Documentary
The story of Elvira’s rise to pop culture royalty.
Artifact is a 2012 American documentary film directed by Jared Leto under the pseudonym of Bartholomew Cubbins, a recurring character in the Dr. Seuss universe. The film is a documentary about the making of the 30 Seconds to Mars album This Is War and the band’s battle against record label EMI. Included in Artifact are several interviews, including the one with neurophysicist Daniel Levitin, author of the popular science book This Is Your Brain On Music. The film won the BlackBerry People’s Choice Documentary Award at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.
Through concert performances and interviews, this film offers us an “inside look” at this famous rock group, “The Who”. It captures their zany craziness and outrageous antics from the initial formation of the group to its major hit “Who Are You”, and features the last performance of drummer Keith Moon just prior to his death.
In September 2012, the tiny prairie town of Leith, North Dakota, sees its population of 24 grow by one. As the new resident’s behavior becomes more threatening, tensions soar, and the residents desperately look for ways to expel their unwanted neighbor.
In the history of aviation, there have been only 14 of them: sole survivors of a commercial aviation disaster. Most have never spoken publicly about the loss, the guilt, the immense pressure of feeling “spared.” Who, after all, could ever truly understand? The answer is only each other. Sole Survivor brings four of them together (George Lamson, Cecilia Cichan, Bahia Bakari and Jim Polehinke) to share their very complex, personal stories for the first time. They revisit the most harrowing moments of their lives in an effort to heal and overcome their most perplexing questions.
The very sad tale of socialite & Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971) who effectively plays herself in a film that follows her life in a large part from the time she left Warhol’s ‘factory’ and what the life of excess drugs did to her sanity. Edie was such a beautiful fragile girl – who finally got her head together and got married (her wedding day video is edited into the end of the movie) but it was too late, her husband woke up on a morning in November 1971, only weeks after filming wrapped, and found her dead beside him. She had died in her sleep from overdosing on her medication she was 28.
When the world’s financial bubble blew, the solution was to lower interest rates and pump trillions of dollars into the sick banking system. But what happens when the solutions are identical to the mistakes that caused the very crisis?
The uplifting and heart-wrenching struggles of families who treat their cancer-stricken children with marijuana, some with astonishing results.
A cinematic portrait of a small town stock car track and the tribe of drivers that call it home as they struggle to hold onto an American racing tradition. The avant-garde narrative explores the community and its conflicts through an intimate story that reveals the beauty, mystery and emotion of grassroots auto racing.
Medieval monasteries, historic German villages, and breweries from across the world serve as the backdrop for four people immersing themselves in their passion for beer.
Follows Irish champion boxer Katie Taylor as she tries to rekindle her career after a year of setbacks.
Wasted Talent is a gritty documentary where director Steve Stanulis and producer Noel Ashman together examine the temptations and struggles many young celebrities go threw on their rise to stardom. It focuses on the story of actor LIllo Brancato who was once considered to be the next Robert De Niro, after his huge success starring in the films A Bronx Tale(De Niro’s directorial debut), Renaissance Man, Crimson Tide and the classic tv show The Sopranos. However Brancato got trapped in the underworld of hollywood instead becoming a drug addict culminating in his arrest for the murder of a new york city police officer on a drug excursion gone horribly wrong. Though Brancato was cleared of the murder charge, he still did eight and a half years in jail on an attempted burglary conviction. During his time in prison the young actor was finally able to get clean and sober, and is now struggling to redeem himself in the fickle world of entertainment.
When filmmaker and investigative journalist Frances Causey, a daughter of the South, set out to explore the continuing racial divisions in the US, what she discovered was that the politics of slavery didn’t end with the Civil War. In an astonishingly candid look at the United States’ original sin, The Long Shadow traces slavery’s history from America’s founding up through its insidious ties to racism today.
The documentary story of Madonna’s struggling days in New York with her first band “Breakfast Club,” leading up to her first solo record deal.
The Laughter Life follows a week in the life of the young comedians who write and star in Studio C, a popular sketch comedy television show that has garnered over 1 billion views on YouTube.
A dark and sensuous film from a landfill in Ghana, where electronic waste from the West is being recycled. An unforgettable experience, told by the workers themselves.
Oprah Winfrey hosts a conversation featuring Wade Robson and James Safechuck, alongside Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed, before an audience of survivors of sexual abuse and others whose lives have been impacted by it.
Dr. Anne Innis Dagg re-traces the steps of her groundbreaking 1956 journey to South Africa to study giraffes in the wild. Now, at 85 years old, Anne sees a startling contrast between the world of giraffes she once knew and the one it has become. Weaving through the past and present, her harrowing journey gives us an intimate look into the factors that destroyed her career and the forces that brought her back.
This documentary describes the experience of F-105 Thunderchief “Thud” pilots and crew during the Vietnam War.
With a magical new invention that promised to revolutionize blood testing, Elizabeth Holmes became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, heralded as the next Steve Jobs. Then, overnight, her 10-billion-dollar company dissolved. The rise and fall of Theranos is a window into the psychology of fraud.
