When Werner Herzog was still a child, his father was beaten to death before his eyes. His mother was overwhelmed with his upbringing and thereupon shipped him off to one of the toughest youth welfare institutions in Freistatt. This was followed by a career as a bouncer in the city's most notorious music club and an attempt to start a family. Today, the 77-year-old from Bielefeld lives with his dog Lucky in a lonely house in the country. Despite adverse living conditions, he has survived in his own unique and inimitable way.
Director Jeanie Finlay charts a transgender man's path to parenthood after he decides to carry his child himself. The pregnancy prompts an unexpected and profound reckoning with conventions of masculinity, self-definition and biology.
Impressions of a turbulent period in youth.
Follows the lives of three sisters affected by one having ALS, finding a cure, and the foundation formed to combat the disease, Project ALS.
Merci, au revoir, je t’aime
Jon Richardson, one of Britain's most cautious men, is sent on a mission by his wife Lucy Beaumont, to investigate the things they are most scared about.
Kathryn Calder, one of the vocalists behind the Influential and successful indie band The New Pornographers, puts her life on hold when her mother is diagnosed with ALS. After moving back to her childhood home to care for her mother, she is inspired to record her first solo album, 'Are You My Mother?' there as a gift to her as she fights the disease. Old bandmates, friends, and a new extended family only recently discovered all join Kathryn in her and her mother's journey.
Bay Area rapper Mac Dre began his career at 18 and quickly became an influential force in early west coast hip-hop. In 1992 he was convicted of conspiracy to commit bank robbery when his lyrics were used against him in court. He left prison with a new lease on life, founded an independent record company, and then was murdered just when he began to emerge as a star. For the first time ever, his mother Wanda reveals the true experiences of a hip-hop legend.
A depiction in the hanging of Edward Heinson, an assumed criminal assault convict in Jacksonville, Florida.
DIS-EASE is a feature-length documentary about how we imagine disease, and how that affects what we do when we encounter illness, outbreaks, doctors, treatments, and disability in real life. It dives deep into the weird, wild archives of medical imaging, public health messaging, and pop-culture outbreak narratives to understand how ideas have moved between science, science fiction, and political ideology over the past century. (Yes, this is a film that covers both antibiotic resistance and the persistence of zombie apocalypse films.) Ultimately, DIS-EASE is a provocation to re-think how we define both the "public" and "health" in public health - who is included, what counts as care, and what it means to be sick or well in a world perpetually on the brink of collapse.
Exposition of two different processes of forensic identification in exhumed bodies with features of violence.
This documentary short is a portrait of Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and 13th prime minister of Canada, John George Diefenbaker (1895-1979). Diefenbaker's political career spanned 6 decades. When he died in 1979, his state funeral and final train trip west became more a celebration of life than a victory for death.
Making Dust is an essay film, a portrait of the demolition of Ireland's second largest Catholic Church, the Church of the Annunciation in Finglas West, Dublin. Understanding this moment as a 'rupture', the film maps an essay by architectural historian Ellen Rowley on to documentation of the building's dismantling. Featuring oral interviews recorded at the site of the demolition and in a nearby hairdressers, the film invites viewers to pause and reflect on this ending alongside the community of the building. The film is informed by Ultimology, and invites its audience to think about the life cycles of buildings and materials, how we mourn, what is sacred, how we gather, what we value and issues of sustainability in architecture.
As the use of plastic has gained ground in our lives over the years, there has been an inexplicable increase in a number of diseases and disorders amongst the population. In this film as part of the Why Plastic? series, we meet leading researchers looking into the reasons for these disorders. We also follow case studies of people suffering from various health conditions thought to be caused by exposure to certain every day materials including plastic. Are these people the victims of unfortunate coincidences - or is there an explanation?
Efrain, known as the Reaper, has worked at a slaughterhouse for 25 years. We will discover his deep relationship with death and his struggle to live.
A story of life and death, featuring Lozinski's six-year-old son Tomaszek and elderly people spending time on the benches of a Warsaw park. Riding his scooter, Tomaszek asks the elderly very adult, though basic, questions, which they are happy to answer. The boy's ideas of future and life are confronted with those of men at the end of their lives.
A surprisingly intimate portrait of how the dream of running one’s own business can take on monstrous contours. Managed by the father of one of the singers, over the course of five years the girl band 5Angels had reached the gates of pop fame. But it is a path paved not only with the songs of Michal David, but also with the dogged determination of a man who loses any notion of where his role as manager ends and his role as parent begins. An emotionally moved Karel Gott, five angelic girls, and one overly involved father, thanks to whom the behind-the-scenes pre-Christmas atmosphere melts away just as rapidly as the fat should disappear from the belly. “A singer can’t be a lard bucket!”
Dying for the Other is a video triptych, documenting the lives of mice used in breast cancer research and humans suffering from the same disease. In order to produce this video, da Costa documented scenes of her own life during the summer of 2011 and combined them with footage taken at a breast cancer research facility in New York City over the same time frame.
A lonely 40-year-old man sits on the balcony of a Finnish apartment building. Joonas Berghäll has learned that he will die in 14 years’ time, unless he changes his way of living or attitude towards life. Joonas wants to make a film about the state of wellbeing of Finnish men, drawing from his own experiences and mirroring the society at large. The film is built around six stories. It starts with the context of school and proceeds through the contexts of military service, custody battle, burnout and substance abuse to end on the subject of premature death caused by health problems.
Through revealing interviews with experts and victims' families, this gripping documentary examines the problem of deadly foodborne illness in the US.