Two tons of snow—flown from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico in 1952 in order to “gift” Puerto Ricans a “white Christmas”—become a metaphor for the colonialist paternalism of America’s relationship to Puerto Rico.
Social & External
Self (archive audio) (uncredited)
Explores the rise of modern slavery in the UK, giving a portrait of the dark world of forced labor through the eyes of the people involved.
Deep in the rain forests of Grenada, anarchist chocolatier Mott Green seeks solutions to the problems of a ravaged global chocolate industry. Solar power, employee shareholding and small-scale antique equipment turn out delicious chocolate in the hamlet of Hermitage, Grenada. Finding hope in an an industry entrenched in enslaved child labor, irresponsible corporate greed, and tasteless, synthetic products, Nothing like Chocolate reveals the compelling story of the relentless Mott Green, founder of the Grenada Chocolate Company.
Water – a living substance, the most common and least understood. It defies the basic laws of physics, yet holds the keys to life. Known to ancients as a transmitter to and from the higher realms, water retains memory and conveys information to DNA. However, water can die if treated poorly. Influences such as sound, thoughts, intention, as well as toxins such as chlorine, structure water’s molecular arrangement– affecting all it comes in contact with. Prominent scientists help reveal the secret of water, allowing us to use this amazing element to heal ourselves and our planet. The movie features Nassim Haramein, Patrick Flanagan, Dr. Masaru Emoto, Konstantin Korotkov, Lynne McTaggart, and Larry Dossey.
Chai Jing's documentary about the massive smog problem in China. Chai Jing started making the documentary when her as yet unborn daughter developed a tumour in the womb, which had to be removed very soon after her birth. Chai blames air pollution for the tumour. The film, which combines footage of a lecture with interviews and factory visits, has been compared with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in both its style and likely impact. The film openly criticises state-owned energy companies, steel producers and coal factories, as well as showing the inability of the Ministry of Environmental Protection to act against the big polluters.
Why is healthcare so expensive? A hapless patient journeys through the of labyrinth of United States healthcare and is left with a headache and sticker-shock. The twenty-first film in the WE THE ECONOMY series.
Money talks. Teens in Los Angeles discuss money: getting it, spending it, and learning to live without it.
Several years ago Bawren Tavaziva was an unemployed teenager dancing on the streets of Zimbabwe's townships to earn enough money to eat. Today, his UK-based contemporary dance company, Tavaziva Dance, performs at London's premier dance venues.
1943, The Netherlands is under total Nazi occupation. In Amsterdam, Jack, an unassuming accountant, first meets Ina at a birthday party - a 20-year-old beauty from a wealthy diamond manufacturing family who instantly steals his heart. But Jack's pursuit of love will be complicated; he is poor and married to Manja, a flirtatious and mercurial spouse. When the Jews are being deported, the husband, the wife and the lover find themselves at the same concentration camp; actually living in the same barracks. When Jack's wife objects to the "girlfriend" in spite of their unhappy marriage, Jack and Ina resort to writing secret love letters, which sustain them throughout the horrible circumstances of the war.
Tells the story of five people from the last generation of Soviet children who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain. Just coming of age when the USSR collapsed, they witnessed the world of their childhood crumble and change beyond recognition. Through the lives of these former schoolmates, this intimate film reveals how they have adjusted to their post-Soviet reality in today's Moscow.
The December 1, 1977, game between the Minnesota North Stars and Boston Bruins started out as just another typical NHL game in the ’70s — no helmets and lots of brawls. One showdown that never actually happened turned this game into one of hockey legend. Shortly after Boston’s John Wensink and Minnesota’s Alex Pirus got untangled from their fight, Wensink famously skated over to the North Stars bench and motioned for the whole team to take him on. They didn’t. Through Wensink’s own words and anecdotes from die-hard fans, family, and fellow NHL players, this film takes us into the mind-set of the Bruins’ most legendary enforcer — and the journey one takes when that life is left behind.
