Abigail Disney looks at America's dysfunctional and unequal economy and asks why the American Dream has worked for the wealthy, yet is a nightmare for people born with less. As a way to imagine a more equitable future, Disney uses her family's story to explore how this systemic injustice took hold.
In Texas, construction workers face the deadliest conditions in the country. This documentary follows three immigrant families who are rising up to seek justice and equality in an industry rife with exploitation.
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
Aussie boys of Asian descent candidly discuss their status as a "minority within a minority".
Provocative, feminist critique of man’s technological progress.
Artist Daniel Crook unpacks masculinity one painting at a time.
This film discusses the effect on how major American films in Hollywood were influenced by the Eastern European Jewish culture that most of the major movie moguls who controlled the studios shared. Through clips of various films, the filmmakers illustrate the dominant themes like that of the outsider, the outspoken American patriotism, and rooting for the underdog in society.
Hit after hit, pop-icon Harry Styles, once the centerpiece of the world's biggest boy bands has grown into someone who isn't afraid of self-expression, continuing to reject the traditional confines of masculinity.
In America, we define ourselves in the superlative: we are the biggest, strongest, fastest country in the world. Is it any wonder that so many of our heroes are on performance enhancing drugs? Director Christopher Bell explores America's win-at-all-cost culture by examining how his two brothers became members of the steroid-subculture in an effort to realize their American dream.
A documentary in which 5 men describe their experiences with gender dysphoria as they wrestled with feelings of inadequacy as men, and their ultimate pursuit to find peace in their natural bodies.
A journey into time, landscape and consciousness: The Southwestern United States in the black-and-white moving images and unsettling instrumental music. Entropy of the American dream.
A hard-hitting documentary that tackles head-on a controversial but increasingly alarming subject: young men's obsession with the perfect body, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs to achieve it. Once the preserve of top-level athletes, the use of anabolic steroids has become endemic among teenagers and young men with a passion for bodybuilding. Daring to tackle head-on the taboo of male beauty standards, Adonis offers a field investigation into the heart of this muscle-building machine, questioning the reasons behind and the physical, psychological and social risks of this race to the perfect body. As he stages his own vulnerability, the filmmaker lifts the veil on the scale of the public health crisis that is looming.
Filmmaker Christopher Quinn observes the ordeal of three Sudanese refugees -- Jon Bul Dau, Daniel Abul Pach and Panther Bior -- as they try to come to terms with the horrors they experienced in their homeland, while adjusting to their new lives in the United States.
Cuban drummer Elvis García reflects on his journey from Havana to Miami, struggling to make his way in the American city as a professional musician.
Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.
A crypto-trader and an ex-clergyman travel to Berlin to throw a sex party. Filmmaker Ayoto Ataraxia documents them and their sex-positive community with a phone during the week leading up to the event, discussing sex and life. But will they cum?
In Man Made, Sunny tries to find out what society's ideas regarding masculinity entails. Does testosteron define your masculinity? Can men be victims? And do men suffer under these ideas? In the twentieth century, feminists have fought for the freedom of women and subsequently their emancipation. Is now the time for the emancipation of men, are they next to be set free?
The collective of antipatriarchal men is a political organization that, since 2010, organizes spaces of group self-reflection to problematize the role of masculinity for those who identify as and/or are read as men. This documentary was filmed around one of their yearly regional forums.
Twenty-Five miles from town, a million miles from mainstream society, a loose-knit community of eco-pioneers, teenage runaways, war veterans and drop-outs, live on the fringe and off the grid, struggling to survive with little food, less water and no electricity, as they cling to their unique vision of the American dream.
ONLY IN THEATERS, a film by actor/director Raphael Sbarge, is an intimate and moving journey taken with the Laemmle family, spanning nearly three years of challenges, losses, and personal triumphs. Laemmle Theatres, the beloved 84-year-old arthouse cinema chain 3rd generation family business in Los Angeles, is facing seismic change and financial pressure. Yet the family behind this multigenerational business – whose sole mission has been to support the art of film – is determined to survive.