The Empire Builder is America’s busiest long-distance train route, running from Chicago to Seattle. Throughout these corridors sit runaways, adventurers, and loners – a myriad of passengers waiting to see what their journey holds. A touching and honest observation, co-directed by the iconic Albert Maysles, In Transit breathes life into the long commute, and contemplates the unknowns that lie at our final destination.
Until the late 1970s, the Pakistani city of Lahore was world-renowned for its music. Following the Islamization of Pakistan, many artists struggled to continue their life's work. Song of Lahore turns the spotlight on a group of stalwart musicians that kept playing and ultimately attracted listeners from around the world.
For the past two years, Ryan and Amy Green have been working on That Dragon, Cancer, a videogame about their son Joel's fight against that disease. Following the family through the creation of the game and the day-to-day realities of Joel’s treatment, David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall create a moving testament to the joy and heartbreak of raising a terminally ill child.
The New Yorker is the benchmark for the single-panel cartoon. This light-hearted and sometimes poignant look at the art and humor of the iconic drawings shows why they have inspired and even baffled us for decades. Very Semi-Serious is a window into the minds of cartooning legends and hopefuls, including editor Bob Mankoff, shedding light onto how their humor evolves.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG, once a US based trillion dollar financial adviser, used the number pi to predict economic turning points with precision. When some big New York bankers asked him to join the club to help them to take over Russia, he refused to join the manipulation. A few days later the FBI stormed his offices accusing him of a 3 billion dollar Ponzi Scheme - an attempt to stop him talking about the real Ponzi Scheme of debts that the US has build up over the years and which he thinks starts to collapse after October 1, 2015, a mayor pi turning point he is predicting.
A documentary about slutshaming.
Nearly 20 years since the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, there are people who still live in refugee Centers, usually located on the outskirts of cities and villages. In such centers what should have been temporary has become indefinite. Collecting medicinal herbs or scraps from nearby coal mines and raising children who were born as refugees in their own country are just some aspects of the monotonous daily life of the people in Ježevci.
Many women are confronted with a young, slim and tight beauty ideal and worry a great deal if they can't live up to that image. Sunny Bergman asks in whose interest it is for her and other women to have these concerns, what's at stake, what's to gain and what's to lose. In this film, Bergman looks for the cause, the effects, and possible solutions for the Western preoccupation with our image.
Filmed in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin camp established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in South Lebanon, Terrace of the Sea uses a collection of family photographs taken over three generations as a prism through which to reflect on memory, loss and history. An anthropologist, author (her most recent book is "Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile) and filmmaker, Diana Allan documents the experiences of the Ibrahim family, who have been making a living as fishermen for generations. The film looks at their relationship to work and to the physical environment and how they've persevered in this ‘temporary' home. Produced at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Terrace of the Sea is a haunting work, a meditation on the process of memory and on the distances between photography and film, land and sea and - between seeing and being seen.
EMPIRE OF THE MOON wryly deconstructs the experience of being a tourist. Paris, gorgeously photographed in black-and-white, is the setting for cultural explorations ranging from the mundane to the sublime, as visitors trek from icon to icon, snapping the same photos, climbing the same steps and at times experiencing the transformative wonder they came to find.
Following the journey of an Evangelical minister trying to find the courage to preach about the growing toll of gun violence in America. Reverend Rob Schenck, anti-abortion activist and fixture on the political far right, breaks with orthodoxy by questioning whether being pro-gun is consistent with being pro-life.
Facing eviction the oldest black-owned gay bar in Brooklyn relies on a passionate community in its fight for survival.
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.
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather (like the wind) something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. - Lynne Sachs
"The Arab governments pushed us out of our homes... I was twelve years old… I've been here for 60 years." A beautiful, poignant documentary, Still Life examines the effect a collection of personal photos showing life in Palestine before the 1948 displacement have on an elderly Palestinian fisherman living in exile in Lebanon. The importance of place and memory in preserving a people's history are crucial to Diana Allan's illuminating documentary. In, Said Ismael Otruk, a Palestinian man born in Acre in the 1930s, recalls his childhood and the halcyon days of his youth. His memories, not always accurate, so he relies on the photographs he managed to take with him. They are images of young boys, of the port, of fishing boats and the sea. On one, he reads a note he wrote many years ago: "Acre and Said in the Golden Age."
Through the intimate portraits of five student survivors, IT HAPPENED HERE exposes the alarming pervasiveness of sexual assault on college campuses, the institutional cover-ups and the failure to protect students, and follows their fight for accountability and change on campus and in federal court.
Black Tape explores the theme of domination. In an entangled tango, the victim and victimizer dance, occupying the frame and space between brushstrokes.
On November 15, 2013, the world came together to grant one 5-year-old leukemia patient his wish to be Batman for a day. "Batkid Begins" looks at why and how this phenomenon took place, becoming one of the biggest "good news" stories of all time.