The story of Christian Gerhartsreiter, an habitual conman, Rockefeller impostor, and convicted murderer. After four decades, America's most notorious con man has been caught - unravelling a shocking and extraordinary story of multiple identities and deception that stretches from a Bavarian village to California, where, in January 2012, he was charged with murder. With exclusive access to many people that knew him at every step of his journey True Stories paints a portrait of the man who started life as Christian Gerhartsreiter, a poor country boy from a tiny mountain village in Upper Bavaria and who pursued the American dream for years in order to reach the upper echelons of society, ending up as Clark Rockefeller - banker, socialite and member of one of America's richest families, married to a successful business woman and living in a $2 million townhouse with a country estate in the grandest part of New Hampshire.
We know about the swing. We know about the swagger. But what most Americans don't know about Venus Williams is how she changed the course of her sport. In a stunning case that captured the European public beginning in 2005, Williams challenged the long-held practice of paying women tennis players less than their male counterparts at Wimbledon. With a deep sense of obligation to the legacy of Billie Jean King, Williams lobbied British Parliament, UNESCO and Fleet Street for financial parity. And it was her poignant op-ed piece in The London Times that convinced many people that the Wimbledon tournament organizers were "on the wrong side of history." Roland Garros and Wimbledon finally relented in 2007. That year at Wimbledon, Venus became the first women's champion to earn as much as the men's singles winner (Roger Federer). VENUS VS. chronicles Williams' fight for pay equality.
Suffering from scoliosis as a teenager, Audrey Mestre found freedom in the ocean. Years later, she discovered another reason to love the water: the elusive, often raucous free diver Pipin Ferreras. As Mestre follows Ferreras's almost spiritual quest to push his limits underwater, she moves from supporter to ardent free diver to world-class competitor. Then a challenge from a rival pushes the couple to the brink of what is possible, both above and below the surface.
Sheryl Swoopes famously has been labeled as the female Michael Jordan, but that's only part of the story. On the court, she was nearly as dominant as Jordan, winning a national championship with Texas Tech, three Olympic gold medals, three MVP awards and four consecutive championships with the Houston Comets of the WNBA, the league she helped start. She even had a Nike shoe named after her, the Air Swoopes. Off the court, she has had a life full of transitions. She gave birth to her son, Jordan, during the inaugural season of the WNBA. Later, she divorced her high school sweetheart and became the highest-profile athlete in her sport to acknowledge she was gay. She has struggled with love, money and personal identity, but has never lost her spirit. In this portrait, you will meet someone who is not your everyday superstar, but a woman who has defied a multitude of labels.
Mary Decker obliterated opponents and records with blazing speed and a starving hunger to win. She dominated her sport, holding US records in every distance from 800 to 10,000 meters, and she did it all without the Olympics. She was too young in '72, hurt in '76 and shut out by the U.S. boycott in '80. As Sports Illustrated's cover Sportswoman of the Year in 1983, she was ready: 1984 was the target, with the Olympics in LA and her skills at their 25 year-old peak. But the story leads to a single shocking moment in the 1984 Olympics, with Mary writhing on the ground in physical pain and emotional heartbreak with the whole world watching.
The world of women's sports was kicked upside down on July 10, 1999. Before a sold-out crowd of more than 90,000 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., and an estimated 40 million Americans watching on television, the U.S. women's soccer team reached a cultural and athletic pinnacle with its penalty-kick shootout victory against China to win the Women's World Cup.
Sports is supposed to be the ultimate level playing field, but in the media and on Madison Avenue, sometimes looks matter more than accomplishments. This film explores the double standard placed on female athletes to be the best players on the field and the sexiest off of it. Through stories of the women who have faced and tackled this question including Mary Lou Retton, Chris Evert, Lolo Jones, and Gabby Reece, "Branded" explores the question: can women's sports ever gain an equal footing with their male counterparts or will sex appeal always override achievement?
IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE explores identity and legacy in the African-American family, as Grammy award-winning rapper Che 'Rhymefest' Smith and his long-lost father reconnect and try to build a new future in Chicago's turbulent South Side. Himself a child of a broken home, Che hasn't seen his father, Brian, in over 20 years, and presumes him dead. But after buying his father's childhood home, Che sets out to find him, and learns that his is now a homeless alcoholic living only several blocks away/ The film offers a probing take on memory and identity in a family two generations removed from slavery as it tracks Che and Brian's shared journey to create a new legacy for themselves, their community and the next generation of family.
