In this award-winning documentary, directors Masri and Chamoun focus on the women who played a crucial role in fighting the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. Preserving their stories on camera, Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon is a poignant documentary about courage, resistance, and hope.
"The film was conceived as a coda to a longer (colour) film, Place of Work, made in the same year. It covers the time of finally emptying a long-time family home, with its personal memories and connection with some of my own work. Fragments of verse, along with young children's voices released into the emptying rooms and staircases, and an ersatz 'pop' music track, clarify the familiar and the alien in the situation." Margaret Tait
Documentarist Nina Davenport turns the conventions of the travelogue inside out. She takes us to India and abandons us there, leaving us to believe what we see through her eyes. Her movie replicates the experience of being a traveller and thus a voyeur, of taking in sights without necessarily understanding their meaning. Davenport seems less interested in cracking the enigma of India than in savoring it...Her hunger makes her unashamed, like the eager children who find the eye of her camera the next best thing to sweets.
With her dog Sam and her 1964 Airstream trailer, Spiro joins an adventurous community of roamers and loners on wheels who live on the road full time--by economic neccessity, pleasure, or both. Behind the camera and behind the wheel, Spiro documents a unique world of vintage trailers, vintage dogs and vintage people, where the spirit of the moment collides with stories from the past.
In its first 25 years only 10 people have finished The Barkley Marathons. Based on a historic prison escape, this cult like race tempts people from around the world to test their limits of physical and mental endurance in this documentary that contemplates the value of pain.
Kids being raised by same-sex couples are growing in numbers worldwide. We are in a Gayby-Boom. But who are these kids? What do they think about having same-sex parents? And do they face different issues to other kids? At a time when the world is debating marriage equality, these questions are more pertinent than ever. Told from the perspective of the kids, Gayby Baby is intimate and sometimes humorous account of four children and their families.
For 63 years, Tom Rose and his wife, Mary, built a life together on his family farm on Canaanville Road. Then last year Mary passed away, leaving Rose to face the future alone, surrounded by a lifetime of memories.
An unsettling and eye opening exploration into the spread of the radical Islamic school Red Mosque, which trains legions of children to devote their lives to jihad, or holy war, from a very young age. With incredible access and chilling footage, Among the Believers is a timely and relevant look into the causes that have led to the growth of radical Islam in Pakistan and around the world.
At a time in the United States when the tech sector outpaces the overall growth of the employment market, CODE asks the important question: Where are all the women?
August 16, 1977. All of America was stunned by the news of Elvis Presley's untimely passing. Some went so far as to believe that it couldn't be true. Somehow he had faked his death. For the executives at Sun Records that fantasy became an opportunity in the form of Orion, a mysterious masked performer with the voice of The King. First appearing in 1979, Orion recorded 11 albums and performed live to packed houses and rapturous fans around the nation. But who was the man behind the mask? In this stranger-than-fiction true story, Jeanie Finlay exposes the incredible life of an unknown singer plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight with the complicity of a manipulative music industry and a public fan base unwilling to let The King go. Resonant in its themes of identity, fate, and the double-edged nature of fame, Orion is a stylish mystery story that finally gives a name and a face to a gifted artist who had been unjustly deprived of both.
A keen observation of a sun-dappled and still-watered swamp, Uncertain contemplates a frequently overlooked and enigmatic town whose lake, and only real source of income, comes under threat from an aquatic nuisance of the botanical variety. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a site so-named, there is a lack of consensus about the Texas town's origin: whether the result of a surveyor's confusion when marking an early map, or steamboat captains' belief that docking there was an unknowable, impossible task, an auspicious beginning is offered for the unsettled and yearning inhabitants.
Bouncing between Europe and the United States as often as she would between lovers, Peggy Guggenheim’s life was as swirling as the design of her uncle’s museum, and reads more like fiction than any reality imaginable. Peggy Guggenheim – Art Addict offers a rare look into Guggenheim’s world: blending the abstract, the colorful, the surreal and the salacious, to portray a life that was as complex and unpredictable as the artwork Peggy revered and the artists she pushed forward.
Dubbed “The Cannibal Cop,” former NYPD officer Gilberto Valle was charged with conspiring to kidnap and eat women but argued it was all a fantasy. His story made headlines both for its disturbing details and its potential to kick off a trend of thought-policing across the nation. Featuring intimate interviews with Valle and insights from experts, Thought Crimes explores if someone can be found guilty for their most dangerous thoughts.
Joáo Bénard da Costa, director of the Portuguese National Film Archives [deceased in 2009], interviews the dean of contemporaneous film directors [96-years-old then]. Two humanists of different philosophical backgrounds, both with their long, entire lives dedicated to culture in general (music, painting, literature) and to film in particular, discuss freely, sometimes haltingly, the director's power as a creator or a magician, the philosophy beyond particular scenes in classic movies, film technique, the importance of color, sound and music to films, art versus entertainment, and much more. Their talk takes place in a museum room, seating in front of "The Annunciation" (a 1510 oil painting by João Vaz, a Portuguese artist), which eventually leads to a discussion of 'Leonardo da Vinci', and the relationship between a trend-setter master and his disciples.
Documentary exploring one of Japan's biggest train crashes in modern history, caused when a driver tried to catch up with a delay of just 80 seconds. It's a cautionary tale of what happens when punctuality, protocol and efficiency are taken to the extreme. On Monday April 25th 2005, a West Japan Railway commuter train crashed into an apartment building and killed 107 people. Just what pressures made the driver risk so much for such a minimal delay? Piecing together personal accounts of those affected by the train crash, with insights from experts and former train drivers, the film poses a question for a society that equates speed with progress. It offers a fascinating insight into the railway's role in Japan's post-war economic boom and the dangers of corner-cutting in the prolonged economic stagnation that followed. Through the lens of this catastrophic train crash, Brakeless considers the ultimate cost efficiency.
Everyday life. Oh joy?
"This is a landscape study of an Orkney croft, with the figure of the crofter, Mary Graham Sinclair, very much in the picture. The croft is West Aith, on the edge of a small loch, which almost every passing visitor stops to photograph or draw or paint. I have been filming this beautiful place since 1977, observing many of the human activities which alter and define how it looks." Margaret Tait
A Perfect 14 explores the fascinating world of plus-size models fighting to reshape the fashion industry and the beauty standards of society.
A documentary destined to calmly explain and analyze the facts, myths and rumours about John Kennedy's assassination and the overwhelming use of information in Oliver Stone's epic "JFK" (1991), at the same time it presents a behind the scenes documentary on the controversial film. Features interviews with the cast and director, and the personalities who lived and remember the facts concerning the November 22, 1963, like reporters, eyewitnesses and others, and some of the real characters from the movie, like Jim Garrison, Numa Bertel, Lou Ivon and Perry Russo.
A documentary from within the Swedish Migration Board's locked repository where people are in custody awaiting forced deportation. Prisoner and guard are in close proximity around the clock. Converses during sleepless nights and playing football during hot summer days. We follow Sophie, 29, who loves her job at the repository, Sami, 20, the young rebel who is locked up but free inside, and Aina, 47, who were separated from her children and kept locked up while the police are stepping up efforts to enforce their expulsion order.