Claire Simon portrays an important time for any individual, from 16 to 18 years of age. Set in the Paris suburbs in high school (for those lucky enough to go), teenagers chat after and even during class, sitting in the hallway or outside on a bench, looking at the city below them.
Ruth Beckermann documents the process of uncovering former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s wartime past. It shows the swift succession of new allegations by the World Jewish Congress during his Austrian presidential campaign, the denial by the Austrian political class, the outbreak of anti-Semitism and patriotism, which finally led to his election.
Deep in the earth beneath the Norwegian permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. For the first time ever, seeds held there from a major gene bank in Aleppo are now being replicated, after its holdings were left behind when the institution had to move to Lebanon due to the civil war. It is refugees from Syria who are carrying out this painstaking work in the fields of the Beqaa Valley. In the Levant, dry conditions and the power of global agricultural corporations are the biggest challenge, while in the Arctic Circle - where the seed vault was supposed to withstand anything - it is rising temperatures and melting glaciers.
Exclusive access to chief diplomat of the EU Federica Mogherini as Europe faces a crumbling world order.
Now one of the world’s most celebrated artists, Yayoi Kusama broke free of the rigid society in which she was raised, and overcame sexism, racism, and mental illness to bring her artistic vision to the world stage. At 88 she lives in a mental hospital and continues to create art.
Cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus relive the creation, rise and fall of their independent film company, Cannon Films. This documentary recounts their many successes and discusses their eventual downfall.
Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon have been partners in love and political struggle for fifty years. With incisive interviews, rare archival images and warmhearted humor, Joan Biren's 2003 film reveals their inspiring public work, as well as their charming private relationship. When they courageously launched the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, it became the first public organization for lesbians in America. Today, these tireless activists are educating both the LGBT and aging movements on the needs of older lesbians.
Lisbon has the second largest community of Hindus in Europe. This film portrays this community, focusing on a family originally from Diu, who then emigrated to Mozambique and then, in 1976, to Lisbon. The film portrays the contrast and conflict between this group of Diu families, low caste with the Lohanas group, the merchants caste. A new temple is being built, however in the courtyard of his house the family Carsane still makes its parties and alternative rituals ....
Black Coffee is a 2007 Canadian documentary film examining the complicated history of coffee and detailing its political, social, and economic influence from the past to the present day. The film details how coffee is the eighth most traded legal commodity in the world. It is also the fourth most valuable agricultural commodity. However, only one cent of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower.[1] This inequality has helped shape the history of continents and the Cold War.
An uplifting feature documentary highlighting the transformative power of art and the beauty of the human spirit. Top-selling contemporary artist Vik Muniz takes us on an emotional journey from Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to the heights of international art stardom. Vik collaborates with the brilliant catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, true Shakespearean characters who live and work in the garbage quoting Machiavelli and showing us how to recycle ourselves.
Commissioned by French television, this is a short documentary on the neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, predominantly on the walls of buildings, holding up windows, roofs etc.
Directed by Marion Grierson, who ran the film unit of the Travel and Industrial Development Association (TIDA), this short film contains some fine photography of the delights on offer to Edinburgh visitors - including trams, bustling streets, restful parks and some familiar tourist sights.
Men, most of them naked, talk about their penises. They range from 17 to 70+, all from the U.S. The interviews are edited around themes: discovery, early sexual experiences, masturbation, size, oral sex, libido, performance, disease and maladies, maturity. A lexicographer discusses language, especially slang; a few archival educational-film clips divide the topics. Images and stories mix with facts and philosophical reflection. The usually private becomes public.
A documentary that takes an alternative approach to dealing with the global warming crisis.
A group of Israelis and Palestinians come together in Oslo for unsanctioned peace talks during the 1990s in order to bring peace to the Middle East.
In 2011, Syria's Bashar al-Assad answered his nation's demands for freedom by launching a brutal war against his own people. While the U.S. drew red lines for intervention, Assad ramped up the attacks, starving and killing civilians and children, including the use of chemical weapons, leveling cities, targeting journalists and blocking humanitarian aid to millions of victims. Abandoned by the outside world, individual activists stepped in to fill the roles of banned journalists, international aid agencies and feckless foreign governments. Red Lines tells the story of two such activists, who despite overwhelming obstacles, attempt to establish democratic enclaves in their devastated homeland.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg now 84, and still inspired by the lawyers who defended free speech during the Red Scare, Ginsburg refuses to relinquish her passionate duty, steadily fighting for equal rights for all citizens under the law. Through intimate interviews and unprecedented access to Ginsburg’s life outside the court, RBG tells the electric story of Ginsburg’s consuming love affairs with both the Constitution and her beloved husband Marty—and of a life’s work that led her to become an icon of justice in the highest court in the land.
A funny, intimate and heartbreaking portrait of one of the world’s most beloved and inventive comedians, Robin Williams, told largely through his own words. Celebrates what he brought to comedy and to the culture at large, from the wild days of late-1970s L.A. to his death in 2014.
A Chippewa prophecy foretells a time called the 7th Fire when lost traditions will be recovered. Native American filmmaker Sandra Sunrising Osawa examines how the Chippewa Indians of Northern Wisconsin have struggled to restore the centuries-old tradition of spearfishing — and the heated opposition they have encountered.
The trio of actresses have ostensibly gathered to pay tribute to Mai Zetterling, but also reminisce about their own careers and the illustrious figures, including Ingmar Bergman, they have worked with.