From Star Trek to The Sound of Music, award-winning director Robert Wise was dedicated, inventive, and ready to tackle any genre. He helmed everything from B movies to award-winning blockbusters, all while managing to live a quiet life amid the scandal of Tinsel Town.
Nearing 100 years old, a national treasure, Bobby Staff whimsically exposes a rare and revealing insight into the romantic life of a butch lesbian born in 1913. Accompanied by her long time friend, Sweet Baby J'ai, Bobbie takes us on a trip down a very steamy memory lane, through photographs and vivid memories of many decades living her life as an out lesbian in New York City and Los Angeles.
Conor McGregor is the biggest star in the history of Mixed Martial Arts. Filmed over the course of 4 years, Notorious is the exclusive, all-access account of Conor’s meteoric rise from claiming benefits and living in his parents' spare room in Dublin to claiming multiple championship UFC belts and seven figure pay-packets in Las Vegas.
The Table is a documentary that exemplifies the power of community, of people pursuing their dreams in spite of having the odds stacked against them. The film follows the lives of a few individuals over the course of an entire year. They are part of a network support group of Hollywood hopefuls and established professionals who call themselves The Table because their informal meetings occur in the backrooms of Los Angeles restaurants - most frequently at Paty’s in Toluca Lake, CA. The Table is where doers and dreamers alike come to share their stories, strategies, and aspirations. Remarkably, they have been meeting together in this way every Thursday for nearly 20 years!
With a maddening sensuality, the unforgettable actress of the film "A Special Day" embodies the golden age of Italian cinema. From the suburbs of Naples to Hollywood, this biographical documentary looks back at the flamboyant career and destiny of Sophia Loren.
Artist Katinka Simonse, alias Tinkebell, is a controversial, very mediagenic phenomenon. In her universe there is no distinction between life, art and activism; Tinkebell is her own work of art. Everything she encounters on her life path can become part of her story. Filmmaker Judith de Leeuw was given access to all images about Tinkebell, including her entire private archive. She thus constructed an archive film about how as a human being, living on the ruins of the past, you can be a character in your own story. What is the price you can afford if you continue to believe at any cost?
Thierry Le Luron, l'humour de ma vie
Sigmund Freud is one of the most important personalities of the 20th century and has not only left his imprint on psychology, his very own field of knowledge, but also on of science and cultural and intellectual history; indeed, he has shaped the twentieth century altogether. Otto Brusatti's film takes us to Vienna, New York, Rome, Paris and London and shows not only previously unknown material about Freud's life and environment but also takes a cautious look on Freud's doctrine.
The Rise of Hope
"Woodstock - Mais Que Uma Loja" tells the story of the Woodstock Discos store, a stronghold considered ground zero for heavy metal in São Paulo and one of the pioneers of the style in Brazil.
The life and career history of singer and percussionist Jackson do Pandeiro, whose originality and unusual rhythmic quality influenced several prominent artists in Brazilian popular music. With unpublished testimonies from professional colleagues and family members, as well as archival footage of their participation in cinema and radio, the documentary traces their journey between troubled relationships, dramas, controversies, stardom, ostracism, the return to the artistic milieu, even his death in 1982.
Documentary on the idiosyncratic, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes utilizes rare archive footage and interviews with associates to shed light on the Hughes enigma.
AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles are dedicated to their art and culture. Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son's education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky's Conservatory in Kyiv, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.
Follows the lives of students and their teachers based on the director's childhood memories. The events of the film take places in the actual boarding school called "Gymnasium Canisianum", founded in 1946 by a German catholic priest.
After World War II a group of young writers, outsiders and friends who were disillusioned by the pursuit of the American dream met in New York City. Associated through mutual friendships, these cultural dissidents looked for new ways and means to express themselves. Soon their writings found an audience and the American media took notice, dubbing them the Beat Generation. Members of this group included writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. a trinity that would ultimately influence the works of others during that era, including the "hippie" movement of the '60s. In this 55-minute video narrated by Allen Ginsberg, members of the Beat Generation (including the aforementioned Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Peter Orlovsky, Amiri Baraka, Diane Di Prima, and Timothy Leary) are reunited at Naropa University in Boulder, CO during the late 1970's to share their works and influence a new generation of young American bohemians.
Performance and conversation with husband-and-wife poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon at a New Jersey festival, in their Wilmot (N.H.) hometown and their Eagle Pond farmhouse.
The personal life and professional career of music superstar Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, universally known as Sting, who became passionate about music at a very early age and founded the trio The Police in 1977 with Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, achieving an immediate success.
With more than 70 films and 160 million cumulative tickets in France, Jean-Paul Belmondo is one of the essential stars of French cinema.
Forever, Chinatown is a story of unknown, self-taught 81-year-old artist Frank Wong who has spent the past four decades recreating his fading memories by building romantic, extraordinarily detailed miniature models of the San Francisco Chinatown rooms of his youth.
A funny walk through the life story of Billy Wilder (1906-2002), a cinematic genius; a portrait of a filmmaker who never was a boring man, a superb mind who had ten commandments, of which the first nine were: “Thou shalt not bore.”