A Norml Life

By the time "It's A Mean Old World" was filmed, Reverend Pearly Brown had been struggling to survive singing gospel music for nearly 40 years. While the rough sound of his bottleneck playing has the feel of a life spent scuffling on the street, the poignancy of his voice is a better measure of the gentle spirit and inner strength of the man.

From oratory classes to operating room, Beauty Factory follows five girls for four months as they compete for the coveted Miss Venezuela crown; revealing the process that has won Venezuela more international beauty pageants than any other country.

Time Is Illmatic is a feature length documentary film that delves deep into the making of Nas' 1994 debut album, Illmatic, and the social conditions that influenced its creation.

Appalachian Journey is one of five films made from footage that Alan Lomax shot between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS American Patchwork series (1991). It offers songs, dances, stories, and religious rituals of the Southern Appalachians. Preachers, singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, cloggers, and square dancers recount the good times and the hard times of rural life there. Performers include Tommy Jarrell, Janette Carter, Ray and Stanley Hicks, Frank Proffitt Jr., Sheila Kay Adams, Nimrod Workman and Phyllis Boyens, Raymond Fairchild, and others, with a bonus of a few African-Americans from the North Carolina Piedmont.

No sick days. Mandatory diets. Boob jobs. Endless rehearsals. It's what showgirls do for love--and a steady job--in the Las Vegas spotlight. 'A Chorus Line' meets 'Real Sex' in this sexy yet poignant documentary that follows the mounting of a new all-female musical revue in Las Vegas--from auditions through opening night--over the course of ten pressure-packed weeks.

The extraordinary story of comedian Bob Monkhouse's life and career, told through the vast private archive of films, TV shows, letters and memorabilia that he left behind.

If a picture paints a thousand words, what will photographs from the Second Gulf War show us? This special focuses on the embedded photographers who traveled with fighting units on the cutting edge of the armored spear slicing into Iraq. The war was thereto be captured in all its raw truth by any photographer with the guts to step out and shoot the picture. In collaboration with the Associated Press, we view never-before-seen photos that portray the horror, struggle, and endurance of mankind.

Years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a loosely organized insurgency continues to target American and Coalition soldiers, as well as Iraqi security forces and civilians, with devastating results. In this sobering account of the ongoing violence, Ahmed Hashim, a specialist on Middle Eastern strategic issues and on irregular warfare, reveals the insurgents behind the widespread revolt, their motives, and their tactics. The insurgency, he shows, is not a united movement directed by a leadership with a single ideological vision. Instead, it involves former regime loyalists, Iraqis resentful of foreign occupation, foreign and domestic Islamist extremists, and elements of organized crime. These groups have cooperated with one another in the past and coordinated their attacks; but the alliance between nationalist Iraqi insurgents on the one hand and religious extremists has frayed considerably.

Detailing the US giving weapons to both Iraq and Iran during the Iraq Iran war.

Sixteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban for being outspoken about her country’s education system. The Pakistani government spends seven times more on its military than on education. The Taliban banned girls from attending school. Pakistan’s literacy rate is among the lowest in the world, with the number of school aged children who don’t attend school is second highest globally. Malala survived and is now the youngest person to ever be awarded the Nobel peace Prize for her activism for female education. This is the story of Malala’s fight for a right to education and freedom.

The Cistercian monks of Austria are holy men who rise at 4:30 a.m., pray for more than four hours a day and have devoted their lives to God. They're also pop stars. This documentary offers a glimpse at the daily life of the joyous monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz Abbey whose recordings of their ethereal Gregorian chants have turned them into chart-topping music sensations.

Commissioned for the Irish representation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, The Enclave is an immersive, six-screen video art installation by Irish contemporary artist Richard Mosse. Partly inspired by Joseph Conrad’s modernist literary masterpiece Heart of Darkness, the visceral and moving work was filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo using 16mm colour infra-red film, which captures otherwise invisible parts of the spectrum. The resulting imagery in Mosse’s work is hallucinatory and dream-like with the usual greens of jungle and forest replaced by shimmering violet. The Enclave depicts a complicated, strife-ridden place in a way that reflects its complexity, using a strategy of beauty and transfixion to combat the wider invisibility of a conflict that has claimed so many.

Raised in an orthodox home, Amos Dov Silver dreams of becoming Prime Minister. But when the State continues to shun him, he soon finds unexpected solace in the velvety smoke of Marijuana. Spreading his new Torah, he establishes an online community using a mobile app called "TeleGrass" that turns into the largest marketplace for drugs in Israel, raising Silver to Messiah status. Through exclusive footage of Silver, his family and his partners’ investigations, as well as secretly filmed footage of Silver in the Ukrainian prison, a polarizing portrayal of the man charged with heading a crime organization emerges. Champion of the people, or a lost soul corrupted by power?

This short documentary tells the story of one of the world’s most difficult and bizarre sporting events: The Barkley Marathons. This 100-mile footrace and its 60-hour time limit force athletes to run, crawl and climb an elevation gain equivalent to two treks up Mt. Everest. In nearly thirty years, only fourteen runners, out of over one thousand participants, have finished The Barkley.

This fascinating documentary chronicles the intense rivalry between high schools in Southern Indiana to win a prestigious festival performance with lavish student musical productions that often cost in the tens of thousands of dollars to produce.

"Both Ends Burning" is a film that captures MxPx at a crossroads in their seasoned career. Directed by Bryan Buchelt, this documentary not only follows the band's struggles in the face of the new touring climate, it also looks at the legacy and impact that Mike, Tom, and Yuri have had on the music industry, fellow bands, and their fans. This is one of the first true looks into the life of the notoriously private working class band on the road and at home.

The film consists mainly of interviews with readers of Freud in Brazil and several places in Europe, and touches on topics such as history, translation, culture, language and, especially, Freud himself.

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.

Sam Schmidt lived out his boyhood dream as an IndyCar racer, winning races and earning the title of IndyCar "Rookie of the Year" along the way. That dream came to an abrupt end when Sam crashed into a wall at 200 miles per hour, leaving him a quadriplegic. Reengineering SAM pulls the curtain back and shows up close the serious implications of a life of paralysis on Sam and everyone around him. Sam's accident rendered him physically helpless, never being able to brush his teeth, much less drive again, until a dedicated group of some of the brightest minds today stepped up to build him a car that he could drive, using only his head. Through groundbreaking adaptive technologies, Reengineering SAM chronicles Sam Schmidt's inspirational road back to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and shows the promise of freedom and mobility for almost anyone confined to a wheelchair.

An examination of the how television news in the US has covered war from Vietnam to the present day