On the 20th anniversary of the opening of crossing points, OVERCOMING tells the inspiring story of Cypriot women, queers, and antimilitarist cismen challenging militarism and gender norms. Through diverse interviews, the film explores how the opening and closing of the checkpoints, as the sole passageways between north and south, have impacted the lives of Cypriots while revealing their struggles against the ongoing division of the island and their efforts towards a more united future.
A City Decides chronicles the events that led to the integration of the St. Louis public schools in 1954. An Oscar-nominated short documentary from 1956.
The Arkansas school integration crisis and the changes wrought in subsequent years. This film profiles the lives of the nine African-American students who integrated Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the fall of 1957. The film documents the perspective of Jefferson Thomas and his fellow students seven years after their historic achievement. Central to this story is their quiet but brave entrance into Little Rock High, escorted by armed troops under the intense pressure of the on looking crowd. We learn first hand their impressions of the past and present and their hopes for the future. Their selfless heroism broke the integration crisis and pioneered a new era. This film went on to win an Academy Award® for Best Documentary Short in 1964.
Never-before-seen testimony is included in this documentary on Emmett Louis Till, who, in 1955, was brutally murdered after he whistled at a white woman.
Evaporating Borders is a poetically photographed and rendered film on tolerance and search for identity. Told through 5 vignettes portraying the lives of migrants on the island of Cyprus, it passionately weaves themes of displacement and belonging.
In 2007 Mobile, Alabama, Mardi Gras is celebrated... and complicated. Following a cast of characters, parades, and parties across an enduring color line, we see that beneath the surface of pageantry lies something else altogether.
The film tells the story of eleven Turkish Cypriot workers who left their homes in a bus in 1964 that never came back. Their remains were found in a well in Cyprus in October 2006.
The American Question examines the insidious roots of American polarization and distrust, in a desperate search for a path forward.
A portrait of a dilapidated Olympic-sized pool in Accra, Ghana.
There's No Place Like This Place, Anyplace looks at the transformation of an iconic Toronto block - where the world famous Honest Ed's store once lived - through the stories of its community members as they reconcile their history with the future, all while facing the biggest housing crisis the city has ever seen.
Celebrated author and Nation magazine sports editor Dave Zirin tackles the myth that the NFL was somehow free of politics before Colin Kaepernick and other Black NFL players took a knee.
A short history of the island is followed by views of the countryside and people in town and village.
A documentary on the life of Matthew Kennedy, one of the first internationally acclaimed African American concert pianists, and former director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee. The film contains footage of interviews with Dr. Kennedy, live performances, radio broadcasts, studio recordings, and interviews with his former students and colleagues. Born in the segregated South in 1921, Matthew Kennedy was known throughout his home state of Georgia as a child-prodigy. At age 12 he attended a concert given by the famous Russian pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff in Macon, Georgia in 1932. Kennedy describes what he remembers of the concert from his perspective in the segregated balcony for “Colored.” He was also the star of his own radio show in the early 1930s. At that time, Kennedy's stage name on radio and in the cinema – where he played the organ to accompany the silent films – was “Sunshine.”
Shots fired inside a club frequented by black Brazilians in the outskirts of Brasilia leave two men wounded. A third man arrives from the future in order to investigate the incident and prove that the fault lies in the repressive society.
Tracing the life of activist Costis Achniotis, the film develops within the history of the Cypriot radical Left and the bicommunal movement for reunification. In parallel quests between the past and present and with an auto-ethnographic approach, the filmmakers bring together personal artifacts, new and archival material, exploring the dialectics and poetics of the ethnic clash and division in Cyprus.
The Police Tapes is a 1977 documentary about a New York City police precinct in the South Bronx. The original ran ninety minutes and was produced for public television; a one-hour version later aired on ABC. Filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond spent three months in 1976 riding along with patrol officers in the 44th Precinct of the South Bronx, which had the highest crime rate in New York City at that time. They produced about 40 hours of videotape that they edited into a 90-minute documentary.
The life story of Richard Pryor (1940-2005), the legendary performer and iconic social satirist who transcended racial and social barriers with his honest, irreverent and biting humor.
In 1936, Victor H. Green (1892-1960) published The Negro Motorist Green Book, a book that was both a travel guide and a survival manual, to help African-Americans navigate safe those regions of the United States where segregation and Jim Crow laws were disgracefully applied.
The second part of the series Cypriot Collage Stories sketches out the history of this Mediterranean island as a conflict of its two mothers – Aphrodite and Virgin Mary. Animations and collages are intertwined with found footage of the 1974 Turkish invasion of the island, revealing the obvious fact that modern conflicts are rooted in history.
Plano B