The enigma of the personality cult is revealed in the grand spectacle of Stalin’s funeral. The film is based on unique archive footage, shot in the USSR on March 5 – 9, 1953, when the country mourned and buried Joseph Stalin.
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In 1976, Karen and Barry Mason had fallen on hard times and were looking for a way to support their young family when they answered an ad in the Los Angeles Times. Larry Flynt was seeking distributors for Hustler Magazine. What was expected to be a brief sideline led to their becoming fully immersed in the LGBT community as they took over a local store, Circus of Books. A decade later, they had become the biggest distributors of gay porn in the US. The film focuses on the double life they led, trying to maintain the balance of being parents at a time when LGBT culture was not yet accepted. Their many challenges included facing jail time for a federal obscenity prosecution and enabling their store to be a place of refuge at the height of the AIDS crisis. Circus of Books offers a rare glimpse into an untold chapter of queer history, and it is told through the lense of the owners’ own daughter, Rachel Mason, an artist, filmmaker and musician.
A powerful documentary that sheds some light on what really happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the 2011 earthquake and the tsunami that immediately followed.
A powerful documentary – shot from March 11th, 2011 through March 2015 – that sheds some light on what really happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the 2011 earthquake and the tsunami that followed.
Although Wikipedia is the 8th most popular website on the Internet today, and it is already the 3rd most widely read ‘publication’ in human history, attracting 100 million unique visitors a month, this great social and academic experiment of our age is riddled with vandals and challenged by skeptics, posing compelling questions about whether Wikipedia’s model can truly achieve its goal. The film intersperses founder Jimmy Wales’ unusual rise to Internet super-stardom among the global implications of Wikipedia. Are entries factually accurate? Biased? Accountable? Does ‘Jimbo’ Wales posses the wisdom to ensure that Wikipedians aggregate knowledge correctly?
‘Family Instinct’ is a film about incest – an illegal act, social taboo and a violation of religious norms. Zanda is a 28-year-old woman, worn out by hard work. Surrounded by poverty and despair, she is trying to survive with her two children in a god-forsaken Latvian village. Her hardships can be traced back to living in a relationship with her brother Valdis. When Valdis is put in jail, the local community forces her to make a difficult choice: to stay with him or with her children. Despite her ill fortune, she manages to express her love for the children, still hoping to save her family. The film offers a tragicomic but highly authentic insight into the bleak reality of Latvian countryside today.
A year in the life of one of America’s most innovative classrooms where students design & build to transform their hometown community. The film follows Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller as they teach the fundamentals of design, architecture and construction to a class of high school juniors in rural North Carolina.
When Post Office subpostmasters up and down the country started to experience big shortfalls in their accounts, Post Office assumed they were stealing the money and prosecuted them. Hundred were given criminal convictions and many were sent to prison. Lives, marriages, reputations – all ruined. The shortfalls were in fact, a result of errors in the Post Office’s own IT system, known as Horizon. It was something the Post Office had always denied. For over twenty years, former subpostmaster Alan Bates has fought tirelessly for justice for all the subpostmasters who were so poorly treated by the brand they had loved. This is his story.
10 years before the debut of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In 1979, Bill Viola and Frank Caliguri dreamed up a contest pitting barroom bigmouths against wrestlers, martial artists, boxers, bouncers and brawlers, billed as no-holds-barred new type of competitive fighting. When the fights succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, they were swept up in a chain of events that ended in the first mixed-martial arts ban in the nation. “Tough Guys” chronicles the inception of Caliguri and Viola’s first bouts and the colorful, crazy cast of fighters who made them a hit as well as the politicians who brought it all crashing down. The film brings to life a moment when the national martial arts craze was building to a crescendo as the economies of Pennsylvania steel towns were plummeting to levels of unemployment never seen, breeding desperate men looking for a chance to prove their worth and make some money in the ring.
A documentary about a man who impersonates a wise Indian Guru and builds a following in Arizona. At the height of his popularity, the Guru Kumaré must reveal his true identity to his disciples and unveil his greatest teaching of all.
After six weeks of gruelling competition, England battle reigning champions Australia. The two teams are inseparable after eighty minutes. Deep into extra time, there are just two minutes left on the clock. England rumble to within 40 yards of the posts. The ball is sent spiralling back to Jonny Wilkinson, the golden boy of English rugby, in a split second he drop kicks for goal and a chance for sporting immortality. It is an astonishing story of pressure, expectation and courage, tracing the roots of success back to the professionalization of the game in the 90s and culminating in that glorious World Cup campaign of 2003 that turned Woodward’s poisoned chalice into a golden cup.
A massive 5 1/2 hour biopic of Napoleon, tracing his career from his schooldays (where a snowball fight is staged like a military campaign), his flight from Corsica, through the French Revolution (where a real storm is intercut with a political storm) and the Terror, culminating in his triumphant invasion of Italy in 1797 (the film stops there because it was intended to be part one of six, but director Abel Gance never raised the money to make the other five). The film’s legendary reputation is due to the astonishing range of techniques that Gance uses to tell his story, culminating in the final twenty-minute triptych sequence, which alternates widescreen panoramas with complex multiple- image montages projected simultaneously on three screens.
A documentary & cross-media project about the creativity of non-violent resistance and modern forms of civil disobedience.
