A documentary about a case of police brutality in the 80's NYC, the killing of graffiti artist Michael Stewart
The story of the legendary wits who lunched daily at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City during the 1920s. The core of the so-called Round Table group included short story and poetry writer Dorothy Parker; comic actor and writer Robert Benchley; The New Yorker founder Harold Ross; columnist and social reformer Heywood Broun; critic Alexander Woollcott; and playwrights George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber and Robert Sherwood.
An in-depth investigation into the private world of the American writer J. D. Salinger (1919-2010), who lived most of his life behind the impenetrable wall of a self-imposed seclusion: how his dramatic experiences during World War II influenced his life and work, his relationships with very young women, his obsessive writing methods, his many literary secrets.
People from different ethnic backgrounds with "difficult" names by Western standards share their experience with moving through the world with an identity that challenges others to simply just say their name. A short social docu-film by Mariam Meliksetyan, “Say My Name” is a meditation on identity, otherness, assimilation, community, and ancestral roots.
When the film West Side Story was released in 1961, New York's reviled Puerto Rican community gained some visibility and, over time, both in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx, neighborhoods plagued by poverty, drugs and crime, Hispanic identity was reborn and strengthened, thanks to a syncretic and intentionally popular music that eventually conquered the entire city.
Between scenes from his concert in São Paulo's oft-inaccessible Theatro Municipal, rapper and activist Emicida celebrates the rich legacy of Black Brazilian culture.
New York City, 1977 - It was a time when the city had fallen into decay, with too few jobs, money, police, schools, and social services. There was a city wide blackout with major looting, a serial killer on the loose, and the Bronx was burning. And yet out of the chaos emerged one of the most creative times any city has ever encountered.
Recently widowed from a man 50 years her senior and bored to tears with covering ladies fashion, Lady Grace leaped at the chance to be the only woman onboard one of the media sensations of the decade. At journey's end she returned to America a star, thanks to her good looks and gutsy charm. But her reports on the ship's travels for the front pages of the Hearst press empire only told part of the story. In her diary she recorded a far more intimate journey-her struggle to get over her secret affair with shipmate, mentor, and married man Karl von Wiegand. Combining spectacular archival footage of the journey across New York, Siberia, Tokyo, and the Pacific with narration drawn from Drummond's articles and her private journals, this sweeping black and white documentary stands as a vision of technological marvels and global hope in that narrow window between world wars when everything seemed possible except true love.
The poet and painter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is among the world's living monuments to arts and letters. For well over a half century, Ferlinghetti helped shape the currents of poetry and literature with his forceful engagement with society and an ideological position that often found him at odds with the political currents of his day. Ferlinghetti's quiet, behind the scenes demeanor and disarming mien may have assuaged, or even fooled, certain opponents, while in reality he was a literary mercenary, a rebel at the forefront of our own cultural revolution.
An impressionistic, graphic history of one of the world's most infamous streets: Manhattan's 42nd Street. Likened to a DNA strip of New York City, the street has ranged from the glamorous to the derelict, housing everything from peep shows to such international institutions as the United Nations. The documentary is an exploration of the street's expansion from the farmland where Washington bivouacked his troops to the flashy, commercial center that it is today. With historical information, musical performances and personal narratives, the film traces the rise, subsequent dilapidation, and eventual resurgence of a street that has come to represent a place where, notoriously, anything may and has happened.
A concert film highlighted by performances from Marvin Gaye, Jerry Butler, and Roberta Flack.
In the late ‘90s, “Sex and the City” took television by storm with its honest and hilarious perspective on love, relationships… and sex, earning legions of devoted fans. Over 20 years later, this exclusive and immersive documentary offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at the filming of the new chapter, “And Just Like That…”.
Driving through New York City in his Sexmobile, Dr. Harrison Rogers of the Bureau of Sexological Investigation, searches out luminary figures in the world of sex.
Government inquiry revealed a pattern of neglect, high child mortality rates and lack of burial records among mother and baby homes once run by Ireland's religious orders. Mothers recount the shame and secrecy attached to pregnancy outside marriage and their long struggle to be reunited with the children that many claim were illegally adopted, while adoptees reveal how they were thwarted from accessing birth records.
The first major uprising against police brutality, harassment, and societal oppression was not at Stonewall in 1969, but at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco three years earlier. Those who stood up were trans women and gay men. Now, nearly 40 years on, Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman tell the story of this oft-overlooked event in the history of American civil rights.
A feature length, lively - montage style - documentary, capturing the essence of what life was like in socialist Hungary - dubbed the "The most cheerful barrack" back then - using contemporary music, interviews, adverts and news footages.
Jon Reiss and his crew travel to Asia, Australia, the Middle East and beyond, exploring the local graffiti scenes and artists. Follow-up to the groundbreaking street art documentary "Bomb It".
A review of the wild New York City nightlife of the 90s. The cast of characters who made up the infamous Club Kids speak candidly about that era, culminating with Alig's release from incarceration.
In this visual essay, Charles Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance, author of "Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema", draws upon a wealth of photography as well as a wide range of interviews (Paulette Goddard, Sydney Chaplin, Chuck Jones, Leni Riefenstahl, Mel Brooks, Joan Collins et al.) to examine the production history of "The Great Dictator", the film's importance as a satire, and legacy.
These children live in the four corners of the earth, but share the same thirst for learning. They understand that only education will allow them a better future and that is why, every day, they must set out on the long and perilous journey that will lead them to knowledge. Jackson and his younger sister from Kenya walk 15 kilometres each way through a savannah populated by wild animals; Carlito rides more than 18 kilometres twice a day with his younger sister, across the plains of Argentina; Zahira lives in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains who has an exhausting 22 kilometres walk along punishing mountain paths before she reaches her boarding school; Samuel from India sits in a clumsy DIY wheelchair and the 4 kilometres journey is an ordeal each day, as his two younger brothers have to push him all the way to school…