In the late 1990s, some officers at Vancouver Police Department made a documentary film (THROUGH A BLUE LENS) about the everyday lives of six drug addicts in Vancouver's skid row, the Downtown Eastside. TEARS FOR APRIL reintroduces us to these six people; with footage shot over a period of nearly ten years, it continues their biography.
Herself
The crazy story of two fancy boys, a French and a German, models and dancers, who won a Grammy award in 1990 just by moving their lips: the rise and fall of the Milli Vanilli duo. Playback singers, lies and video clips.
Afro-American men and women express their views on why some Black men are travelling from the US to Brazil to find sex partners.
Documentary depicting the lives of child prostitutes in the red light district of Songachi, Calcutta. Director Zana Briski went to photograph the prostitutes when she met and became friends with their children. Briski began giving photography lessons to the children and became aware that their photography might be a way for them to lead better lives.
This documentary, filmed over a 10-year period, centers on the debate over censorship as it follows Vancouver's Little Sister's Bookstore and its 20-year struggle with Canada Customs over the seizure of books. In the face of bigotry, bombings and repeated book seizures, it wages the most important legal battle in history against Canada Customs.
Robert Mitchum narrates an anti drug propaganda film.
Transsexuals? Transvestites? Skinheads? Anarchy? Street life, hustling and drag are explored with sophistication, emotional resonance and that certain extra something that'll make you want to change the impossible to the incredible.
This film describes the 1960s drug culture. Addicts discuss their experiences in the United States and in Vietnam. Dr. Stanley Yolles, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), talks about the drug culture and the NIMH role in prevention and treatment. The tape describes growth in the use of marijuana and heroin. In 1966, the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act is the first law to give the addict a choice of treatment or jail. Synanon in California is a private, self-help, residential community that helps people deal with their addictions. New York's Daytop Village works not only with addicts on addictions, but on developing a new lifestyle. Methadone, though still experimental, has proved to be an effective treatment for heroin addiction.
Stresses recognition and treatment of drug abuse emergencies, accurate identification of symptoms, and immediate clinical procedures. Presents scenes of actual cases in the emergency room and adjoining physician's offices of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. Viewers observe emergency treatment of patients in the major classes of drugs commonly abused, opiates, depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens. The film demonstrates to health professionals that successful management of drug overdoses can save most lives and avert additional organic and psychiatric complications.
This film presents a series of extemporaneous interviews with teenagers and young adults who have taken narcotics for "kicks," "association," or "curiosity." Residents of the California Rehabilitation Center relate how they were introduced to narcotics, why they wished they had not used drugs or narcotics, and what the future holds for them. Film is shot in Hollywood, Calif.
Ibogaine is a plant extract that stops drug addiction. In this documentary, a 34-year-old heroin addict undergoes ibogaine therapy with Dr Martin Polanco at the Ibogaine Association, a clinic in Rosarito, Mexico. In Gabon, where use of the iboga root is traditional, a Babongo woman's tribe uses the plant to help her recover from a depressive malaise. Director Benjamin De Loenen interviews people formerly addicted to heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine, who share their perspectives about ibogaine treatment.
Prostitutes of old age make their living in Praça da Luz, in São Paulo. Unusual and surprising accounts of five women who reveal in detail their experiences in all these years of profession.
In 2002, serial killer Patrice Alègre was sentenced to life imprisonment for five murders. Gendarme Roussel, the main investigator of this case, believes that he will make him confess to other unsolved crimes in Toulouse. Two ex-prostitutes give a series of names of presumed accomplices of the killer, among them Dominique Baudis, then president of the CSA. He decides to face the case alone. Around him, it is silence: not an official support of his political family. Almost twenty years later, we return to the Baudis affair to try to understand it, with the testimonies of Pierre and Benjamin Baudis, his sons, François Hollande, Camille Pascal and the main protagonists.
The Canadian Coast Range is a humbling place. The range dwarfs both exceptionally large human beings and egos with its foreboding size. Norseman Productions follows Dave Treadway and Henrik Windstedt as they push into the range on snowmobiles in pursuit of big lines the Coast Range is never short of.
Quiet towns across rural Australia are in the grip of an Ice epidemic. Major international drug cartels are working with local outlawed motorcycle gangs to push crystal meth to a captive market of children.
A filmed sequence dramatizes the problems addressed in the program: the story of a working mother addicted to barbiturates initially prescribed by her doctor.
The 60s equivalent of Reefer Madness and all those other 30s drug exploitation flicks. Apparently, dropping acid leads to stripteases, cat fights, promiscuous sex, playing with kittens, and being convinced your dinner is much larger than it actually is. This is all illustrated in a series of silent sketches accompanied by a droll narrator who seems positively doped out of his mind.
A film documenting work shortages during the Depression of the 1930s and the attempts to deal with the unemployed, in particular young men. The film discusses the establishment of relief camps and projects, where men were paid twenty cents per day; the founding of organizations such as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), Workers' Unity League, and Relief Camp Workers' Union; general unionization and protest of the unemployed, including the On To Ottawa Trek, Regina Riot, sit-in strike from May to June 1938 at the Vancouver Main Post Office, Vancouver Art Gallery and Hotel Georgia, and the resulting Bloody Sunday of June 19.