East, West, Home

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

The opening of the Kiel Canal in Germany by Kaiser Wilhelm II on 20 June 1895.

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

A portrait and tribute to Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta.

Iceberg the documentary takes a personal deep dive into Stormy; the person behind and beyond music. A closer tap into his persona, his loved ones, his passions and Iceberg the album journey. Stormy’s goal is to present a beautiful memoir pinning a timestamp in his career to reflect back on in the future. He hopes this educates, inspires, changes perspectives or simply entertains his fans.

The camera wanders through streets standing witness to a war that has destroyed a city and an entire nation. Bagdadi goes to war against the Lebanese civil war, exploring different locations and situations in a country faced with its own demise. The poetic text raises questions of life and death through contrasting images of violent death and the will to live.

Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording "Daybreak Express", this is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City.

Hymn of the Nations, originally titled Arturo Toscanini: Hymn of the Nations, is a 1944 film directed by Alexander Hammid, which features the "Inno delle nazioni," a patriotic work for tenor soloist, chorus, and orchestra, composed by Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi in the early 1860s. (For this musical work, Verdi utilized the national anthems of several European nations.) In December 1943, Arturo Toscanini filmed a performance of this music for inclusion in an Office of War Information documentary about the role of Italian-Americans in aiding the Allies during World War II. Toscanini added a bridge passage to include arrangements of "The Star-Spangled Banner" for the United States and "The Internationale" for the Soviet Union and the Italian partisans. Joining Toscanini in the filmed performance in NBC Studio 8-H, were tenor Jan Peerce, the Westminster Choir, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.

This "Theater of Life" documentary was produced in cooperation with the International Committee, YMCA. It focuses on the work of Dr. Spencer Hatch, as he shows residents of small Mexican villages how to make their land better able to grow food and make them more independent.

This short documentary, presented and directed by MGM sound engineer Douglas Shearer, goes behind the scenes to look at how the sound portion of a talking picture is created.

Since the beginning of her career, Sinéad O’Connor has used her powerful voice to challenge the narratives she was surrounded by while growing up in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland. Despite her agency, depth and perspective, O’Connor’s unflinching refusal to conform means that she has often been patronized and unfairly dismissed as an attention-seeking pop star.

A 96-year-old woman in a Kerala village pursues her lifelong dream of getting an education. Having never gone to school, she must start at the beginning...first grade.

Highlighting the heroic efforts of Dorothy Oliver to keep her small town of Panola, Alabama safe from COVID-19, The Panola Project chronicles how an often-overlooked rural Black community came together in creative ways to survive.

The Ax Fight (1975) is an ethnographic film by anthropologist and filmmaker Tim Asch and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon about a conflict in a Yanomami village called Mishimishimabowei-teri, in southern Venezuela. It is best known as an iconic and idiosyncratic ethnographic film about the Yanomamo and is frequently shown in classroom settings.

The short documentary visits the groundhog research center in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It was made for Sony Home Entertainment's 15th anniversary edition DVD release of the 1993 film, "Groundhog Day." It was filmed on location at the silver mining ghost town of Gothic, Colorado, near Crested Butte. The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory has been located there since its founding in 1928.

Chantal Akerman reads a script detailing the woes that befell her on the day she thought about "The Future of Cinema". The camera continuously rotates 360 degrees around her apartment as she rereads the script at an exponentially increasing speed. At its heart, an homage to Godard.

The Crystal Text is a fleeting, poetic impression of the the fragmented emotional world of Young Moon's music. Amazingly, all of the visual effects are created within the camera, rather than through digital manipulation. The resulting film explores the rhythms inherent in the combination of music and film, as it evokes both memory and gesture to create an audio and visual dialog with the audience.

The Night Before Upheaval

A boy growing up in a port town in Morocco dreams of escaping into a different life than the one in store for him.

An endearing portrait of a South Asian father as he attempts to give life and marital advice to his bodybuilding and image-obsessed son.