
For 200 years, the United States Congress has been one of the country's most important and least understood institutions. In this elegant, thoughtful and often touching portrait, Ken Burns explores the history and promise of this unique American institution. Using historical photographs and newsreels, evocative live footage and interviews with David Broder, Alistair Cooke, Cokie Roberts, Charles McDowell and others, the award-winning film chronicles the personalities, events and issues that have animated the first 200 years of Congress and, in turn, our country.

Self - Journalist
Self - Newspaperman
Self - Historian
Self - Former Senator
Self - Reporter
Self - Photographer
Self - Historian

For 200 years, the United States Congress has been one of the country's most important and least understood institutions. In this elegant, thoughtful and often touching portrait, Ken Burns explores the history and promise of this unique American institution. Using historical photographs and newsreels, evocative live footage and interviews with David Broder, Alistair Cooke, Cokie Roberts, Charles McDowell and others, the award-winning film chronicles the personalities, events and issues that have animated the first 200 years of Congress and, in turn, our country.
1989-03-19
7.8
5.9At the end of September 1941, Soviet artillery troops in besieged Leningrad realize that pretty soon they will fire their last shot, and after that the defense of the city will be doomed. The film is based on a true event: a small group of fearless soldiers transported a large supply of gunpowder through enemy lines to Leningrad.
4.5What is stranger than the big hole that opens up in Lucy Sherrington's living room floor? As it turns out, love.
7.7The first rule is that there are no rules. For the bare-knuckle combatants competing in Musangwe fights, anything goes - you can even put a curse on him. The sport, which dates back centuries, has become a South African institution. Any male from the age of nine to ninety can compete. We follow a group of fighters as they slug it out in the ring. Who will be this year's champion?
7.7After his show That remains my joy! Alexandre Astier returns to the stage ventures where we do not expect it and raises the question of extraterrestrial life.
4.5Max films his friends having lecherous fun at his own birthday party; unaware of how it will change his life. Just out of high school, by haphazard, he becomes a big porno producer. His father, a principled police major, chases porno makers, not suspecting that one of them lives in his own apartment. Hoodlums and girls from good families, corrupted policemen, petty dealers find themselves in a luring and scary world of porno.
6.9A community is under siege as three Belmont Highschool coed students go missing with no trace of their whereabouts. The pressure is on the police to capture the culprits responsible. Scouring the school hallways in search of clues, undercover female detective Maggie Rawdon (Jessica Sonnerborn) enters Belmont High as a transfer student in an attempt to solve the hideous disappearance of the students. Maggie makes a few new friends, and gets invited to a private rave in the country. Just as the group begins to suspect that they've taken a wrong turn, however, the trap is sprung and Maggie finds out firsthand what fate has befallen the missing girls.
7.6Drama descends upon two tennis-obsessed women as the tension moves from off the court and into the café.
6.6The story of Charlotte Brown,a waitress and young single mother who will do anything for her daughter Jenny, and when push comes to shove, she does. With a menacing figure on the other end of the phone and a time limit of two hours,she must raise enough money to ensure that she sees the smiling face of her child again. Charlotte's customers are her only hope. The clock is ticking as we see the desperate young mother dealing with one eccentric customer after the next, displaying her charming vulnerability and inspiring strength through all the chaos. With her feet firmly planted on the ground, Charlotte maintains her focus and attempts to beat the clock and save the day.
5.9Tension mounts between a quadraplegic man and his wife as she prepares a bath for him.
7.5A woman living in main street goes to school in a rich environment, but she is full of loneliness. One day she saw a cloud and decided to go to Sinchon Station, so she met a new man. Her little lie started the meeting between the two.
6.9While Yeung Kam Wing is trying to remove all connections between the mob and him, his actions are being carefully observed by Lau Kin Ming, who bears a personal grudge against him.
7.9Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creators of the hit television series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, reflect on the creation of the masterful series.
