If Carol Channing didn't exist, no one could have made her up. One in a billion, Carol , at 89, remains an unstoppable, megawatt dynamo. Broadway diva extraordinaire is just the icing. Carol Channing hovered at the pinnacle of the entertainment world from the late-1950's through the 1960's and beyond, living life sensationally large. As Carol has observed, '...if you're lucky enough to have two hit shows, the world passes through your dressing room'. At 89, she remains irrepressible.
In 2015, Dagny Carlsson quickly garnered the attention of millions of Swedes when she started blogging for the first time at age 102. Now at age 106, wanting to experience as much as she can, she accepts an invitation from a Finnish film director who wants her to star in a short film. So, off to Åland she goes!
Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?
A documentary investigation across five countries on the big business of sexual slavery.
Everyone who enters a crime scene leaves something behind and takes something away. "Something Left, Something Taken" is an animated dark comedy about a vacationing couple's encounter with a man they believe to be the Zodiac Killer.
What happens when a group of hairdressers from America travel to Kabul with the intention of telling Afghan women how to do hair and makeup? This engaging, optimistic documentary tracks a unique development project: a shiny new beauty school, funded in part by beauty-industry mainstays, which sets out to teach the latest cutting, coloring, and perming techniques to practicing and aspiring Afghan hairdressers and beauticians. The American teachers, all volunteers, include three Afghan-Americans returning home for the first time in over twenty years. The Beauty Academy of Kabul offers a rare glimpse into Afghan women’s lives, and documents the poignant and often humorous process through which women with very different experiences of life come to learn about one another.
The story of artist Edith Lake Wilkinson, a painter who was committed to an asylum in 1924 and never heard from again. All her worldly possessions were packed into trunks and shipped to a relative in West Virginia where they sat in an attic for 40 years. Edith's great-niece, Emmy Award winning writer and director Jane Anderson, grew up surrounded by Edith's paintings, thanks to her mother who had gone poking through that dusty attic and rescued Edith's work. The film follows Jane in her decades-long journey to find the answers to the mystery of Edith's buried life, return the work to Provincetown and have Edith's contributions recognized by the larger art world.
Three kids are stuck in a strange city causing massive mayhem through the land. They are searching for an atypical rabbit in order to return home. Koto, the eldest of the three, seems to have some sort of connection to this weird place ruled by a monk, a demon, and a priest.
The story of the making of The Bell Jar, the unique, semi-autobiographical novel written by American writer Sylvia Plath (1932-63), published in February 1963, shortly before her death.
Michael Tilson Thomas explores the lives of his grandparents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, through a musical performance that features five performers and the New World Symphony orchestra.
5 separate, slightly immoral stories.
In 1968, five girls from Tuscany who dreamt of seeing the world were offered to tour the Far East as an all-girl band, finding themselves in the middle of the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, they tell the story of Le Stars' adventure amongst American soldiers, remote jungle bases and soul music.
After tragedy strikes, acclaimed poet Ruth Stone retreated to the margins of the literary world, working tirelessly to provide for her children, and transforming her intense grief into poetry, using simple, startling language.
The life and times of Joe Albany, a little-known jazz pianist, is the subject of this specialized documentary that not only brings out the pianist himself, but the mood and feeling of the era in which he reached the top. Albany talks about the great musicians and singers he worked with - Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker among them - and how so many succumbed to drugs and died young. He is followed around at home, work, on the bus, and in other settings as he is interviewed by director Carole Langer. His sharp observations and dry sense of humor enliven the stories.
"Last year my father asked me to go on the road with him. As my sister was going along as his back-up singer and his wife Maebh, and my new baby brother Isaac, were also travelling with him, I decided to pick up my camera and go along. This is the Growing UP Tour 2002." - Anna Gabriel An inventive and intimate portrait of family life on the road during Peter Gabriel's recent Growing Up Tour; the highs, the lows, the sublime, the ridiculous, the fathers, sisters, brothers, band members and road crew, in short...The Family...captured and revealed like you've rarely ever seen before by the knowing eye of Anna Gabriel, a family member in every sense of the word.
Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "tune in, turn on and drop out," lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was being used by researchers trying to understand the human mind. This documentary is a fascinating look at the story of "acid" before it hit the streets. Featuring interviews with many LSD pioneers, Hofmann's Potion is much more than a simple chronicle of the drug's early days. With thoughtful interviews, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, it is an invitation to look at LSD, and our world, with a more open, compassionate mind.
The Jewish milliner May Aubert grew up in Kristiania with an English father and a German mother. Before WW II she was an apprentice hat maker in Berlin and delivered hats to UFA film studio's brightest stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Elisabeth Bergner. Later, she became a refugee, war hero and currency smuggler. Eighty-seven years old, she still goes to work every day and is the Norwegian Queen Sonja's regular hat maker.
Award-winning documentary film about old age and the elderly. We meet residents and staff at a nursing home and take part in the madness, humor, desire, sorrow, hopes and the great love that this miniature society holds.
Seven young women from Berlin discuss their experiences with the pill in a studio setting and react to the ideas that young men of the same age have about this contraceptive. The film is based on the work of the women's group "Brot und Rosen" and their book "Frauenhandbuch Nr.1 Abtreibung und Verhütung".
Short directed by Lotte Reiniger.