Seven Islands and a Metro

A collection of film clips from horror movies and interviews with the actors and directors who made them.

This documentary profiles the life and career of Pat Summitt, the NCAA's winningest basketball coach, who resigned from her post at the University of Tennessee in 2012 due to early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never heard of before, Jean Varda, nicknamed "Yanco". This hitherto unknown uncle lives on a boat in Sausalito, is a painter, has adopted a hippie lifestyle and loves life. The meeting is a very happy one.

Re-framing the U.S. gun violence debate from Second Amendment rights to public health prevention.

This poignant documentary from directors Judith Leonard, Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg explores the rich complexity of mother-daughter relationships as told by women themselves in scores of candid interviews. Honoring the sometimes close, sometimes fractious, but always vital link moms share with their girls, this film celebrates how these relationships evolve in stages from birth through adulthood to the end of life.

Kristina, a self-named Hungarian female lion tamer, arrives in New York to become a dance choreographer. Kristina, now a middle-class NYC artist concerned about the environment, has a sailor lover named Raoul. The film, a collage work, an essay film, a fictional narrative and a documentary all rolled into one, is one of the most important independent American feminists films made during the 1970's.

A short documentary on the chateaux of the Loire in France was commissioned by the French Tourist Bureau.

When asked to make a documentary about her friend’s mother—a Parisian astrologer named Juliane—the filmmaker sets off for Montmartre with a Bolex to craft a portrait of an infectiously exuberant personality and the pre-war apartment she’s called home for 50 years.

This searing British thriller follows Flash (Dylan Duffus), who's safeguarding his buddy Angel's (Yohance Watson) cash until his release from prison. Now Angel is out -- and Flash is 100 pounds short. He turns to a lowlife named Evil (Tobias Duncan) for help, the first in a series of mistakes. Now, Flash has more than just Angel hunting him down. Directed by Penny Woolcock (Mischief Night), the film co-stars Ohran Whyte and Chris Wilson

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 joyful insight into the creative world of Barry and Joan Grantham, two British eccentrics who have kept the skills of vaudeville alive for over seventy years. Since becoming stage-struck lovers in 1948, Barry and Joan have taught, danced and acted alongside the greats of British film and theatre. They are the last of the golden generation of vaudeville, eager to pass their legacy on to future generations.

The Age of Stupid is the new movie from Director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) and producer John Battsek (One Day In September). Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

A 65-year-old cleaning woman for a professional dancers' exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voiceover about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. A challenge to mainstream media's ongoing stereotypes of women of color who earn their living as domestic workers, this seemingly simple documentary achieves a quiet revolution: the expressive portrait of a fully realized individual.

Georgiana Halmac is turning 15 this winter, but she has no time for teenage dreams when her mother, who's on unemployment, moves to Torino to find work. Georgiana is left in charge of her six siblings in a social housing condo on the outskirts of Bacau, Romania. Caught between adolescence and the responsibilities of adulthood, Georgiana does the best she can, improvising with parenting advice from the television and the occasional phone call with her mother. As she handles her own issues and high-school dramas, Georgiana must also deal with admonishing neighbours who threaten to turn the whole family into social services. With incredible calm and stoicism, Georgiana amazes as she holds everything together in an ingenious and delicate balance.

Feature-length documentary about the greatest diver of all time. Four-time Olympic champion Greg Louganis has faced more than his share of challenges. In 2011, he is far from the public eye and struggling to pay his mortgage. Now, the openly gay, HIV+ world-class athlete returns to diving to mentor the USA Olympic hopefuls. This may be his best chance to regain the notoriety -- and financial stability -- he enjoyed at the height of his career.

In the summer of 1977, NASA sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on an epic journey into interstellar space. Together and alone, they will travel until the end of the universe. Each spacecraft carries a golden record album, a massive compilation of images and sounds embodying the best of Planet Earth. According to Carl Sagan, “[t]he spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” While working on the golden record, Sagan met and fell madly in love with his future wife Annie Druyan. The record became their love letter to humankind and to each other. In the summer of 2010, I began my own hopeful voyage into the unknown. This film is a love letter to my fellow traveler. - Penny Lane

Ulrike Ottinger’s provocative mélange of ethnography, stunning tableaux and baroque vignettes was inspired by what she calls the “well-stocked miracle” of Korean wedding chests, assembled according to time-honored customs. This exploration of love and marriage in South Korea looks closely at ancient and present-day rituals, revealing what is old in the new and new in the old. Her inquiry leads us from shamans, temples and priests, to the enchanted maze of 21st-century Seoul, where vendors of medicinal herbs co-exist with high-tech beauty salons for wedding couples and secular marriage palaces. Using film much like a canvas, Ottinger creates a modern fairytale flush with mythological heroes, traditional rites, ancestral symbolism, dreams of eternal love, and a whole lot of Western kitsch. One of her most acclaimed documentaries, it captures the amazing phenomenon of new mega-cities and their contradictory societies caught in a balancing act.

"My Own Breathing" is the final documentary of the trilogy, The Murmuring about comfort women during the World War II directed by BYUN Young-joo. This is the completion of her seven years work. BYUN's first and second documentaries spoke of grandmothers' everyday life through the origin of their torment, while My Own Breathing goes back to their past from their everyday life. Deleting any device of narration or music, the camera lets grandmothers talk about themselves. Finally, the film revives their deep voices trampled by harsh history.

At the sea shore, a goat, a child, and a naked man. This is a photograph taken in 1954 by Agnès Varda. The goat was dead, the child was named Ulysses, and the man was naked. Starting from this frozen image, the film explores the real and the imaginary.

There are places that we don’t want to know anything about, places that we would rather pretend don’t exist at all. One such place is a dumpsite. From the humans’ point of view, it is a ghastly place, a stinking desert of trash. But it’s a desert that is teaming with life.