5.6It's the end of the century at a corner of the city in a building riddled with crime - Everyone in the building has turned into zombies. After Jenny's boyfriend is killed in a zombie attack, she faces the challenge of surviving in the face of adversity. In order to stay alive, she struggles with Andy to flee danger.
6.1On the edge of a crumbling city, 11-year-old Alexander lives in a sequestered commune alongside other children, their mothers, and charismatic leader, Gregori. Gregori teaches the children how to raise livestock, grow vegetables, work as a community - and how to kill. With the birth of a new baby brother weighing on his mind, Alexander begins to question Gregori’s overpowering influence on the children and their training to become assassins. Threatened by his increasing unwillingness to fall in line, Gregori’s behavior turns erratic and adversarial toward the child he once considered a son. With the two set dangerously at odds and the commune’s way of life disintegrating, the residents fear a violent resolution is at hand.
7.0This is a story about a city guy Nikolai, who will have to go instead of his friend on a rural business trip. A series of funny events, meetings and the beauty of the Yakut village encourage Nikolai to make an important decision in his life…
6.3Rome, 1984, Aria is nine-year-old girl. On the verge of divorce, Aria's infantile and selfish parents are too preoccupied with their careers and extra-marital affairs to properly tend to any of Aria's needs. While her two older sisters are pampered, Aria is treated with cold indifference. Yet she yearns to love and to be loved. At school, Aria excels academically but is considered a misfit by everyone. She is misunderstood. Aria finds comfort in her cat - Dac and in her best friend - Angelica. Thrown out of both parents' homes, abandoned by all, even her best friend, Aria finally reaches the limit of what she can bear. She makes an unexpected decision in her life.
7.4“Re-Existence” is a documentary about migration stories of individuals from the Brazilian queer community.
6.7A tramp tries to earn money by playing the violin, but he’s soon facing off against the jealous competition.
7.3Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for health reasons. There, he becomes obsessed with the stunning beauty of an adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido as Aschenbach.
7.8A biopic of Temple Grandin, an autistic American who has become one of the leading scientists in humane livestock handling.
6.1The year is 1764. For over a year, Josef has been leading a precarious life in Venice. He hopes to become an opera composer. The city, full of talented and already-established composers, seems closed to him. Looking for work as a violinist, he comes into the orbit of a rich young woman. Thanks to her, he gets the opportunity to play at salons. But his real opportunity arises when he becomes the lover of a libertine marquise. She teaches him worldly manners, rids him of signs of a provincial upbringing and introduces him to a hedonistic existence free from religious intolerance. Thus transformed, Josef gets an incan incredible commission: to write an opera for the San Carlo, Europe's largest theatre.
Iranian film director Amir Naderi talks to Zar Amir Ebrahimi about his career in this documentary directed and produced by Ebrahimi and broadcast by BBC World Service and BBC Persian. Amir Naderi is one of the most influential figures of Iranian modern cinema. He was born in 1945 in the Persian Gulf port of Abadan. Orphaned at an early age and living the life of a street urchin, Naderi had to survive by selling ice, working as a shoeshine boy and recycling empty beer bottles. He developed his knowledge of cinema by watching films in the theaters where he worked at a very young age. He began his career by taking pictures for some notable Iranian features. In the 1970’s, he started directing his own films, and made some of the most important movies of the New Iranian Cinema. After moving to New York in the early 90’s, Amir Naderi continued to make films. They have premiered at the Venice, Cannes, Tribeca, and Sundance Film Festivals.
7.2Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world.
7.1After defeating France and imprisoning Napoleon on Elba, ending two decades of war, Europe is shocked to find Napoleon has escaped and has caused the French Army to defect from the King back to him. The best of the British generals, the Duke of Wellington, beat Napolean's best generals in Spain and Portugal, but now must beat Napoleon himself with an Anglo Allied army.
