For the first 50 years of film history, the newsreel was a fixture in American movie theaters. From 1911 to 1967, these shorts proved an influential source of information – and misinformation – for generations of American moviegoers. Television news and public affairs programs became a great improvement over the scanty information offered by the newsreels. This documentary offers insight into a medium which has disappeared.
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Primary is a documentary film about the primary elections between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Primary is the first documentary to use light equipment in order to follow their subjects in a more intimate filmmaking style. This unconventional way of filming created a new look for documentary films where the camera’s lens was right in the middle of what ever drama was occurring. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1998.
A heartwarming exploration of a community art project by photographer Tawfik Elgazzar providing free portraits for locals and passers-by in Sydney, Australia's Inner West. The film explores the nature of individuality, cultural diversity and the positive joy for the photographer of seeing his subjects smile.
A portrait of American actress Uma Thurman, muse of legendary filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and courageous voice for the many victims of despotic producer Harvey Weinstein.
A total of 17 journalists have been fired since 2008, the beginning of LEE Myung-bak’s presidential term. They fought against the companies that they worked for succumbing to power and are now frustrated at reality where censorship of the press by authority has now become a norm. Can they continue their activities as journalists?
In 2007, the Writers Guild of America, the Screenwriters Union, hit an impasse in their contract negotiations with the Studios. At the center of the dispute was jurisdiction over the internet. Unable to make progress, the WGA called a strike which brought Hollywood to a halt for 100 days.
In 1981, a film about the misadventures of a German U-boat crew in 1941 becomes a worldwide hit almost four decades after the end of the World War II. Millions of viewers worldwide make Das Boot the most internationally successful German film of all time. But due to disputes over the script, accidents on the set, and voices accusing the makers of glorifying the war, the project was many times on the verge of being cancelled.
When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s "all in her head." Determined to live, she sets out on a virtual journey to document her story—and four other families' stories—fighting a disease medicine forgot.
Joanne is a model, a teacher, a fighter, a chameleon. But when her private semi-nude photos went public, this woman of many talents came to be simply known as 'the topless teacher'. Together with her former student, artist Simon Fujiwara, she seeks to reclaim her image through social media and branding tactics. Shifting between advertisement and portraiture, this meta-narrative on identity manages to infuse playfulness in its layered commentary on who you are and how you're seen.
The story of the abandoned production of 'Day of the Champion', a movie about Formula 1 which was set to film in 1966.
A documentary that details the process of restoring 270 of the 520 lost films of pioneering director Georges Méliès, all orchestrated by a Franco-American collaboration between Lobster Films, the National Film Center, and the Library of Congress.
Produced in the UK on a zero-budget, the filmmakers spent two years contacting and interviewing journalists, organisers and critics of the corrupt industrial practices highlighted by, but not limited to, the Leveson Inquiry in 2011. While the phone hacking scandal illuminated the depth and breadth of the cavalier flouting of legality and integrity in British journalism, there are larger implications and connections to ideology, entertainment, and political economy at work in this crisis. The Fourth Estate is the result of an examination of these connections at work.
The fantastic story of how an ancient martial art, Chinese kung fu, conquered the world through the hundreds of films that were produced in Hong Kong over the decades, transformed Western action cinema and inspired the birth of cultural movements such as blaxploitation, hip hop music, parkour and Wakaliwood cinema.
Jean Rochefort, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Philippe Noiret - This is the story of a bunch of friends. Comedian buddies. Actors who dreamed of the Conservatory and the National Theater of Paris. The theater was their ideal, cinema will be their paradise. Their friend Jean-Paul Belmondo, the relaxed Parisian, who failed the entrance exam, will make sparks fly. Rochefort, Marielle and Noiret, the three provincials, will climb the steps of recognition one by one. From the little cabarets on the Left Bank to the TV shows of the Buttes-Chaumont pioneers. From the second roles to the first and from the B movies to the classics.
As Hong Kong's foremost filmmaker, Johnnie To himself becomes the protagonist of this painstaking documentary exploring him and his Boundless world of film. A film student from Beijing and avid Johnnie To fan, Ferris Lin boldly approached To with a proposal to document the master director for his graduation thesis. To agreed immediately and Lin's camera closely followed him for over two years, capturing the man behind the movies and the myths. The result is Boundless, a candid profile of one of Hong Kong's greatest directors and a heartfelt love letter to Hong Kong cinema.
The history of Frankenstein's journey from novel to stage to screen to icon.
Music is an integral part of most films, adding emotion and nuance while often remaining invisible to audiences. Matt Schrader shines a spotlight on the overlooked craft of film composing, gathering many of the art form’s most influential practitioners, from Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman to Quincy Jones and Randy Newman, to uncover their creative process. Tracing key developments in the evolution of music in film, and exploring some of cinema’s most iconic soundtracks, 'Score' is an aural valentine for film lovers.
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall offers an extended meditation on representation. Moving beyond the accuracy or inaccuracy of specific representations, Hall argues that the process of representation itself constitutes the very world it aims to represent, and explores how the shared language of a culture, its signs and images, provides a conceptual roadmap that gives meaning to the world rather than simply reflecting it. Hall's concern throughout is the centrality of culture to the shaping of our collective perceptions, and how the dynamics of media representation reproduce forms of symbolic power.
Emilio Pascual, a historical figure of Andalusian cinema from the early 1900s, appears in today's Malaga with the mission of bringing the first documentary filmed in Andalusia to its first screening.
The history of the comic book superhero, Superman, in his various media incarnations.
Boogie Man is a comprehensive look at political strategist, racist, and former Republican National Convention Committee chairman, Lee Atwater, who reinvigorated the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans. He mentored Karl Rove and George W. Bush and played a key role in the elections of Reagan and George H.W. Bush.