Alma Anciana

Dying to live

Pearl Randall, a 66-year-old widow, announces that she is planning to remarry, but her three grown children express conflicting emotions. Daughter Terri captures on tape the family's attempts to come to grips with Pearl's new romance.

A year in the life of the Palm Springs Follies, featuring beautiful, ageless performers from around the world in a show that is always Standing Room Only. The film intercuts colorful interviews with the participants and footage of auditions, rehearsals, and the actual performances.

A choir of tired nurses sing to Anna-Mari Kähärä’s hypnotic tunes about the truths of everyday nursing work in a musical documentary directed by Susanna Helke and co-scripted by Helke and Markku Heikkinen. DocPoint’s opening film is new in its format, and jolting in its message. It is a cinematic-musical work of activism, calling for more humane work, life and old age.

When filmmaker Mari Soppela took her children and husband to live for a year on a sacred mountain in her native Finland, she was fulfilling a lifelong dream to share the arctic wilderness of her childhood with her family. But when years later her children turn the camera onto her, she is forced to confront her motivation for filming their lives in this searching and searingly honest cinematic exploration of identity, belonging and motherhood. Filmed over the course of 27 years, Mother Land challenges us all to examine the landscapes we carry within us and the narratives we create to make sense of our lives.

From late 1940-s to late 1980-s doves were an obsession for boys in Kyiv. This is a film about how a hobby from childhood becomes a meaning of life.

Silence - the stuff of assumptions and confusion - is a legacy inherited by many grandchildren of Japanese Americans interned during WWII. Shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Masuo Yasui, a respected figure of Hood River Valley, Oregon was arrested by the FBI as a "potentially dangerous enemy alien." In A FAMILY GATHERING, Lise Yasui, a granddaughter that Masuo never knew, shows that courageous journeys into the past can bring greater understanding of family and personal history to the present.

Afro-Cubans played a leading role in the fight to free Cuba from Spanish domination; as part of that struggle, slavery was abolished. Nevertheless, as African descendants began to achieve a semblance of social and economic parity, the plantocracy, backed up by the US army, sought to undo their gains. Determined to resist, veterans of the Mambi army formed the Party of Independents of Color, gaining wide popular support and ultimately threatening the domination of the white Cuban rulers. Their response was savage, and 6,000 Afro-Cubans were massacred; until this film, these events have been shrouded in silence.

The film is a story about the officers, soldiers and seamen who did not betray their oath of loyalty to the people of Ukraine and their first hand accounts about Russia's invasion and annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. They continue to fulfill their military obligations on land, on sea and in the air today.

When old age imposes physical and sometimes mental decay, is there a way to maintain a hopeful attitude towards life and its mysteries? This is the question that the documentary 'Le vieil âge et l'espérance' project aims to confront not only specialists such as geriatricians, gerontologists, psychologists and philosophers, but first and foremost the lived experience of the elderly.

Film capturing a family holiday on the North Antrim coast, with trips to the Giant's Causeway and the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge.

The chronic shortage of housing in Central Havana has pushed the city upwards, where life spills out onto the rooftops. Resilient and remarkable, these rooftop dwellers have a privileged point of view on a society in the process of major transformation.

A lonely 40-year-old man sits on the balcony of a Finnish apartment building. Joonas Berghäll has learned that he will die in 14 years’ time, unless he changes his way of living or attitude towards life. Joonas wants to make a film about the state of wellbeing of Finnish men, drawing from his own experiences and mirroring the society at large. The film is built around six stories. It starts with the context of school and proceeds through the contexts of military service, custody battle, burnout and substance abuse to end on the subject of premature death caused by health problems.

The War Diary is a contemporary road movie that confronts history with the current reality of Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia. An extraordinary document leads Hakob Melkonyan to undertake the journey of a lifetime:

At the end of the 1960s, Vanesa’s parents fled the Franco-regime’s deep poverty to pursue their dream in the Netherlands. Working their blue-collar jobs for hours and hours, for over 45 years, their purpose was to return to Spain wealthy and comfortable. There, in a house full of Dutch porcelain and shiny gold, they can now finally rest. Vanesa was raised as Dutch, but still feels trapped in their expectant illusion, even with the distance between them. Torn between two homes, she starts to re-examine her past.

"Estadio Novo is about Portugal, its football and its fans. As hordes of supporters descend on the ten brand new stadiums for Euro 2004, this lively and informative documentary takes a look at their impact. Examining the role of football in Portugal before and the revolution of 1974 it asks... what's really going on?"

A love letter from an American soul to the city of Lisbon.

People who knew R. perceived her as a happy woman. A woman from Brno in her thirties who moved to Sweden together with her Slovak husband, psychiatrist Ivan. In their new home country, the young couple bought a house and had two children. It seemed that R.’s life would continue in a predictable way. As a distraction from the routine, she chose an unusual hobby. She created a male alter-ego and started writing novels for LGBTQ+ audiences. R. was happy but felt empty on the inside. She could only fill it by living out her true self. Things started speeding up and R. began changing. R. is now Marvin. And Marvin is a man.

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In Uganda, AIDS-infected mothers have begun writing what they call Memory Books for their children. Aware of the illness, it is a way for the family to come to terms with the inevitable death that it faces. Hopelessness and desperation are confronted through the collaborative effort of remembering and recording, a process that inspires unexpected strength and even solace in the face of death.