographer Ruth Litoff, and her sister's struggle to come to terms with her tragic suicide.