Recaptures the lives and times of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, and the other legendary women who made blues music a vital part of American culture. The film brings together for the first time dozens of rare, classic renditions of the early blues.
Vinie BurrowsSelf - Narrator (voice)Koko TaylorSelfDanny BarkerSelf
Mae BarnesSelfDoll ThomasSelfChris AlbertsonSelfSammy PriceSelfIda GoodsonSelfBlue Lu BarkerSelfAlberta HunterSelf
Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.
Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.
Broadway style songs are used to tell this interesting story of an ingenious orphan who gets involved in matchmaking and striving for inter-racial understanding in 1956 Alabama.
Out of State is the unlikely story of native Hawaiians men discovering their native culture as prisoners in the desert of Arizona, 3,000 miles, and across the ocean, from their island home.
Singapore GaGa is a 55-minute paean to the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape. It reveals Singapore's past and present with a delight and humour that makes it a necessary film for all Singaporeans. We hear buskers, street vendors, school cheerleaders sing hymns to themselves and to their communities. From these vocabularies (including Arabic, Latin, Hainanese), a sense of what it might mean to be a modern Singaporean emerges. This is Singapore's first documentary to have a cinema release. With English and Chinese subtitles.
An in-depth documentary about the making of David Cronenberg's feature film, Cosmopolis (2012), an adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel of the same name.
Paris To Kyiv’s Fragmenti recording was originally released in 2005, a sonic tapestry of ancient Ukrainian song fragments and contemporary sounds. Nearly 11 years later, after circulating throughout the roster of artists on Balanced Records, a remix album has been compiled featuring electronic and avant garde interpretations by Ken Gregory, Joe Silva, Rise Ashen, Kasm, J57, Solidaze, Cayetano, Miguel Graça, Trevor Walker and Anders Peterson. This film accompanies the remix by Joe Silva.
Twenty years ago, novelist Salman Rushdie was a wanted man with a million pound bounty on his head. His novel, The Satanic Verses, had sparked riots across the Muslim world. The ailing religious leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, had invoked a little-known religious opinion - a fatwa - and effectively sentenced Rushdie to death. This film looks back on the extraordinary events which followed the publication of the book and the ten year campaign to get the fatwa lifted. Interviews with Rushdie's friends and family and testimony from leaders of Britain's Muslim community and the Government reveal the inside story of the affair.
Three women whose paths never cross, yet are bound by the shared experience of losing their mothers during adolescence, exploring each one’s sometimes-complex relationship with her mother.
Examines the impact a century of struggling for survival has on a native people. It weaves the Crow tribe's turbulent past with modern-day accounts from Robert Yellow-tail, a 97-year-old Crow leader and a major reason for the tribe's survival. Poverty and isolation combine with outside pressures to undermine the tribe, but they resist defeat as "Contrary Warriors," defying the odds.
Four female cons who have formed a band in prison get a chance to play at a police ball outside the walls. They take the chance to escape. Being on the run from the law they even make it to sell their music and become famous outlaws.
Explores the lives of Sara, Gigi and Giovanna, three Latino transvestites who for years have lived on the streets of Manhattan supporting their drug addictions through prostitution. They made their temporary home inside broken garbage trucks that the Sanitation Department keeps next to the salt deposits used in the winter to melt the snow. The three friends share the place known as "The Salt Mines".
Ricardo was once Sara, a homeless HIV positive transvestite, living in the underbelly of Manhattan. Today he is a churchgoing, married man, "saved" by a Dallas ministry. He has renounced his homosexuality, but is his conversion complete? Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio offer an intimate look at Ricardo's transformation.
Helke Sander interviews multiple German women who were raped in Berlin by Soviet soldiers in May 1945. Most women never spoke of their experience to anyone, due largely to the shame attached to rape in German culture at that time.
In 1954, before his senior year of high school, Wilt Chamberlain took a summer job that would change his life, working as a bellhop at Kutsher's Country Club, a Jewish resort in the Catskill Mountains. An unexplored and pivotal chapter in the life of one of basketball's greatest players, and a fascinating glimpse of a time when a very different era of basketball met the Borscht Belt in its heyday.
A nuanced portrait of a new generation, Dear Thirteen is a cinematic time capsule of coming of age in today’s world. Through the eyes of nine thirteen-year-olds, we see how pressing social, geographical and political challenges are shaping, and being shaped by, young people: rising anti-Semitism in Europe, guns in America, gender identity and racial divisions across Australia and Asia. With no adult commentary outside the filmmaker, Dear Thirteen offers an intimate view into the universal uncertainty inherent in growing up.
Robert De Niro, Sr., was a celebrated painter obscured by the pop-art movement. His life and career are chronicled in the artist's own words by his contemporaries and, movingly, by his son, the actor Robert De Niro.
A look at the lives of 19th-century composers Clara and Robert Schumann.
A single mother in London's Camden Town hears music when she meets a handsome stranger with a past. But she's not sure she's ready to open her heart.
An epistolary feature film: a cinematic discourse between a British director Mark Cousins, and an Iranian actress and director Mania Akbari which extends the concept of "essay film" with startling confrontations in the arenas of cultural issues, gender politics and differing artistic sensibilities. A unique journey into the minds of two exceptional filmmakers which becomes a love affair on film.