Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.
HALF THE ROAD is a documentary film that explores the world of women's professional cycling, focusing on both the love of sport and the pressing issues of inequity that modern-day female riders face in a male-dominated sport. With footage from some of the world's best races to interviews with Olympians, world champs, rookies, coaches, managers, officials, doctors and even the U.S. Surgeon General, HALF THE ROAD offers a unique insight into the drive, dedication and passion it takes for a female cyclist to thrive despite oppression. Both on and off the bike, the voices and advocates of women's pro cycling take the audience on a journey of enlightenment, depth, strength, love, humor and best of all, change and growth.
The Oystermen of Pointe a la Hache, Louisiana. This town of nearly 300 is struggling to survive following the BP Oil Spill that left their crop dead, finances in ruin and culture facing extinction. This community has a history of being overlooked by the State, and therefore, are taking matters into their own hands, to assure their voice is heard so that they may not otherwise vanish
Lee Anne Schmitt explores California's landscape and past to document the history of one-time boom towns built and abandoned by the industries that necessitated their creation. Sold as a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its onset, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and public interests. Schmitt's film covers various locations through time, as the major industries of the early 20th century (mining, lumber, oil) give way to the military, eventually leading to multinational corporations, and the use of small towns as satellites for growing urban metropolises.
When seminal documentarian Ed Pincus is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he and collaborator Lucia Small team up to make one last film, much to the chagrin of Jane, Ed’s wife of 50 years. Told from two points of view with vulnerability, intimacy and humor, ONE CUT, ONE LIFE challenges the form of first person documentary while offering a complex story of love, loss, legacy, and the delicacy of capturing the preciousness of life while time is fleeting.
French documentarist Sonia Kronlund follows actor and director Salim Shaheen, an Afghan movie star who produced more than 110 low-budget movies in a country devastated by war.
The film describes the microcosmos of the small village Wacken and shows the clash of the cultures, before and during the biggest heavy metal festival in Europe.
THE ARYANS is Mo Asumang's personal journey into the madness of racism during which she meets German neo-Nazis, the US leading racist, the notorious Tom Metzger and Ku Klux Klan members in the alarming twilight of the Midwest. In The ARYANS Mo questions the completely wrong interpretation of "Aryanism" - a phenomenon of the tall, blond and blue-eyed master race.
In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, on the basis of anti-black racism. Fast-forward to 2013, the Dominican Republic's Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929, rendering more than 200,000 people stateless. Elena, the young protagonist of the film, and her family stand to lose their legal residency in the Dominican Republic if they don't manage to get their documents in time. Negotiating a mountain of opaque bureaucratic processes and a racist, hostile society around, Elena becomes the face of the struggle to remain in a country built on the labor of her father and forefathers.
A group of elders spends their weekdays in a retirement home in Sandim, in the north of Portugal, where they talk, do arts and crafts, practice yoga and pray. We follow them between October 2012 and March 2013, when an economic crisis overshadowed Portuguese society and unemployment rates reached record levels. Meanwhile, arrangements are made for the Carnival ball. Will they bring the first place home this time?
Filmed in the Indian Himalayas and in Canada, A Song for Tibet tells the dramatic story of the efforts by Tibetans in exile, including the Dalai Lama, to save their homeland and preserve their heritage against overwhelming odds. Since the invasion of their territory by China in the late 1950s, Tibetans have been struggling for cultural and political survival.
Documentary featuring interviews with several of legendary Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s close friends and collaborators.
Finding love is never easy. For Ravi Patel, a first generation Indian-American, the odds are slim. His ideal bride is beautiful, smart, funny, family-oriented, kind and—in keeping with tradition—Indian (though hopefully raised in the US). Oh, and her last name should be Patel because in India, Patels usually marry other Patels. And so at 30, Ravi decides to break up with his American girlfriend (the one who by all accounts is perfect for him except for her red hair and American name) and embark on a worldwide search for another Patel longing to be loved. He enlists the help of his matchmaker mother, attends a convention of Patels living in the US and travels to wedding season in India. Witty, honest and heartfelt, this comedy explores the questions with which we all struggle: What is love? What is happiness? And how in the world do we go about finding them?
Following a series of intimate conversations between a former couple who lived through two years of domestic abuse, A Better Man infuses new energy and possibility into the movement to end violence against women.
Profile of a Chinese immigrant to Canada narrated by her son.
How are the sex scenes filmed? What tricks are used to fake the desire? How do the interpreters prepare and feel? Spanish actors and directors talk about the most intimate side of acting, about the tricks and work methods when narrating exposed sex. In Spain the general rule is that there are no rules. Each film, each interpreter, faces it in very different ways.
A documentary on the once promising American rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. The friendship between respective founders, Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor, escalated into bitter rivalry as the Dandy Warhols garnered major international success while the Brian Jonestown Massacre imploded in a haze of drugs.
Buddhist monks open up about the joys and challenges of living out the precepts of the Buddha as a full-time vocation. Controversies swirling within modern monastic Buddhism are examined, from celibacy and the role of women to racism and concerns about the environment.
“La Zerda and the songs of oblivion” (1982) is one of only two films made by the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, with “La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua” (1977). Powerful poetic essay based on archives, in which Assia Djebar – in collaboration with the poet Malek Alloula and the composer Ahmed Essyad – deconstructs the French colonial propaganda of the Pathé-Gaumont newsreels from 1912 to 1942, to reveal the signs of revolt among the subjugated North African population. Through the reassembly of these propaganda images, Djebar recovers the history of the Zerda ceremonies, suggesting that the power and mysticism of this tradition were obliterated and erased by the predatory voyeurism of the colonial gaze. This very gaze is thus subverted and a hidden tradition of resistance and struggle is revealed, against any exoticizing and orientalist temptation.
Chuck Close, an astounding portrait of one of the world's leading contemporary painters, was one of two parting gifts (her second is a film on Louise Bourgeois) from Marion Cajori, a filmmaker who died recently, and before her time. With editing completed by filmmaker Ken Kobland, Chuck Close lives the life and work of a man who has reinvented portraiture. Close photographs his subjects, blows up the image to gigantic proportions, divides it into a detailed grid and then uses a complex set of colors and patterning to reconstruct each face.