Like It Is

Les secrets de François Truffaut

Exclusive interviews, live performances and studio recording sessions offer an intimate look at how OneRepublic became the successful band it is today.

In JINGLE BELL ROCKS!, director Mitchell Kezin delves into the minds of some of the world’s most legendary Christmas music fanatics and hits the road to hang with his holiday heroes – including hip hop legend Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons of RUN-D.M.C., The Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne, filmmaker John Waters, bebopper Bob Dorough, L.A. DJ and musicologist Dr. Demento, and Calypso legend The Mighty Sparrow. In his search for the twelve best, underappreciated Christmas songs ever recorded, Kezin both asks and answers the question, “Why, when Christmas rolls around, are we still stuck cozying up with Bing Crosby under a blanket of snow?”

The Other Side of Carnival (2010) is a 45-minute award-winning documentary that explores Carnival's social and economic impact on Trinidad & Tobago. With more than 60 interviews from professors, medical staff, police officers, government officials, students, tourists, every day locals and more, The Other Side of Carnival is able to highlight that while Carnival is an exciting occasion, it is a festival that creates turmoil, which is not widely visible...or is it just simply ignored? Known as "The Greatest Show on Earth", this documentary captures the roots of Carnival and how far some go to keep the original idea alive, and how others attempt to integrate change. Consummating over two years of research and interviews and with the coordination of a multi-national crew (Trinidad & Tobago, US and UK), The Other Side of Carnival does not pass judgment on Carnival in Trinidad & Tobago, but aims to bring an awareness of the type of influence that Carnival has on the population.

This documentary follows the production of Shinhwa's 12th album, "We", its promotional activities, and filming of the music video for their song, "Sniper."

In the deep hills of northeast India, Christianity and pop culture have taken over the lifestyle and imagination of the Tangkhul tribes. Rewben Mashangva from Choithar travels through the remote villages of the Tangkhul Naga to talk to the old people and collect songs and instruments. The rhythms, melodies and lyrics form links to his own music, which he describes as Naga Folk Blues. In his traditional 'Haokuirat' hairstyle and western boots along with his 9 year old son Saka, he performs across India and South-East Asia spreading the message that some songs have no end.

Cosmic Trip, la musique à la conquête de l'espace

The 60s equivalent of Reefer Madness and all those other 30s drug exploitation flicks. Apparently, dropping acid leads to stripteases, cat fights, promiscuous sex, playing with kittens, and being convinced your dinner is much larger than it actually is. This is all illustrated in a series of silent sketches accompanied by a droll narrator who seems positively doped out of his mind.

Dance for All

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.

Documentary — featuring both interviews and live footage — about underground rock music in Russia, during the last years of the Perestroika.

Years ago, artists would walk around the muck at the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Emeryville, and build loads of sculptures out there on the flats, created from driftwood and found objects that drivers would enjoy as they motored south on the old Highway 17 (known in numerous radio ads as 'Highway 17, The Nimitz'). Grabbing material off someone else’s work was considered fair game and part of the fun, and contributed a kinetic dynamic to the ongoing display. Now the place is a park, and the sculptures are gone, but you can see what it used to be like in this neat and funny documentary by Ric Reynolds, augmented by Erich Seibert’s wonderful musique-concrète/time-lapse sequences. The flashback circus sequence includes Scott Beach and Bill Irwin. Sculptors interviewed include Walt Zucker, Tony Puccio, Robert Sommer, Ron & Mary Bradden, and Bob Kaminsky.

Druid Heights is a short documentary film by Marcy Mendelson about a wild & wooly place. California’s hidden bohemia. Where sex, drugs and philosophy thrived among the eucalyptus just a few miles north of the Golden Gate.

A Big Package for You: 1999-2003 is a DVD/CD by the pop punk band Simple Plan from Montreal, Canada. The band consists of five members Pierre Bouvier, guitarist and lead vocalist, David Desrosiers, bassist and backing vocalist, Sébastien Lefebvre, rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist, Chuck Comeau, drummer, and Jeff Stinco, lead guitarist.

Anne Hamilton-Byrne was beautiful, charismatic and delusional. She was also incredibly dangerous. Convinced she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, Hamilton-Byrne headed an apocalyptic sect called The Family, which was prominent in Melbourne from the 1960s through to the 1990s. With her husband Bill, she acquired numerous children – some through adoption scams, some born to cult members – and raised them as her own. Isolated from the outside world, the children were dressed in matching outfits, had identical dyed blonde hair, and were allegedly beaten, starved and injected with LSD. Taught that Hamilton-Byrne was both their mother and the messiah, the children were eventually rescued during a police raid in 1987, but their trauma had only just begun.

This documentary film focuses on the rapidly growing modular synthesis movement, the diverse artists creating soundscapes of emotionally charged content, and the developers pushing the boundaries of sonic invention with their community driven creations. Capturing this immediate creative vision and personal process from patch to pulse will be the journey we share.

The movie is a biopic about Mia Martini, an italian singer who died in 1995.

On the outside, it looks like any ordinary seniors' facility. But on the inside, a series of remarkable, late-in-life love stories of three different couples is unfolding.

Inspired even as a boy by the Folies Bergere, the legendary Paris cabaret venue, couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier always wanted to stage a show there. "But what story can I tell?" he muses in this doc about the six months of preparation that went into the show. "Mine." Combining fashion with film, dance, theater, and unapologetic over-the-top-ness, the revue offers a 40-year career retrospective of the designer who is practically never spoken of without using the phrase enfant terrible. Notorious among cinephiles for his costumes for The Fifth Element and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and among pop fans for Madonna's pointy cone brassiere, he also incorporated teddy bears and S&M fetish gear as design motifs. In the show, the fanciful and outrageous meets the naughtily witty (a skit sending up Vogue dragon lady Anna Wintour) and the poignant (a tribute to his partner Francis Menuge, who died in 1990).

Billy Yeager is a musician, singer-songwriter, filmmaker, activist, humanitarian and an all around living breathing performance artist. He has written and recorded over 2600 songs, produced 6 films and been discovered many times by several well known artists, yet most of his works are extremely hard to find and are considered to be very valuable by serious collectors, but if it can't change the world, the artist wants no part of it. Turning his back on the music and film industries, Yeager retreats into the desert to make his films and create his music.