A film in two parts about a fierce and deadly battle raging between farmers and landowners in the Philippines. The first part tracks the Sumilao farmers’ gruelling 1,700-kilometer journey through scorching heat, rains, fatigue, and great uncertainty to the presidential palace in Manila. The second part tells the story of the sugarcane workers from Negros.
2009-02-19
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Unable to understand why parenting seems like a constant uphill battle, an emotionally exhausted mother who can’t connect with her two young sons courageously confronts the events of her own traumatic childhood.
Akerman spends a brief period on her own in an apartment by the sea in Tel Aviv. She films from the apartment and in her narration she talks about her family, her Jewish identity and her childhood. She wonders whether normal everyday life is possible in this place and whether filming is a realistic option.
Derek and Nancy Haysom were brutally murdered in their house in Lynchburg, Virginia, on March 30, 1985. Suspicion fell on their daughter Elizabeth and her boyfriend Jens Söring. They flee to Europe, but are caught and extradited to the U.S. Elizabeth is sentenced to 90 years in jail for incitement to murder, Jens Söring to two life sentences. Karin Steinberger, Marcus Vetter and their team spent over three years researching this case, which achieved world-wide notoriety. They uncovered new evidence, including the fact none of the blood samples found at the scene of the crime belonged to Jens Söring.
In 1936, 18 African American athletes dubbed the "black auxiliary" by Hitler defied Nazi Aryan Supremacy and Jim Crow Racism to win hearts and medals at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin. The world remembers Jesse Owens. But, Olympic Pride American Prejudice shows how all 18 are a seminal precursor to the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Homeless since the age of nine, South African skateboarder Thalente Biyela travels to the US to pursue his dream of becoming a professional skateboarder. Through his eyes, we experience what it takes to rise up out of circumstance and escape a lifetime on the streets.
In Uganda, a new bill threatens to make homosexuality punishable by death. David Kato - Uganda's first openly gay man - and his fellow activists work against the clock to defeat the legislation while combating vicious persecution in their daily lives. But no one, not even the filmmakers, is prepared for the brutal murder that shakes the movement to its core and sends shock waves around the world.
When President Abdoulaye Wade wanted to run for office yet again in 2011, a resistance movement formed on the streets. Shortly afterwards, a group of school friends, including rappers Thiat and Kilifeu, set up "Y'en a marre" ("We Are Fed Up"), with filmmaker Rama Thiaw soon coming on board to start documenting events – meetings, campaigns, arrests, concerts, states of exhaustion, trips – from an "insider" perspective. Over several years, a stirring portrait emerged of a youth protest movement to whom independent observers were not the only ones to ascribe the role of "kingmaker" in the last elections. Rama Thiaw shows the rappers and their environment with an intimacy whose cinematographic finesse provides space and context for the thorny conflicts between music and politics, street and state.
In 2000, a California State Prison inmate serving Life Without Parole (LWOP) approached the warden to request a dedicated yard for men serving life sentences that would break the code of violence dominating prison life. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) subsequently transformed Yard A at California State Prison into The Progressive Programming Facility, which inmates call The Honor Yard. The only one of its kind in the United States, this experimental prison yard is free of violence, racial tensions, gang activity and illegal drug and alcohol use.
Croatia, 7th of January 1992: In the middle of the war, a young journalist's body is discovered dressed in the uniform of an international mercenary group. Twenty years later, his cousin Anja Kofmel investigates his story.
Stonecarvers, masons, carpenters, smiths, electricians, woodworkers, restorers, goldsmiths: the extraordinary, never-ending saga of the fabrication of Milan Cathedral is portrayed in the light of the sacredness of a building that lives through times, rhythms, calendars and aspirations that merge with and transcend the labor of men and women. The anonymous, humble, painstaking everyday care required by a structure such as the Cathedral, over the years and still today, reveals the magnificence of human action that spans time and generations, holding within itself a grand humanist sentiment.
