Did you know that the quaint custom of Christmas caroling actually began with drunk and rowdy revelers threatening people door to door looking for food and liquor? Early versions of the heartwarming legend of Santa Claus described him as a horrible devil named Krampus who beat and kidnapped naughty children. In America during the 17th and 18th Centuries, celebrating Christmas was against the law! There's a lot to tell about the history of Christmas, and a lot you may not know. Along the way, meet Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey, The Grinch and Rudolph, and learn the true origins of our Christmas traditions. So grab some eggnog and a slice of fruitcake as HISTORY unwraps THE REAL STORY OF CHRISTMAS.
Did you know that the quaint custom of Christmas caroling actually began with drunk and rowdy revelers threatening people door to door looking for food and liquor? Early versions of the heartwarming legend of Santa Claus described him as a horrible devil named Krampus who beat and kidnapped naughty children. In America during the 17th and 18th Centuries, celebrating Christmas was against the law! There's a lot to tell about the history of Christmas, and a lot you may not know. Along the way, meet Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey, The Grinch and Rudolph, and learn the true origins of our Christmas traditions. So grab some eggnog and a slice of fruitcake as HISTORY unwraps THE REAL STORY OF CHRISTMAS.
2010-12-01
6.8
From bespoke baubles to extravagant gifts and £615000 diamond-encrusted tree toppers, this programme meets the people supplying and buying a top-end Christmas.
When the gang goes on safari, they encounter a variety of freaky, glowing demon animals.
The Making-of James Cameron's Avatar. It shows interesting parts of the work on the set.
As the Trost District is reclaimed from the Titans, Eren is taken under the wing of Captain Levi and his squad, who decide to try and teach him to master his mysterious abilities.
Tension mounts between a quadraplegic man and his wife as she prepares a bath for him.
A young woman lives sadly in a small garrison town with a soldier. Little by little, won over by boredom, sadness, total inaction, she develops a relationship with plants and starts talking to plants.
Did the Nazis ever see Charlie Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator'? Yugoslavia, 1942 - The young Serbian projectionist Nikola Radosevic decides to teach the German oppressors a lesson they won't forget. The beginning of a true and astonishing World War II resistance story.
is a creative documentary-fiction film and a film that might expand your sense of reality. It is the story about a man who enters the virtual world Second Life to pursue his personal dreams and ambitions. His journey into cyberspace becomes a magic learning experience, which gradually opens the gates to a much larger reality.
Through seven scenes, the film follows the life and destinies of stray dogs from the margins of our society, leading us to reconsider our attitude towards them. Through the seven “wandering” characters that we follow at different ages, from birth to old age, we witness their dignified struggle for survival. At the cemetery, in an abandoned factory, in an asylum, in a landfill, in places full of sorrow, our heroes search for love and togetherness. By combining documentary material, animation and acting interpretation of the thoughts of our heroes, we get to know lives between disappointment and hope, quite similar to ours.
A New York drug dealer is kidnapped, and his wife must try to come up with the money and drugs to free him from his abductors before Christmas.
High school is almost over and four friends are going their separate ways as they go to college. But they have one more chance to spend some time together: Inspection 12, their favorite band, is playing one last concert in Jacksonville, FL.
Do, Re and Mi in this sequeal tells the tale of a group of gangsters who are planning to rob a bank. So they use this oppurtunity to con them out of it and capture them at the same time. Many comedic memorable moments are carried out through the movie.
When Princess Peach is kidnapped by the monster King Koopa, Mario and his brother Luigi journey to the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue her.
Nala, a thirteen-year-old girl from the city, travels with her family to her grandmother's home in the countryside, to try to find a cure for her little sister's mysterious illness - But she'll soon find her granny is not exactly what she seems...
Six college friends blowing off steam on a camping trip, find themselves caught up in a cat and mouse hunt with an Alien monster. Not knowing what to do or who to trust, they struggle to protect themselves. Reluctantly, they join forces with another, seemingly friendly, alien, Ava, who orbits the Earth and appears to them in the form of an avatar. Having only one chance at stopping the monster, they must race to locate and repair the Ava’s earth sent robot, before it slaughters them one by one.
John tells the story of a young male, a psychiatric hospital patient who witnesses the death of another Black male patient at the hands of white staff. Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, this work draws from real life cases of mentally ill Black men who have died as a result of excessive force of the State.
Police officers around Tokyo are being murdered by an unknown assailant. When Ran witnesses an attempt on the life of one of her friends in the police, she loses her memory. Now, Conan and Inspector Megure must find the murderer while Ran attempts to regain her lost memories.
On his request, the sensitive sister of a real estate agent visits a house he intends to put up for sale, only to cross paths with its resident curse.
Documentary taking a look at the making of the controversial 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave.
A look at the global culture and appeal of the LEGO building-block toys.
An extraordinary journey deep into space offering fresh insight into the origins and evolution of the universe.
A short film about Pete Seeger and the birth of banjo music throughout the Southern United States.
The film evokes all the aspects of bullfighting - its history, the bulls, the toreros, the arena, the audience - and involves numerous matadors from the era.
