This delicate and impressive collection of life experiences centers on a group of foreigners -- Chinese, Peruvian, North American, Senegalese, Australians, French -- who are trapped in Brazilian jails.
La otra educación (The Other Education) is about the class action suit Rosa Lydia Velez vs the Department of Education, and serves as the storyline to document 30 years of struggles that the families of disabled children in Puerto Rico have suffered. Their only request is the right to an education for their sons and daughters with special needs.
Documents Ku Klux Klan activities in California, Georgia, Chicago, and Ohio.
This documentary analyzes the origins of the Puerto Rican economic development plan of the 1960’s, better known as Manos a la Obra (or Operation Bootstrap). The film examines this economic plan within the framework of Puerto Rican society, with special emphasis on the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland.
Women workers stand up to the toxic flower industry in Colombia.
An educational documentary spanning two continents, opening up a much-needed debate about traditional African spiritual systems; their cosmologies, ideologies and underlying ethical principles. Modern science no longer refutes the origins of mankind being in Africa and similarities in the cosmological ideologies of African esoteric systems with those found many established world religions today, suggest that it was not only people that migrated, but also concepts and themes that then provided bedrock for the formation of other systems of belief.
Filmmaker Molly Gandour, in her mid-20s, returns to her childhood home in Indiana to speak with her parents in depth for the first time about her sister's death from cancer sixteen years earlier. The filmmaker comes of age as she weaves a deeply observed portrait of a family unearthing a long ago loss. Unflinching and poignant, Peanut Gallery shows us how we can transform when we begin to fill the silences between those closest to us.
Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. This first half of her two-part film opens with a renowned introduction that compares modern Olympians to classical Greek heroes, then goes on to provide thrilling in-the-moment coverage of some of the games' most celebrated moments, including African-American athlete Jesse Owens winning a then-unprecedented four gold medals.
Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. Where the two-part epic's first half, Festival of the Nations, focused on the international aspects of the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, part two, The Festival of Beauty, concentrates on individual athletes such as equestrians, gymnasts, and swimmers, climaxing with American Glenn Morris' performance in the decathalon and the games' majestic closing ceremonies.
Friends and admirers of iconoclastic film director Sam Fuller read from his memoirs in this unconventional documentary directed by Fuller's only child, Samantha.
In this documentary we meet five children in Sweden and see what happened in their lives. Robin was nine years old, but he already knew what a prison looked like and the bad a punishment can do. Frida was not yet born when we filmed her mother Angela in 1983. Her sister Malin lived for several years in a foster family. Bosse was 14 years old and in 9th grade when we met him in 1978. He was the only guy in the class who had glasses. Marie received many postcards and letters from her father, but very rarely met him while she was growing up.
This feature documentary is an exploration of the concept of dirt and impurity. From the slums of Kolkata to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to a barbeque joint in Central Texas, Dirt digs deep into the webs of meaning and feeling attached to that deceptively simple 4-letter word. An odyssey into all things unclean, the film features animation to make Hieronymus Bosch blush and music from Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Hidden in the heart of Russia, there is a Soviet-era city where thousands of people live and work behind barbed-wire fences monitored by armed guards. It is Ozyorsk (Ozersk), located in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, one of the most polluted places on the planet and home to the largest stockpiles of nuclear material. Its code name: City 40.
REAL BOY is the coming-of-age story of Bennett Wallace, a transgender teenager on a journey to find his voice-as a musician, a friend, a son, and a man. As he navigates the ups and downs of young adulthood, Bennett works to gain the love and support of his mother, who has deep misgivings about her child's transition. Along the way, he forges a powerful friendship with his idol, Joe Stevens, a celebrated transgender musician with his own demons to fight.
When a Mongolian nomadic family's newest camel colt is rejected by its mother, a musician is needed for a ritual to change her mind.
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.
The film describes the microcosmos of the small village Wacken and shows the clash of the cultures, before and during the biggest heavy metal festival in Europe.
North Philadelphia, PA – Kev, El and Andy are three men united by one struggle: they are trying to defy gravity. As part of the 700,000 prisoners released into society every year, they find themselves faced with a chilling outlook: 67% of ex-offenders re-offend within three years. What explains this invisible force that keeps former inmates in a seemingly unending cycle of incarceration? Filmed on the street over the course of two years, Pull of Gravity is an intimate portrait of these three men that confronts head-on the gritty details of lives cut short by poverty and drugs, where dealing is seen as the only route to economic prosperity, where using offers an escape from powerlessness, and where prison is too often the next stop. The film’s unfiltered lense captures its subjects as they lay bare their stories, fears, and tentative dreams.
Bartolomé, a teacher in a multigrade school on the mountains of Chiapas in Mexico, knows well that pedagogy is not based on textbooks and cannot fit behind the four walls of a classroom. A true sower of knowledge unravels his philosophy and method and becomes a beacon of hope for the creation of a humanistic model of education based on curiosity and love for the outside world.