Narrator (voice)
Agnes Martin (voice)
This film was shot during Easter 1985. It shows the preparation and staging of the Passion in the village of Norogachic, Mexico. The initiation rites of two Pascoleros, filmed for the first time, form the center of this document.
The Head of a Pin reveals the awkward ruminations of the filmmaker and her friends as they attempt to learn about nature. Starting out as an examination of the differences between urban and rural life, between the daily grind and summer vacations, the film turns unexpectedly into a portrait of what happens when city dwellers encounter a country spider.
After a twenty year period of multiple illnesses and injuries, the filmmaker turns the camera on herself as a way to analyze her chances for a happier, healthier life. In the process, she captures the frustration, tedium and petty annoyances of a revolving-door relationship with the medical establishment, while portraying the complicated web of emotions that accompany any medical problem. With humor and honesty, The Odds of Recovery uses the filmmaker's medical history as a means to address a perennial human problem: the desire to avoid conflict and deny the need for radical change.
Algerian director Hamid Benamra turns his focus to Mustapha Boutadjine, a charming, mercurial collage artist in Paris whose very work methods embody resistance, and celebrate those who work to liberate others. Boutadjine creates his portraits of Third World artists such as Miriam Makeba, and Algerian figures such as Assia Djebar from pieces of paper torn from high end fashion magazines and other, glossy, glitzy publications. Using this material is as much an act of rejecting bourgeois standards, which are often anti-North African in France, as much as elevating these figures and making them the social and visual standard against which we should judge ourselves, not the runway models of Chanel.
Blackout is a short, animated documentary about the 2003 power failure in much of the eastern seaboard of the U.S and Canada for up to 4 days.
What if, instead of bombs, we dropped watermelons? Dreamy and hopeful, this animated short sweeps us up into a colourful world where layers of reality and creativity intersect. Our protagonist navigates through it all seamlessly, and in the process shows us the importance of imagination.
A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?
On learning that her infant niece, Maya, is dying of a rare disease, newly pregnant Sharon decides she must return home to Buffalo, N.Y., to help out -- but instead, she steps into a hornet's nest of family turmoil. While Maya deteriorates, another crisis erupts when Karen -- Maya's mother -- becomes pregnant with the child of a former gang member in this cinema verité-style portrait of a family on the brink.
Far from home, 17-year-old Ying Ling practices for her examination to become a mortician at one of China's largest funeral homes. The everyday routine of this unusual occupation also serves up both humorous and life affirming moments.
Filmed in New York in the summer of 2006: a march across the Brooklyn Bridge in support of the Palestinian and Lebanese populations. Habibi means "beloved" in Arabic.
An animated history of American health care provider, Planned Parenthood.
A look at the high profile case of Liberian Olivia Zinnah, who died in 2012 of complications from a rape that occurred when she was just 7 years old.
A group of passionate young environmentalists spend 100 days in the jungles of Borneo in effort to save the rainforests and its endangered orangutans in this Australian documentary...
Rhoma Acans is a journey of self-discovery undertaken by the director in order to understand the true identity weight of her Gypsy heritage, from the history of his own family to the way it moves away or approaches the story of a young gypsy inside the tradition – Her name is Joaquina.
China's top drama academy stages the American musical "Fame," China's first official collaboration with Broadway, as the graduation showcase for its senior class. During the eight-month rehearsal, five students compete for roles, struggle with pressure from family and authority, and prepare to graduate into China's corrupt entertainment industry.
A descent into Eastern Europe's haunted woodlands uncovers the secrets, fairy tales, and bloody histories that shape our understanding of man's place in nature.
In 1971, inmates at Attica State Prison seized control of D-yard and took 35 hostages after peaceful efforts for reforms failed. Attica investigates the rebellion and its bloody suppression, revealing institutionalized injustices, sanctioned dishonesty, and abuses of power.
Documenting the creative brilliance and passion of three stand-up comedians working the comedy club circuit in the “flyover zones” of middle America, Road Comics: Big Work on Small Stages explores expectations of where and how comedy thrives today in the United States. Anthropologist and first-time filmmaker Susan Seizer follows comedians Stewart Huff, Tim Northern, and Kristin Key as they earn their living on the road, pausing along the way to discuss the business of being funny with regional club owners.
Ulrike Ottinger’s provocative mélange of ethnography, stunning tableaux and baroque vignettes was inspired by what she calls the “well-stocked miracle” of Korean wedding chests, assembled according to time-honored customs. This exploration of love and marriage in South Korea looks closely at ancient and present-day rituals, revealing what is old in the new and new in the old. Her inquiry leads us from shamans, temples and priests, to the enchanted maze of 21st-century Seoul, where vendors of medicinal herbs co-exist with high-tech beauty salons for wedding couples and secular marriage palaces. Using film much like a canvas, Ottinger creates a modern fairytale flush with mythological heroes, traditional rites, ancestral symbolism, dreams of eternal love, and a whole lot of Western kitsch. One of her most acclaimed documentaries, it captures the amazing phenomenon of new mega-cities and their contradictory societies caught in a balancing act.
"My Own Breathing" is the final documentary of the trilogy, The Murmuring about comfort women during the World War II directed by BYUN Young-joo. This is the completion of her seven years work. BYUN's first and second documentaries spoke of grandmothers' everyday life through the origin of their torment, while My Own Breathing goes back to their past from their everyday life. Deleting any device of narration or music, the camera lets grandmothers talk about themselves. Finally, the film revives their deep voices trampled by harsh history.