7.5"Patton" tells the tale of General George S. Patton, famous tank commander of World War II. The film begins with Patton's career in North Africa and progresses through the invasion of Germany and the fall of the Third Reich. Side plots also speak of Patton's numerous faults such his temper and habit towards insubordination.
6.8Aging King George III of England is exhibiting signs of madness, a problem little understood in 1788. As the monarch alternates between bouts of confusion and near-violent outbursts of temper, his hapless doctors attempt the ineffectual cures of the day. Meanwhile, Queen Charlotte and Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger attempt to prevent the king's political enemies, led by the Prince of Wales, from usurping the throne.
4.8Popular Hong Kong actress Amy Yip plays Sister Har -- a seminal figure in 1960s and '70s Hong Kong nightlife -- in this biographical film that follows the scenester's rise and fall from the upper echelons of society to the glamour and excess of Hong Kong's teeming underworld. A truly fascinating portrait of the allure and excess that were part of the fabric of Asia's favorite playground.
6.6The 1960s was an extraordinary time for the United States. Unburdened by post-war reparations, Americans were preoccupied with other developments like NASA, the game-changing space programme that put Neil Armstrong on the moon. Yet it was astronauts like Eugene Cernan who paved the uneven, perilous path to lunar exploration. A test pilot who lived to court danger, he was recruited along with 14 other men in a secretive process that saw them become the closest of friends and adversaries. In this intensely competitive environment, Cernan was one of only three men who was sent twice to the moon, with his second trip also being NASA’s final lunar mission. As he looks back at what he loved and lost during the eight years in Houston, an incomparably eventful life emerges into view. Director Mark Craig crafts a quietly epic biography that combines the rare insight of the surviving former astronauts with archival footage and otherworldly moonscapes.
6.9Barbra Streisand grew up in working class Brooklyn, dreaming of escape from her tough childhood. A stellar student, she resisted the pressure to go to college as her sights were firmly set on Broadway. She was determined to become an actress and landed her first role aged 16, but it was two years later, when she started to sing, that her career took off. Subverting stereotypes and breaking glass ceilings, this programme looks at her rise to stardom and the remarkable achievements of her early career.
7.1The Academy Award® nominee Cosmic Voyage combines live action with state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery to pinpoint where humans fit in our ever-expanding universe. Highlighting this journey is a "cosmic zoom" based on the powers of 10, extending from the Earth to the largest observable structures in the universe, and then back to the subnuclear realm.
1.0A documentary about surrealist artist Salvador Dali, narrated by Orson Welles.
4.5Hopkins’ career has spanned several decades, which is why we will also use many interviews that he gave throughout his life, allowing us to put him back into the context of each period and will be helpful in understanding his role in the history of cinema, because he was far from following the trends. He never belonged to any film movement; he is a chameleon that has always preferred natural acting, ‘non-acting’ when method acting was the fashion.
Released on DVD as part of The Criterion Collection's "Martha Graham: Dance on Film" collection.
6.8Heaven Adores You is an intimate, meditative inquiry into the life and music of Elliott Smith. By threading the music of Elliott Smith through the dense, yet often isolating landscapes of the three major cities he lived in -- Portland, New York City, Los Angeles -- Heaven Adores You presents a visual journey and an earnest review of the singer's prolific songwriting and the impact it continues to have on fans, friends, and fellow musicians.
5.8A barefoot contessa, a screwed-up princess, an exquisite drunk, a bawdy aristocrat, a nightmare for puritanical America and the moguls of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Ava Gardner never stopped loving those she loved. She turned women green and made men sweat. And rejected with all her force the bulwark of normality.
6.8The life of Camille Claudel, a French sculptor who becomes the apprentice of Auguste Rodin and later his lover. Her passion for her art and Rodin drive her further away from reason and rationality.
7.3Tati Express dives into Jacques Tati's films and how they look at a changing world throughout the 20th century. It shows how modernity impacts human-beings and goes through that amazing body of work at 100 mph.