By the dawn of the 21st century, hip-hop sales had reached an all-time high, but one thing has remained the same. The doors were still locked, and the music industry held the keys. Young artists began to self-market on the Internet, ultimately helping to collapse the music industry as we knew it. It’s Yours explores how it became possible to become a rap star through a Twitter account, YouTube site or Myspace page. It tells this story through the unique perspectives of numerous artists, producers, record industry insiders, and music and cultural critics.
As a sci-fi obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realized far before its time. Three decades on, the musician – now Glenn Copeland – began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered.
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.
Megacities is a documentary about the slums of five different metropolitan cities.
The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults is a two-hour live American television special that was broadcast in syndication on April 21, 1986, and hosted by Geraldo Rivera. It centered on the live opening of a secret vault in the Lexington Hotel in Chicago once owned by noted crime lord Al Capone.
The “Prophecy of the 7th Fire” says a “black snake” will bring destruction to the earth. For Winona LaDuke, the “black snake” is oil trains and pipelines. When she learns that Canadian-owned Enbridge plans to route a new pipeline through her tribe’s 1855 Treaty land, she and her community spring into action to save the sacred wild rice lakes and preserve their traditional indigenous way of life. Launching an annual spiritual horse ride along the proposed pipeline route, speaking at community meetings and regulatory hearings. Winona testifies that the pipeline route follows one of historical and present-day trauma. The tribe participates in the pipeline permitting process, asserting their treaty rights to protect their natural resources. LaDuke joins with her tribe and others to demand that the pipelines’ impact on tribal people’s resources be considered in the permitting process.
A provoking film on the place of women.
The shocking story of Richard Leopold and Nathan Loeb, two wealthy college students who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924 to prove they were smart enough to get away with it.
Más allá de la alambrada: la memoria del horror
Valentine Fabre and Hillary Gerardi, two high-level complete athletes, take on the challenge of establishing the first female record on the non-stop Haute-Route, a legendary ski mountaineering endurance race linking Chamonix to Zermatt in 100km and 8000m altitude difference. A feat that the two women take on, as much for personal reasons as for the representation they offer by achieving this great female first.
Brüder Kühn: Zwei Musiker spielen sich frei
This documentary brings alive a remarkable artist’s passionate journey through a turbulent century. Both epic and surprisingly intimate, the film presents a classic American immigrant saga, an inspiring search for artistic independence, and a great romance. Along the way, Biberman's growing commitment to social justice and struggle against McCarthy-era repression (his brother, director Herbert Biberman, went to prison as one of The Hollywood Ten) combine with his efforts to create both a loving family life and a groundbreaking body of work. With its grand scope, rich personalities, and vast array of breathtaking artwork, Brush With Life connects us in a deeply personal way to a brilliant artist who lived by the same high standards he set for his paintings.
Two actresses take us through a series of 'raps' and sketches about what it means to be beautiful and black.
From May 10, 1940, France is living one of the worst tragedies of it history. In a few weeks, the country folds, and then collapsed in facing the attack of the Nazi Germany. On June 1940, each day is a tragedy. For the first time, thanks to historic revelations, and to numerous never seen before images and documents and reenacted situations of the time, this film recounts the incredible stories of those men and women trapped in the torment of this great chaos.
The space of the junkyard allows various ‘crash’ narratives to unfold, with the stories of actual crashes and the remnants and afterlife of these machines becoming metaphors for economic decline. This is an investigation of planes as they are parked during the economic downturn, stored and recycled, revealing unexpected connections between economy, violence and spectacle, finding perfect example in the form of the Boeing 4X-JYI, an aircraft first acquired by film director Howard Hughes for TWA, which was subsequently flown by the Israeli Airforce before finding its way to the Californian desert to be blown up for the Hollywood blockbuster Speed. Through intertwined narratives of people, planes and places Steyerl reveals cycles of capitalism incorporating and adapting to the changing status of the commodity, but also points at a horizon beyond this endless repetition.
Recaptures the lives and times of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, and the other legendary women who made blues music a vital part of American culture. The film brings together for the first time dozens of rare, classic renditions of the early blues.
Jan Werich: Když už člověk jednou je…
The documentary portrait of the world-famous traveler, the most translated Czech writer and the only Czech chief of an Indian tribe, Miloslav Stingl, is an adventurous journey presenting the life of an extraordinary personality. It is also a journey of Stingl’s biographer and monograph author Adam Chroust into the unexplored corners of Stingl’s extraordinary, obsessive and lonely life. 286 unpacked suitcases, archival films and photographs are a monument to his romantic exploration of unknown cultures and corners in an age of global oversaturation with images.
The brilliant Czech writer Milan Kundera has not given an interview in thirty years; nor does he appear in public. How did he become a legendary author? What is so unique about his books?
Documentary - They're clean, educated, articulate and rarely receive public assistance. But following a divorce, job loss or a long illness, a growing number of middle-class women are forced to live out of their cars. Directed by Michèle Ohayon (Colors Straight Up) and narrated by Jodie Foster, It Was a Wonderful Life chronicles the hardships and triumphs of six "hidden homeless" women as they struggle to survive, one day at a time. - Jodie Foster, Lou Hall, Reena Sands