In conversation, in her Paris apartment, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, mime, dancer, novelist, wonders whether she should give the green light to a proposed film about the houses in which she lived. “I’m no longer photogenic,” she insists; nearly 80, marriages, affair with a stepson and intermittent lesbianism behind her, refusing now even to mention the arthritis that confines and assaults her, Colette is vivacious. Yannick Bellon’s captivating postmodernist film, as much a study of evanescence as any poem by Dickinson, segues into the film that Colette, a few years before her end, has just said she doesn’t want to do. Giving voice(over) to her own commentary, she goes back, first, to the home in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, where she was born.
Bruce Conner’s most celebrated film for a reason: it takes historical moments that were replayed over and over on television—chilling repetition of Kennedy assassination coverage—and repurposes them into a meditation on how the media tries to exert authority and apply a sense of order to the anarchic. And though it may sound perverse to say so, the film is also—not incidentally—a thrill to watch. -- The A.V. Club
SEDUCED AND ABANDONED combines acting legend Alec Baldwin with director James Toback as they lead us on a troublesome and often hilarious journey of raising financing for their next feature film. Moving from director to financier to star actor, the two players provide us with a unique look behind the curtain at the world's biggest and most glamourous film festival, shining a light on the bitter-sweet relationship filmmakers have with Cannes and the film business. Featuring insights from directors Martin Scorsese, 'Bernando Bertolucci' and Roman Polanski; actors Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain and a host of film distribution luminaries.
An IMAX 3D camera chronicles the effort of 7 astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
Documentarian Ross McElwee originally set out to make a travelogue of sorts tracing General William T. Sherman's infamous scorched-earth march through the Confederacy in the latter stages of the Civil War. Instead, haunted by a recent breakup with a girlfriend, McElwee ends up documenting his progress -- or lack thereof -- in starting a new relationship. His journey then becomes one of self-reflection and self-discovery rather than a historical/sociological exploration.
In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.
This character-driven film considers the evolving sex trafficking landscape as seen by the main players: the exploited, the pimps, the johns that fuel the business, and the cops who fight to stop it.
Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.
Stars of "The Walking Dead," Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira, walk down memory lane and visit iconic locations where pivotal moments between their characters, Rick and Michonne, were filmed.
This special explores the return of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to the screen, as well as Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to their classic roles. Director Deborah Chow leads the cast and crew as they create new heroes and villains that live alongside new incarnations of beloved Star Wars characters, and an epic story that dramatically bridges the saga films.
Fourteen years after his first visit, Louis Theroux meets some of the growing community of religious-nationalist Israelis who have settled in the occupied West Bank.
An experimental portrait of the North American commercial fishing industry through the lens of GoPro cameras placed on a fishing vessel off the coast of New England.
In the early-morning hours of July 23, 2007, in Cheshire, Conn., ex-convicts Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky broke into the family home of William Petit, his wife, Jennifer, and their daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17. Dr. Petit was beaten and tied to a pole in the basement. The three women were bound in their bedrooms while the men ransacked the house. The brutal ordeal continued throughout the morning, ending with rape, arson and a horrific triple homicide.
Serving life in prison for murdering their parents, Lyle and Erik Menendez speak out in this documentary explaining the shocking crime and ensuing trials.
Unravel the case of Utah therapist Jodi Hildebrandt, whose child abuse arrest with parenting YouTuber Ruby Franke exposed a twisted tale of manipulation.
Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.
An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.
The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.
A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.
A detailing of the rise to prominence and global sporting superstardom of six supremely talented young Manchester United football players (David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Phil and Gary Neville). The film covers the period 1992-1999, culminating in Manchester United's European Cup triumph.
Fulton and Pepe's 2000 documentary captures Terry Gilliam's attempt to get The Man Who Killed Don Quixote off the ground. Back injuries, freakish storms, and more zoom in to sabotage the project.