In 1910, the Pennsylvania Railroad successfully accomplished the enormous engineering feat of building tunnels under New York City's Hudson and East Rivers, connecting the railroad to New York and New England, knitting together the entire eastern half of the United States. The tunnels terminated in what was one of the greatest architectural achievements of its time, Pennsylvania Station. Penn Station covered nearly eight acres, extended two city blocks, and housed one of the largest public spaces in the world. But just 53 years after the station’s opening, the monumental building that was supposed to last forever, to herald and represent the American Empire, was slated to be destroyed.
Appalachian Journey is one of five films made from footage that Alan Lomax shot between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS American Patchwork series (1991). It offers songs, dances, stories, and religious rituals of the Southern Appalachians. Preachers, singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, cloggers, and square dancers recount the good times and the hard times of rural life there. Performers include Tommy Jarrell, Janette Carter, Ray and Stanley Hicks, Frank Proffitt Jr., Sheila Kay Adams, Nimrod Workman and Phyllis Boyens, Raymond Fairchild, and others, with a bonus of a few African-Americans from the North Carolina Piedmont.
By the time "It's A Mean Old World" was filmed, Reverend Pearly Brown had been struggling to survive singing gospel music for nearly 40 years. While the rough sound of his bottleneck playing has the feel of a life spent scuffling on the street, the poignancy of his voice is a better measure of the gentle spirit and inner strength of the man.
The incredible story of the Avro Lancaster, one of the finest bombers of the Second World War, which played a crucial role in the long and savage campaign to defeat Hitler's Third Reich. This documentary features interviews with surviving veterans of Bomber Command, who share frank personal accounts of their part in an aerial battle of attrition which claimed the lives of 55'000 aircrew.
Documentary film about the "zanja de Alsina", a long trench dug in the Argentinian Pampa in 1876 as way to separate the "civilized" from the "barbarians" during the massacre of indigenous peoples known as "campaña del desierto".
Antarctica: A Frozen History takes a look at the history and stories of the human explorations in the Antarctic. Although quite slow paced and relatively old, the documentary film successfully incorporates reconstructed film material and original Antarctic expedition footage to fully illustrate the hardships of the heroic and extreme arctic explorations. Human endurance is tested to the maximum, as the documentary takes a look back at those who have tried, failed and conquered this most unforgiving landscape. Some of these stories entail Robert Falcon Scott, a Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery expedition of 1901–1904 and the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910–1913. Scott reached the South Pole in January 1912 only to find he had been beaten to the spot by 33 days. His entire party died on the return journey; eight months later, a search party discovered some of their bodies, diaries and photographs.
Francois the Tree Man is far from his wife and three small children in Quebec, selling Christmas trees and living in a van on the streets of New York City. He does it for them. But this is home, too. Like the hundreds of Christmas tree sellers who descend upon the city from Canada, New England and even Europe, Francois delivers the magic of the season over a grueling month in his adopted neighborhood. He's a star, a storyteller, a Santa Claus in a sap-stained coat, a confidant, a friend, and a father figure to the local characters who are his New York family. They also need him. TREE MAN is the story of Francois's journey, how he arrived here, what holds him, and the conflict that will cause him to leave. As one of Francois' long-time customers says: "This has nothing to do with the trees anymore."
Chez Schwartz takes us inside a year in the life of Schwartz's Deli - the unique 75-year-old landmark on Montreal's historic Main. Filmed through changing seasons, from the quiet of early morning preparation to the frenetic bustle of packed lunch times and never ending line-ups, to the more relaxed ambiance late at night - Chez Schwartz is an evocative, cinematic portrait of a small spunky deli known worldwide equally for its atmosphere and smoked meat.
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.
On April 13, 2011, Les Films 13 production company turned 50. How can one celebrate an anniversary of this sort ? By simply making "another" film that would sum up all the earlier ones. D'un film à l'autre is hence a kind of anthology of the films produced Les Films 13 since the 1960s (short and feature films written and directed for the main part by Claude Lelouch), a best-of of half a century of cinema, going from Le Propre de l'homme to What Love May Bring. A biography in images of a filmmaker as admired as he is criticized. In reality, D'un film à l'autre is more than a series of film excerpts, interviews, and making-of documents (some of which possess an undeniable historical value, like that from A Man and A Woman, or the final performances of Patrick Dewaere).
The key to the communal laundry room in the block of flats on the Rue de Genève 85 in Lausanne serves a much greater function than merely unlocking the door. This encounter between a symbol of typical Swiss mentality with a penchant for order and the tenants who have been housed here by the city’s social services department is not something to be taken for granted. Although the laundry room is normally located in the cellar, the tenants in this building share a tiny laundry room off the entrance hall because the cellar is reserved for prostitution. To maintain order and cleanliness, the landlord hires Claudina, a new “laundry woman”.
22 year-old Jade graduated with a degree in Fashion from Manchester Metropolitan University in the summer of 2015. But rather than work in the world of fashion, Jade - aka Carly Rae Summers - has decided to pursue a career in porn. This film follows Jade as she embarks on her new full-time career, travelling to shoots in London, Barcelona and Prague, and explores the practical and ethical issues that surround a young female porn star in Britain today. Why would a well-educated young woman with a range of career options choose to pursue a career in porn?
Scenes on an ostrich farm, filmed in Natal during the Boer War.