In 2015, Dagny Carlsson quickly garnered the attention of millions of Swedes when she started blogging for the first time at age 102. Now at age 106, wanting to experience as much as she can, she accepts an invitation from a Finnish film director who wants her to star in a short film. So, off to Åland she goes!
If Carol Channing didn't exist, no one could have made her up. One in a billion, Carol , at 89, remains an unstoppable, megawatt dynamo. Broadway diva extraordinaire is just the icing. Carol Channing hovered at the pinnacle of the entertainment world from the late-1950's through the 1960's and beyond, living life sensationally large. As Carol has observed, '...if you're lucky enough to have two hit shows, the world passes through your dressing room'. At 89, she remains irrepressible.
Biographic film chronicling the last year of the life of the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, 1919, who falls in love with a girl from a wealthy family. Her parents are against this relationship and stop financial help. Modigliani worked and died in abject poverty in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France.
Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?
In the Serere village of Khombole, Senegal, the inhabitants organize an old man's funeral and take part in wrestling competitions held in arenas.
A short film mostly comprised of two sources: research footage from 1988 about the beginnings of the HIV epidemic from the perspective of medical professionals, and an interview with Cleve Jones in 2003 as he looks back upon his activism, and the state of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 2000s.
In Victorian England, graverobbers supply a wealthy doctor with bodies to research anatomy on, but greed causes them to seek an easier means of getting the job done.
"Last year my father asked me to go on the road with him. As my sister was going along as his back-up singer and his wife Maebh, and my new baby brother Isaac, were also travelling with him, I decided to pick up my camera and go along. This is the Growing UP Tour 2002." - Anna Gabriel An inventive and intimate portrait of family life on the road during Peter Gabriel's recent Growing Up Tour; the highs, the lows, the sublime, the ridiculous, the fathers, sisters, brothers, band members and road crew, in short...The Family...captured and revealed like you've rarely ever seen before by the knowing eye of Anna Gabriel, a family member in every sense of the word.
Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "tune in, turn on and drop out," lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was being used by researchers trying to understand the human mind. This documentary is a fascinating look at the story of "acid" before it hit the streets. Featuring interviews with many LSD pioneers, Hofmann's Potion is much more than a simple chronicle of the drug's early days. With thoughtful interviews, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, it is an invitation to look at LSD, and our world, with a more open, compassionate mind.
Award-winning documentary film about old age and the elderly. We meet residents and staff at a nursing home and take part in the madness, humor, desire, sorrow, hopes and the great love that this miniature society holds.
The Jewish milliner May Aubert grew up in Kristiania with an English father and a German mother. Before WW II she was an apprentice hat maker in Berlin and delivered hats to UFA film studio's brightest stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Elisabeth Bergner. Later, she became a refugee, war hero and currency smuggler. Eighty-seven years old, she still goes to work every day and is the Norwegian Queen Sonja's regular hat maker.
The story of artist Edith Lake Wilkinson, a painter who was committed to an asylum in 1924 and never heard from again. All her worldly possessions were packed into trunks and shipped to a relative in West Virginia where they sat in an attic for 40 years. Edith's great-niece, Emmy Award winning writer and director Jane Anderson, grew up surrounded by Edith's paintings, thanks to her mother who had gone poking through that dusty attic and rescued Edith's work. The film follows Jane in her decades-long journey to find the answers to the mystery of Edith's buried life, return the work to Provincetown and have Edith's contributions recognized by the larger art world.
A portrait of Toronto, as defined by the spaces its queer residents inhabit and the memories they’ve created there.
Bilkis Banu lost her husband Hasan on the night of 25th March 1971. She tries to forget him and concentrate on the urban guerrilla movements of Dhaka with Altaf Mahmud, Shahadat, Mrs Khan and many more. But when spies and the razakars inform them, most of their people get arrested and Bilkis has to run for her life, towards her village.
What happens when a group of hairdressers from America travel to Kabul with the intention of telling Afghan women how to do hair and makeup? This engaging, optimistic documentary tracks a unique development project: a shiny new beauty school, funded in part by beauty-industry mainstays, which sets out to teach the latest cutting, coloring, and perming techniques to practicing and aspiring Afghan hairdressers and beauticians. The American teachers, all volunteers, include three Afghan-Americans returning home for the first time in over twenty years. The Beauty Academy of Kabul offers a rare glimpse into Afghan women’s lives, and documents the poignant and often humorous process through which women with very different experiences of life come to learn about one another.
A documentary investigation across five countries on the big business of sexual slavery.
A Carta
Contrary to the stereotype of Mississippi as a state of social conservatism and stagnation, the support, protection and love Rainbow families provide queer youth offers up an alternative view of the New Deep South.
In 1968, five girls from Tuscany who dreamt of seeing the world were offered to tour the Far East as an all-girl band, finding themselves in the middle of the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, they tell the story of Le Stars' adventure amongst American soldiers, remote jungle bases and soul music.
The life and times of Joe Albany, a little-known jazz pianist, is the subject of this specialized documentary that not only brings out the pianist himself, but the mood and feeling of the era in which he reached the top. Albany talks about the great musicians and singers he worked with - Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker among them - and how so many succumbed to drugs and died young. He is followed around at home, work, on the bus, and in other settings as he is interviewed by director Carole Langer. His sharp observations and dry sense of humor enliven the stories.