This documentary tells four stories of Apartheid in South Africa, as seen through the eyes of the Truth and Reconciliation commission
Seeking Asian Female is an eccentric modern love story about Steven and Sandy – an aging white man with “yellow fever” who is obsessed with marrying any Asian woman, and the young Chinese bride he finds online. Debbie, a Chinese American filmmaker, documents and narrates with skepticism and humor, from the early stages of Steven’s search, through the moment Sandy steps foot in California for the first time, to a year into their precarious union. Global migration, Sino-American relations and the perennial battle of the sexes, weigh in on the fate of their marriage in this intimate and quirky personal documentary.
Ebony Goddess: Queen of Ilê Aiyê follows three women competing to be the carnival queen of Ilê Aiyê, a prominent and controversial Afro-Brazilian group with an all-black membership. The selection is based on Afro-centric notions of beauty, in counterpoint to prevailing standards of beauty in Brazil, a country famous for slim supermodels and plastic surgery. Contestants for the title of Ebony Goddess dress in flowing African-style garments, gracefully performing traditional Afro-Brazilian dances to songs praising the beauty of black women.
Festive Land examines one of the largest and most extraordinary popular celebrations in the world, the week-long Carnival that brings more than two million people to the streets of Salvador, the capital of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil. Carnival is the most expressive showcase of the unique cultural richness of Bahia, where African culture has survived, prospered, and evolved, mixing with other Brazilian influences to create forms found nowhere else in the world. The film captures this unique cultural energy through extraordinary footage of musical performances, dances, religious manifestations, and street celebrations. At the same time, Carnival reflects the racial and social tensions of Brazil's heterogeneous society. At first glance there appear to be two million people chaotically mixed on the streets, but a more detailed look reveals how patterns of segregation driven by racial, social and economic differences continue in Carnival.
A personal meditation on the landscape of the American West that tracks the ruling conception in nature in the 19th and 20th centuries from the pioneers through the instamatic tourists, at the same time that it obsessively follows the four seasons. The elemental vicissitudes of the weather, the exact moment of the day, the colour of the light and the soil and the trees form an acute visual record of the constantly changing mood of the landscape. The film successfully attempts, with quiet, passionate, almost single-minded firmness, to confront us as nakedly as possible with our cultural inability to see nature whole, without preconceptions.
An exciting inside look at the stars of Lucha Libre, Mexico's distinctly colorful brand of professional wrestling, where flesh and blood Superheroes have performed for generations of fans. With unprecedented access to some of the top Luchadores in the world, LUCHA MEXICO goes behind the mysterious mask to explore one of the most cherished traditions of Mexican culture.
Impressions of the rue Mouffetard, Paris 5, through the eyes of a pregnant woman.
Brooklyn Castle is a documentary about I.S. 318 – an inner-city school where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level – that also happens to have the best, most winning junior high school chess team in the country. (If Albert Einstein, who was rated 1800, were to join the team, he’d only rank fifth best.) Chess has transformed the school from one cited in 2003 as a “school in need of improvement” to one of New York City’s best. But a series of recession-driven public school budget cuts now threaten to undermine those hard-won successes.
A film about non-territorial office space, multi-mobile knowledge workers, Blackberries and Miles&More. A road movie discovering the working world of tomorrow. This documentary will take you on a journey through the post-industrial knowledge and services workshops, our supposed future working place. In this new world work will be handled more liberally. Time clocks cease to exist. Attention is not compulsory any more. The resource “human“ comes into focus. The film closely follows the high-tech work force – people who are highly mobile and passionate to make their work their purpose in life. Further episodes resume this topic and lead into the world of modern office architecture and into the world of Human Resource Management.
“The Bella Vista” is the story of a house started as a football club, becoming a successful transvestite brothel and changes at last to a Catholic Chapel, all in a small conservative village in Uruguay. In this playful documentary, two transvestites, one brothel’s Madam and a gaucho football player, will bring to life this battle for control of a single physical space, driven by the same motivation: passion.