Isle of Flowers

An essay on memory that explores the vision of life and death in the Far East. Shot in five Asian countries over three years, it recounts the director's real experiences.

Three arrested and detained undocumented immigrants must navigate the system to fight impending deportation.

“Shellmound” is the story of how one location was transformed from a sacred center of pre-historic cultures to a commercial mecca for modern people. What began as a Native American burial ground three thousand years ago, was transformed first into an amusement park, and later an industrial age paint factory. Now, the tainted ancient soil sits beneath the glittering lights of Banana Republic, Victoria’s Secret, and the AMC movie theaters. “Shellmound” examines the decisions made during the recent toxic cleanup, excavation, and construction of the Bay Street mall through the eyes of the city of Emeryville, the developer, the archaeologists, and the native Californians who worked on the site.

Explores the hot-button issues around the striking gender gap in Hollywood. Both women and men in the entertainment industry share first-person insights, questions, and anecdotes about the place of women in Hollywood.

On February 21, 1945, the Royal Canadian Air Force Halifax bomber NP711 with a crew of seven men took off from the Linton-on-Ouse air base in England for a bombing raid over Worms, Germany. The bomber never made it to its target. The Halifax was struck by anti-aircraft fire and crashed into a mountainside near Leistadt, Germany. All crew members were killed. The crash was so horrific that the wreckage was strewn over 1,000 meters. Seventy-seven years later the wreckage was recovered and the site was deemed a gravesite for the perished crew. This documentary film examines the last days of the seven-member crew and the recovery of the wreckage of Halifax NP711.

This half-hour documentary by acclaimed director Jonathan Demme ("The Silence of the Lambs") captures singer-songwriter Neil Young and his hard-rocking backing band Crazy Horse "live" in the studio playing a set of four songs. These sessions took place at the Complex Recording Studios in Los Angeles on October 3, 1994, just one day after Young's critically-lauded Bridge School Benefit concert. Earlier that year, Young and his band had recorded the studio album "Sleeps with Angels" at the Complex studios and came back to film a series of music videos. Jonathan Demme was there to document the recording session, which began at 6:30 pm on a Monday evening and concluded at 4:30 am the next day. "The Complex Sessions" is the result of these sessions. Set List: 1. My Heart (3:08), 2. Prime of Life (4:44), 3. Change Your Mind (14:56), 4. Piece of Crap (3:08).

Jean-Luc Godard visits NYU in order to discuss his latest feature "La chinoise" with graduate students on filmmaking and politics.

A short news reel documentary about poster art.

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)

Megacities is a documentary about the slums of five different metropolitan cities.

A biographical documentary following the life of a young Japanese priest and bar-owner.

It's a warm spring night, and the bee cowboys of Prince Edward Island begin rounding up their hives.

Documentary following dockers of Liverpool sacked in a labour dispute and their supporters’ group, Women of the Waterfront, as they receive support from around the world and seek solidarity at the TUC conference.

In the decades after Bacon's Rebellion, an African man and an English woman - husband and wife - sing of their fate, their future as law by law, edict by edict, their family, their marriage, their love made illegal.

Based on the career of Roberto Dinamite, Vasco da Gama's biggest idol, we explore the magic of the goal and the connection with the stands in the figure of a player who personified the spirit of the club and its fans on the field

Kyabakura is a type of hostess club in Japan, inspired by French cabaret. There exists an ambiguous relationship between the clients, the men, and the hostesses, that should never materialize into a sexual relationship...There are strict rules, which of course, are designed to be broken.

In February 2012, I went to Ishinomaki, a town North of Tokyo that was half destroyed by the tsunami of March 11th, 2011, to meet the disaster victims who now live in temporary housing. I spent several days in the North, under the snow, listening to these people talk candidly about what they had lived through, telling their own stories without the media as an intermediary. Their testimonies were terrifying, harsh and sad, but at the same time touching, sincere and human. From the pictures and interviews that I collected, I decided to make a film, not to reflect how awful the events were, but to communicate the singular and even surreal nature of each person’s experience. My intention wasn’t so much to focus on this particular event in Japan, but rather to make these stories more universal as a way of paying tribute to all the victims of natural disasters throughout the world.

Between the French La Nouvelle Vague and the Italian Neorealismo, Europe had been undergoing a continuous cinema transformation since the 1950s, while the ailing American studio system groaned under its own weight and inertia. New Hollywood had arrived with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and already by 1968 it was changing how Hollywood thought and acted. The student film scene was getting ready to explode, and it knew it.

The subject matter of Memory Room 451 is the cultural and historical significance of 20th-century hairstyles – the Afro, the conk, dreadlocks – in Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Akomfrah has disguised this exploration as a science fiction story – in the manner of the groundbreaking writers profiled in The Last Angel of History – while providing a bravura display of the aesthetics of video art in the 1990s. The tale of visitors from the future who gather dreams from unwitting subjects in order to construct a history of the Black diaspora both defamiliarizes Akomfrah’s ongoing project and points to the danger that extracting history from memory can be a kind of expropriation.

Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.