Feature-length documentary as part of Pierre Perrault's Abitibian Cycle. The filmmaker questions the past and present of Abitibi and draws up, face to face, the promises of colonization in the 1930s and the great disappointment caused by the closing of the land in the 1970s. There are witnesses to the heroic era, including the cultivator Hauris Lalancette, as well as extracts from films by Father Maurice Proulx (1934-1940).
"This film is one of the first French Unit productions of the “Société Nouvelle/Challenge for Change” program. When an old area of Montréal is to be demolished to make way for a new low-income housing development, is there anything the residents can do to protect their own interests? The film documents such a situation in the Little Burgundy district of Montréal and shows how the residents organized themselves into a committee that successfully influenced the city’s housing policy." - Anthology Film Archives
A documentary about direct-cinema from its very beginnings (Nanook of the North) to the fake-direct-cinema of the Blair Witch Project. All the important direct-cinema filmmakers are portrayed and/or interviewed: Leacock, Wiseman, Maysles, Pennebaker, Reisz and others.
"This feature documentary is considered to be the forerunner of the NFB's Challenge for Change Program. The film offers in inside look at 3 weeks in the life of the Bailey family. Trouble with the police, begging for stale bread, and the birth of another child are just some of the issues they face. Through it all, the father tries to explain his family's predicament. Although filmed in Montreal, the film offers an anatomy of poverty as it occurs throughout North America." - NFB
A working class family leaves St-Henri quarter in Montréal to build a new home in the countryside.
"This documentary depicts a canoe being built in the traditional manner. Cesar Newashish, a 67-year-old Attikamek of the Manawan Reserve North of Montréal, uses only birchbark, cedar splints, spruce roots, and gum. With a sure hand he works methodically to fashion a craft unsurpassed in function or beauty of design. Building a canoe solely from the materials that the forest provides may become a lost art, even among the Native Peoples whose traditional craft it is. The film is free of spoken commentary but text appears on the screen in Cree, French, and English." - Anthology Film Archives
"Montréal under the snow and the cold winter. It is the period of the year when the garage owners strike it rich. The automobile at the service of man? This small opus would rather show the contrary. This is one in a series of eight films titled “Chronicle of Everyday Life,” a project that filmmaker Jacques Leduc took four years to realize, and whose goal was to revisit Direct Cinema at a moment when it was already heavily “contaminated” by mainstream TV." - Anthology Film Archives
"Mobile Suit Gundam" is a science fiction anime about a war-torn future where humanity has colonized outer space. Over the decades Gundam has become one of Japan's most iconic media franchises. But when the original series debuted in 1979, ratings were low, and it was initially deemed a flop. So how did Gundam become beloved by generations of people? What was the making of "Mobile Suit Gundam" - the beginning of this cultural phenomenon - like? This documentary speaks with the people who were there.
An intimate look at the Woodstock Music & Art Festival held in Bethel, NY in 1969, from preparation through cleanup, with historic access to insiders, blistering concert footage, and portraits of the concertgoers; negative and positive aspects are shown, from drug use by performers to naked fans sliding in the mud, from the collapse of the fences by the unexpected hordes to the surreal arrival of National Guard helicopters with food and medical assistance for the impromptu city of 500,000.
Working-class gay DJ Tony De Vit invented hard house music and made it mainstream – his fans included Madonna and Boy George when he was the star attraction at all-night London club Trade. In 1996, in his late 30s, he was on the cusp of becoming one the biggest DJs in the world. Robert Ferguson, already known as Fergie, was a 15-year-old budding DJ in a small town in Northern Ireland. At the same age, teenage rebel Andi Buckley had been kicked out of school and out of home in Birmingham – but had begun to work in the dance music industry. This powerful documentary tells the story of how the three men's lives became intertwined in a tale of love, loss, gay identity, hero worship, attitudes to AIDS and the 90s boom in dance music.
A powerful short documentary inspired by the launch of the genre breaking PlayStation 3 title HEAVY RAIN. Directed by the acclaimed filmmaker Neil LaBute, the seven minute short was filmed in London, LA & Paris and asks leading luminaries, 'How far would you go to save someone you love?'
Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder? In 1983, four people were murdered in a home in Chino Hills, California. The sole survivor of the attack said three white intruders had committed the murders. Then a woman told the police that her boyfriend, a white convicted murderer, was probably involved, and she gave deputies his bloody coveralls. So here’s what sheriff’s deputies did: They threw away the bloody coveralls and arrested a young black man named Kevin Cooper. He is now awaiting execution on Death Row in San Quentin State Prison.
Shots puts an amusing spin on the little-known history of eugenics. It traces the genocidal, anti-ethnic eugenics movement which resulted in the sterilization and elimination of millions. It exposes how the wealthiest families financed the evolution of eugenics into Nazi Germany, and pushed America into perpetual wars. These families further influenced the government's elimination of financial liability for vaccine manufacturers while simulating run-ups to the 2020 pandemic. By that year the wealthiest had bought and controlled the media, and censored medical experts that criticized government actions. Shots illuminates how the government censored effective therapeutics, financially incentivized hospitals to adopt misleading reporting practices and deadly treatments, doubled global deaths with lockdowns, bankrupted small businesses, and allowed the most unsafe vaccines in a century.
The surprising story of how one of music's biggest icons helped to establish a USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor. Elvis’ fundraising concert drew public attention to the plight and helped to galvanize efforts to finish the USS Arizona Memorial as it stands today.
On the day of the 150th anniversary of Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, an evening dedication "Outside the System" took place on the Main Stage of the Moscow Art Theater. The production is based on documentary material — letters, memoirs, memoirs, diaries, recordings of rehearsals. The fate of the founder of the Moscow Art Theater is reflected in the testimonies of his greatest contemporaries, friends, students and opponents.
Documentarians Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer turn their camera on 81-year-old Traudl Junge, who served as Adolf Hitler's secretary from 1942 to 1945, and allow her to speak about her experiences. Junge sheds light on life in the Third Reich and the days leading up to Hitler's death in the famed bunker, where Junge recorded Hitler's last will and testament. Her gripping account is nothing short of mesmerizing.
A fourth-generation Chinese American, filmmaker Kimberlee Bassford explores her family's relationship to Honolulu's Chinatown and examines the parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1899-1900 bubonic plague in Hawai'i.
Tania and Cocteau, a cat that comes from the not too distant future, tell the story of the passage of animals through the world and their relationship with humans.
On 2018 a student at Santa Fe High School executed 10 people and wounded 13 others. The shooting took half an hour before the killer was arrested. The movie is about the students that were directly affected and what they are doing today.
This film reveals some of Madagascar's secretive and rarely filmed inhabitants, from the apex predator, the fossa, to the aye aye – possibly the weirdest creature on earth.