The Baselstrasse is a street in Lucerne. People call it "Rue de Blamage" – it's a noisy street tucked into a narrow space between a hill and a train track. The people who live here don't usually mingle with the rich and famous, but even the roughest haunt can be a home to those who live and work there – and Baselstrasse's two kilometers of asphalt are no different.
Young members of 3 New Orleans school marching bands grow up in America's most musical city, and one of its most dangerous. Their band directors get them ready to perform in the Mardi Gras parades, and teach them to succeed and to survive.
Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnamese refugees have built the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam, in Orange County, California. In 1999, "Little Saigon" burst onto the national stage when a store owner displayed a poster of Ho Chi Minh, triggering protests by Vietnamese Americans struggling to reconcile their past demons with their present lives. Saigon, U.S.A. uses this moment to examine this community's changing identity and growing empowerment.
Sound is a journey. Each note opens a door, closes another. Instruments chart the course. Through a poetic and immersive lens, Sou Jazz shines a light on musicians from the Paraisópolis community, reaffirming the social and transformative power of art. The film invites viewers into a reflective, sensory exploration of the relationship between jazz and life on the margins.
Since the end of World War II, one of kind of urban residential development has dominate how cities in North America have grown, the suburbs. In these artificial neighborhoods, there is a sense of careless sprawl in an car dominated culture that ineffectually tries to create the more organically grown older communities. Interspersed with the comments of various experts about the nature of suburbia
To do this documentary, the director Pedro Henrique Fávero featured 42 characters - among MCs, DJs and producers - to make a detailed map of its kind in the country. Without mincing words, they speak openly here about 8 topics proposed by the film and try to understand Hip Hop in Brazil. The result is a collection of stories from a lot of fighting, where there are many eternal start-end-start, overcoming the difficulties of being understood and feeling of belonging to a group and many clichés.
A highschool project recorded by father and son Ben (16) and Adam Black, consisting of documental shots of Warsaw during nighttime, accompanied by the teen-agers grandmother reading Wisława Szymborska's poem "Four in the Morning," as well as a score composed by his sister.
On Easter Sunday, 1939, contralto Marian Anderson stepped up to a microphone in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Inscribed on the walls of the monument behind her were the words “all men are created equal.” Barred from performing in Constitution Hall because of her race, Anderson would sing for the American people in the open air. Hailed as a voice that “comes around once in a hundred years” by maestros in Europe and widely celebrated by both white and black audiences at home, her fame hadn’t been enough to spare her from the indignities and outright violence of racism and segregation.
A child who just loved to skate from the age of eight, Poppy Starr Olsen became the number one female bowl skater in Australia at 14 and went on to take out bronze at the XGames at 17 - the ultimate competition in the world of skateboarding. The same year, skateboarding was announced as an official additional sport category at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Now faced with the opportunity to represent Australia on the world stage Poppy grapples with the transition from skater to athlete and the pressure of competition mounts in a way it has never done before.
Sundance award-winning director Julia Kwan’s documentary Everything Will Be captures the subtle nuances of a culturally diverse neighbourhood—Vancouver’s once thriving Chinatown—in the midst of transformation. The community’s oldest and newest members offer their intimate perspectives on the shifting landscape as they reflect on change, memory and legacy. Night and day, a neon sign that reads "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT" looms over Chinatown. Everything is going to be alright, indeed, but the big question is for whom?
This documentary explores the complexities of Los Angeles. Blending a highly structured montage of shots exploring the city with interviews of students, the writer Henry Miller, and residents from all communities, this evocation of Angelenos' city paints a portrait of a living, constantly evolving entity.
Yannick Bellon's documentary paints a portrait of a city torn between the problem of unsanitary housing, pollution corroding walls and statues, and the recurring and increasing floods—all consequences of human activity. Faced with job shortages and rampant speculation, the overarching question arises of how industries can coexist with the city of Venice. Allowing them to develop risks destroying it; driving them out risks turning it into a museum, causing its inhabitants, and thus its soul, to leave.
Lacey Schwartz grew up in a typical upper-middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity - despite the open questions from those around her about how a white girl could have such dark skin. She believes her family's explanation that her looks were inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather. But when her parents abruptly split, her gut starts to tell her something different. At age of 18, she finally confronts her mother and learns the truth: her biological father was not the man who raised her, but a black man named Rodney with whom her mother had had an affair.
In operation to this day, the mansion known as Madame Satan began its activities in 1983, and in the 1980s was the main hub of avant-garde artists of the city, from which came out disparate and essential names for music, performing arts, visual arts, journalism, photo and video of Sao Paulo, as well as mythical characters of the night of São Paulo who made history with their absurd and impactful performances.
A poetic and personal cinematic meditation on displacement and loss, SKIN OF GLASS follows filmmaker Denise Zmekhol’s journey after discovering that her late father's most celebrated work as an architect, a modernist glass skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, Brazil, has become occupied by hundreds of homeless families.
The documentary portrays the collective traumas of the militarization of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas occupied by the Armed Forces during the mega sporting events. Through voices from within the favelas, the film documents the struggle for justice and reparation for victims of human rights violations.
In the wilderness of the Bucharest Delta, nine children and their parents lived in perfect harmony with nature for 20 years – until they are chased out and forced to adapt to life in the big city.
"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 Favela Pacification Program was launched in 2008 to reduce crime and drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In April 2015 however, police shot and killed 10-year old Eduardo in Complexo do Alemão, causing uproar in that community. Alemão and other pacified communities began to realise that the program had become the very thing it was designed to destroy. Taking place in the build to the 2016 Olympic Games, this is the side of Rio that you have never seen before.
In October 1995, Forbach witnessed one of the most violent strikes in the history of contemporary France. A thousand or so miners took to the streets for a merciless struggle against a reform in their rights. Twenty years after the mines shut down, people’s will to fight is still alive, just hidden away somewhere.