Grant Korgan is a world-class adventurer, nano-mechanics professional, and husband. On March 5, 2010, the Lake Tahoe native burst-fractured his L1 vertebrae, and suddenly added the world of spinal cord injury recovery to his list of pursuits. On January 17, 2012, along with two seasoned explorers, Grant attempted the insurmountable, and became the first spinal cord injured athlete to literally push himself to the most inhospitable place on the planet: the bottom of the glove, the geographic South Pole.
In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” a powerful and timelessness novel which eternal theme is nothing other than man’s quest for the secret of life. Since then, the Creature became a pop culture icon, overshadowing the novel and Doctor Frankenstein himself.
Exploration of the podcasting medium via interviews with several big names in the field and their fans.
Anything can happen on Russian roads and is precisely shot by the dashboard camera. Super-objective video registration grows into the strong image of Russian national character – with its permanent awaiting for the miracle and habitual approach to real dramas. A forest on fire as a symbol of Russian hell, a military tank at a car wash and car chase in the vicinity of Kremlin shot with a dashboard cam at the same time when Boris Nemtsov, the leader of political opposition, was shot dead near Kremlin. Dashboard cam depicts life in it’s purity as an unbiased observer.
For years, Miles Lagoze served in Afghanistan as a Combat Camera, shooting footage and editing videos for Marine Corps recruiting purposes. In this devastating film, Lagoze assembles his own footage and that of his fellow combat cameramen into a never-before-seen look at the daily life of Marines from the ultimate insider’s point of view. More than a mere compilation of violence, the edit ingeniously repurposes the original footage to reveal the intensity and paradoxes of war in an age of ubiquitous cameras, when all soldiers can record themselves with helmet-cams and cellphones. Combat Obscura revels in the chasm separating civilian from military life and questions the psychological toll war exacts on all that it touches
Stephen Hawking has warned that the creation of powerful artificial intelligence will be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”. Inspired by Brian Christian’s study The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive, the filmmakers set out on an international investigation highlighting the effects of AI – scenes from our daily lives destructive and constructive.
U2, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, Blondie, Duran Duran, Tears for Fears, The Clash, The Cure: Over half a billion records sold but you may never have heard of them if not for a small suburban radio station on Long Island, NY: WLIR. In August, 1982, a small group of radio visionaries knew they couldn’t compete with the mega-stations in New York City. With one brave decision, they changed the sound of radio forever. Program Director Denis McNamara, the ‘LIR crew and the biggest artists of the era tell the story of how they battled the FCC, the record labels, mega-radio and all the conventional rules to create a musical movement that brought the New Wave to America.
Alexis Bloom charts the rise and fall of the late Republican Party booster and controversial Fox News mogul who went down in flames amid multiple sexual harassment allegations.
In China’s popular live-streaming showrooms, three millennials – a karaoke singer, a migrant worker and a rags-to-riches comedian – seek fame, fortune and human connection, ultimately finding the same promises and perils online as in their real lives.
Released in 1977 and directed by Jerry Garcia, is a film that captures performances from the Grateful Dead’s October 1974 five-night stand at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. This end-of-tour run marked the beginning of an extended hiatus for the band, with no shows planned for 1975. The movie also faithfully portrays the burgeoning Deadhead scene. The film features the “Wall of Sound” concert sound system that the Dead used for all of 1974.
A documentary spanning over 30 years of the California Bay Area’s punk music history with a central focus on the emergence of Berkeley’s inspiring 924 Gilman Street music collective.
Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.
The life and mysterious death of Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian billionaire and Israeli spy.
Investigates the MLB’s infamous doping scandal involving a nefarious clinician and his most famous client: the New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez.
The human tale behind the creation of a blockbuster game.
Another super polished, overly produced debacle. Delivering the gnarliest skateboarding from this year’s new breed of rippers: Jamie Foy, Chase Webb, Carlos Iqui, Michael Pulizzi and Cody Lockwood. “If anyone knows where the end of the Earth is, can they take us there?”
A feature-length documentary centered around the Linotype typecasting machine. Called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” by Thomas Edison, it revolutionized printing and society. The film tells the surprisingly emotional story of the people connected to the Linotype and how it impacted the world.
Using the book ‘Fragments’, which collects Marilyn Monroe’s poems, notes and letters, and with participation from the Arthur Miller and Truman Capote estates who have contributed more material, each of the actresses will embody the legend at various stages in her life.
As the front man of the Clash from 1977 onwards, Joe Strummer changed people’s lives forever. Four years after his death, his influence reaches out around the world, more strongly now than ever before. In “The Future Is Unwritten”, from British film director Julien Temple, Joe Strummer is revealed not just as a legend or musician, but as a true communicator of our times. Drawing on both a shared punk history and the close personal friendship which developed over the last years of Joe’s life, Julien Temple’s film is a celebration of Joe Strummer – before, during and after the Clash.
From director Andrew Rossi (PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY) comes an electrifying portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and her acclaimed one-woman show, BRONX GOTHIC. Rooted in memories of her childhood, Okwui – who’s worked with conceptual artists like Ralph Lemon and Julie Taymor – fuses dance, song, drama, and comedy to create a mesmerizing space in which audiences can engage with a story about two 12-year-old black girls coming of age in the 1980s. With intimate vérité access to Okwui and her audiences off the stage, BRONX GOTHIC allows for unparalleled insight into her creative process as well as the complex social issues embodied in it.