Off a dirt road in rural Maine, a precocious 20-year-old woman named Michelle Smith lives with her mother Julie. Michelle is quirky and charming, legally blind and diagnosed on the autism spectrum, with big dreams and varied passions. Searching for connection, Michelle explores love and empowerment outside the limits of “normal” through a provocative fringe community. Will she take the leap to experience the wide world for herself? Michelle’s joyful story of self-discovery celebrates outcasts everywhere.
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Filmed and edited in intimate vérité style, this movie follows visionary medical practitioners who are working on the cutting edge of life and death and are dedicated to changing our thinking about both.
Examines the case from every angle, shedding light on the victims and on the suspect, Rex Heuermann.
In his first New York City-set documentary in nearly a decade, filmmaker and provocateur Abel Ferrara uses the experience of one longtime cinema owner to chart the vast changes to the city’s theatrical landscape.
A personal documentary about a public subject, My Father’s Vietnam personifies the connections made and unmade by the Vietnam War. Featuring never-before-seen photographs and 8mm footage of the era, My Father’s Vietnam is the story of three soldiers, only one of whom returned home alive. Interviews with the filmmaker’s Vietnam Veteran father, and the friends and family members of two men he served with who were killed there, give voice to individuals who continue to silently carry the psychological burdens of a war that ended over 40 years ago. My Father’s Vietnam carries with it the potential to encourage audiences to broach the subjects of service and sacrifice with the veterans in their lives.
Billboards and commercial messages dominate the public space like never before. Can we reverse this visual pollution? This Space Available looks at diverse activists from the worlds of advertising, street art, and politics. Influenced by the writing of Marc Gobé ( Emotional Branding ), his daughter Gwenaëlle directs with tremendous verve in her depiction of New Yorkers and others around the world who want to reclaim the integrity of their cities against an onslaught of visual pollution. From 240 hours of film, 160 interviews, and visits to 11 countries on five continents, This Space Available charts a fascinating variety of struggles against unchecked advertising and suggests that more than aesthetics is at stake. If Jacques Attali once called noise pollution an act of violence, is visual pollution also such an act?
Finding Amelia follows Ric Gillespie and his team as they travel to Nikumaroro, a remote Pacific island 350 miles from Amelia’s last known location. This is where they believe Amelia landed her plane, lived, and died as a castaway.
Dallas comedian Ralph Barbosa talks about how he grew up with his grandparents and ran a hair salon in his bedroom when he was 13 years old.
Meet the men and women who make their living cleaning our shoes. From New York to Tokyo and beyond, The Art of the Shine travels the world to give you an insider’s view of this overlooked profession. People around the world have turned to shoe shining to provide for themselves and their families. These are their stories.
The images could be taken from a science fiction film set on planet Earth after it’s become uninhabitable. Abandoned buildings – housing estates, shops, cinemas, hospitals, offices, schools, a library, amusement parks and prisons. Places and areas being reclaimed by nature, such as a moss-covered bar with ferns growing between the stools, a still stocked soft drinks machine now covered with vegetation, an overgrown rubbish dump, or tanks in the forest. Tall grass sprouts from cracks in the asphalt. Birds circle in the dome of a decommissioned reactor, a gust of wind makes window blinds clatter or scraps of paper float around, the noise of the rain: sounds entirely without words, plenty of room for contemplation. All these locations carry the traces of erstwhile human existence and bear witness to a civilisation that brought forth architecture, art, the entertainment industry, technologies, ideologies, wars and environmental disasters.
This material was developed and prepared over the last year or so, mostly in comedy clubs. This special kind of goes back to when he used to just make noises and be funny for no particular reason. It felt right to him to shoot this special in a club to give it that live immediate intimate feeling. The show is about an hour long. The opening act, who is seen at the beginning (good place for an opening act) is Jay London. One of his favorite club comics going way back to the late 80s when he first started in working in New York.
Profiles Father James Martin, an outspoken New York-based priest and author who works to connect the Catholic Church with the LGBTQ+ community through compassion, inclusion, love, and acceptance.
In a candid, first-time interview with Rachel Lee, the so-called teenage mastermind behind a string of high-profile celebrity robberies in 2008 and 2009, the film examines the motivations of Lee and a group of her friends who broke into celebrity homes in Hollywood to ransack and steal, exploring the possible reasons behind her actions including mental health issues and addictions, as well as the climate of celebrity excess that fueled the teens, recontextualizing the events behind the sensational headlines.