Big Mama

Chemical engineer and inventor Maria Telkes worked for nearly 50 years to harness the power of the sun, designing and building the world's first successful solar-heated modern residence and identifying a new chemical that could store solar heat like a battery. Telkes was undercut and thwarted by her (male) boss and colleagues at MIT, but she persevered. Upon her death in 1995 Telkes held more than 20 patents, and now she is recognized as a visionary pioneer in the field of sustainable energy whose work continues to shape how we power our lives today.

Alanis Obomsawin, a North American Indian who earns her living by singing and making films, is the mother of an adopted child. She talks about her life, her people, and her responsibilities as a single parent. Her observations shake some of our cultural assumptions.

In this evocative meditation, a disturbing link is made between the resource extraction industries’ exploitation of the land and violence inflicted on Indigenous women and girls. Or, as one young woman testifies, “Just as the land is being used, these women are being used.”

A young woman tries to understand the real circumstances of the death of her mother.

Mi'kmaw poet and published author Rebecca Thomas uses words for a living, but she can't speak the language stolen from her father at residential school. Words Matter follows her journey to reclaim the language while exploring the complicated past that's kept it from her.

A portrait of the masterful author whose novels were adapted into the classics 'The Birds,' 'Jamaica Inn,' and 'Rebecca."

In her documentary on Hungarian-Slovak relations, Vladislava Plancíková focuses on the word "felvidék", which refers to the now non-existent northern part of Austro-Hungary. In a personal collage consisting of the stories of members of her Slovak-Hungarian family and of visual references to historical events, she follows the eventful and today often taboo history of the post-war fate of Hungarians on Slovak soil. The abstract topic grabs our interest not only through the witnesses' testimony, but also by using thre novel technique of animating real objects, including a number of contemporary and modern photographs.

The Gift is a feature-length film exploring a major transformation in peoples' relationships with animals.

A young Kenyan's life changes drastically when his education is sponsored by a Swedish stranger. Years later, he founds his own scholarship program to replicate the kindness he once received.

Daniel Tosh performs in front of a live San Francisco audience in this stand-up special for Comedy Central, and touches on topics ranging from sports and pop culture, to religion and politics.

The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song will honor either a songwriter, interpreter, or singer/songwriter whose career reflects lifetime achievement in promoting the genre of song as a vehicle of artistic expression and cultural understanding. Paul Simon, one of America's most respected songwriters and musicians, was the recipient of the first annual Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Named in honor of the legendary George and Ira Gershwin, the award recognizes the profound and positive effect of popular music on the world's culture.

The dance performance “Kontakthof” bears the unmistakable signature of Pina Bausch: it deals with forms of human contact, encounters between the sexes, and the search for love and tenderness, with all its attendant anxieties, yearnings and doubts. It is a dance about feelings, which always pose a big challenge – particularly for young people. Teenagers from more than eleven schools in Wuppertal went on an emotional journey that lasted almost a year. Every Saturday, forty students aged between fourteen and eighteen years of age took part in rehearsals that were led by Bausch-dancers Jo-Ann Endicott and Bénédicte Billiet and intensely supervised by Pina Bausch herself.

Poet, singer / songwriter and ladies man Leonard Cohen is interviewed in his home about his life and times. The interview is interspersed with archive photos and exuberant praise and live perfomances from an eclectic mix of musicians, including: Jarvis Cocker, Rufus & Martha Wainwright, Teddy Thompson, ANOHNI, The Handsome Family and U2's Bono and The Edge.

Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists. The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice. The film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story.

Yael Hersonski's powerful documentary achieves a remarkable feat through its penetrating look at another film-the now-infamous Nazi-produced film about the Warsaw Ghetto. Discovered after the war, the unfinished work, with no soundtrack, quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record, despite its elaborate propagandistic construction. The later discovery of a long-missing reel complicated earlier readings, showing the manipulations of camera crews in these "everyday" scenes. Well-heeled Jews attending elegant dinners and theatricals (while callously stepping over the dead bodies of compatriots) now appeared as unwilling, but complicit, actors, alternately fearful and in denial of their looming fate.

In The Beckoning Silence, Joe Simpson, whose amazing battle for survival featured in the multi-award winning "Touching the Void", travels to the treacherous North Face of the Eiger to tell the story of one of mountaineering's most epic tragedies. As a child, it was this story and that of one of the climbers in particular, that first captured Simpson's imagination and inspired him to take up mountaineering.

Fun, disarming and musically provocative, the Topp Twins are New Zealand's finest lesbian country and western singers and the country's greatest export since rack of lamb and the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.

Three Alaska Native women work to save their endangered language, Kodiak Alutiiq, and ensure the future of their culture while confronting their personal demons. With just 41 fluent Native speakers remaining, mostly Elders, some estimate their language could die out within ten years. The small community travels to a remote Island, where a language immersion experiment unfolds with the remaining fluent Elders. Young camper Sadie, an at-risk 13 year old learner and budding Alutiiq dancer, is inspired and gains strength through her work with the teachers. Yet PTSD and politics loom large as the elders, teachers, and students try to continue the difficult task of language revitalization over the next five years.

The life of internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin is told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.

Icons of '60s counterculture, Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Ram Dass became estranged until an illness inspired their fascinating reunion.