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He launched a host of today’s comedy superstars in the ‘90s on the HBO series Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam. Now, Russell Simmons returns to the network for All Def Comedy, taped before a live audience Sept. 7 at the Avalon Theatre in Los Angeles. Hosted by Tony Rock, with DJ Drama, the uncensored special features stand-up performances in a variety of styles from up-and-coming comics, discovered at ADD’s weekly comedy showcase: Chris Powell, Zainab Johnson, Kevin Tate, and Robert Powell, as well as HBO’s Def Comedy Jam veteran Tony Roberts.
Documentary about the role of Native Americans in popular music history, a little-known story built around the incredible lives and careers of the some of the greatest music legends.
Michael has been estranged from his family for a long time. When he shows up at his brother John’s house unexpectedly, Rayanne, his new sister-in-law, decides to let him in. But things are not always as they seem, and people may not be who they say there are.
Follows a year in the life of an alternative high school that has radically changed its approach to disciplining its students, becoming a promising model for how to break the cycles of poverty, violence and disease that affect families.
A creative and talented young man (Wilbur Hunter -played by James Maslow) is torn between his passion for painting and his promise to his father to oneday take over the family business. With his family, his friends, and a newfound love, Wilbur must decide whether to follow his heart or do what’s expected of him.
The Narrow World examines the sudden appearance of a giant creature in Los Angeles through the eyes of three people with differing ideas of its true significance.
A precocious kitten wants to be a witch’s familiar and must pass a test or she will forever be just simple cat, but the witch sees something in the kitten she does not expect.
Thinking they’re doing the right thing by taking matters into their own hands, two brothers cross the line when they take a household rifle without their father’s consent. Set in contemporary middle class rural Lebanon, a country with a porous border constantly threatened by hostile infiltration, this coming-of-age story examines fraternal trust and brings into focus the ethics of seemingly innocuous violence and its consequences.
Why do human beings get married in almost every society in the world? Why do we cheat? Why is monogamy so important to a relationship and why does infidelity cause so much grief? These are some of the questions acclaimed documentary filmmaker Dhruv Dhawan confronts in his next feature length documentary which explores why human beings evolved cultures of marriage and monogamy that are rife with infidelity. As he attends various lavish weddings occurring within his family, Dhruv is pestered to follow suit but is haunted by his family’s history of infidelity, as well as his own and embarks on a personal quest to discover the origins of marriage, the reasons for monogamy and the pain of infidelity as he tries to mediate an open relationship with the woman he loves. Dhruv’s search takes us on a journey into the biology of sex, the history of patriarchy and the politics of monogamy told through the lives of scientists, swingers, adulterers and Dhruv’s own family.
Eva Arctander is born with hypertrichosis, meaning that she is covered from head to toe with fine blonde hair. Her father is so ashamed of her that he hides her away from the world in their apartment. However, Eva’s nanny fights for her right to be treated like everyone else.
A journey of a woman’s body who is shot and killed on a vacation with her family.
Canadian documentarian Jamie Kastner (The Secret Disco Revolution) looks back at a notorious 1970s murder trial in the Virgin Islands — where five politicized young islanders were convicted of a massacre at a ritzy country club — and its dramatic aftermath a decade later, when the culprits’ ostensible leader staged a skyjacking and found refuge in Cuba.
We are taken care of when we are children and we do not know as much as when we are older. There is less to worry about. But it does not mean the things that are important to us as children have less significance. You see, for Scruffy, despite that she is from a poor family of the countryside, it is very important to study well, because she will become an asthma doctor. The doctor said her dad will die but she has decided – she will grow up and cure her father. Equally important is to run away from her grandmother, who almost always is lurking around in the dark corners of the house with a comb to fix her messy hair. Death is too abstract to understand, war is a word one hears on the radio that grownups sometimes listen to. Yet, as Scruffy lives through her days full of happiness and misery at full steam, the most tumultuous years of Iran become unveiled on the background, as we are introduced to the Revolution and the Iran-Iraqi war through the eyes of a child.
A pizza cook who’s never left his college town meets the girl of his dreams before finding out there’s a huge roadblock to them being together.
A district attorney who, tapped to replace the outgoing mayor, is stalked by a man who engineers her fall from grace, leading her to push back and beat him at his own game.
Twenty-five years after Roseanne Barr’s groundbreaking number-one sitcom, Roseanne for President tells the tale of her 2012 grassroots campaign for President of the United States. While Roseanne may have revolutionized the way Americans talked about family, class, race, gender, and gay rights, this campaign trail adventure is a personal account of Roseanne’s thoughts on these subjects—and others, as we have never heard them before. What seems at first like a political profile quickly becomes a humorous and sentimental picture of an icon. This surprising journey uncovers raw and revealing moments from Roseanne’s private world, while juxtaposing her current influence as a politician with her role as a comedy leader in the ’90s.
The Old Republic: Rescue Mission is a passion project born from the idea of breaking the bounds of achievability. Begun as a small collective of individuals to soon becoming a larger team, we set out with an aim to create some of the best fan-made content ever to be based from the Star Wars Expanded Universe lore. It is an original story featuring Mission Vao and Revan, set between the events of the KOTOR game and Drew Karpyshyn’s novel ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan’.
Marion Fish makes a documentary following her attempt to find her best friends killer. Little does she know that she is actually the subject of the killers own filmmaking ambitions
Tommy and EJ are brothers with nothing in common. Tommy is a straight A student who desperately wants to be cool and EJ is a former high school legend living at home, wasting away in middle management in GE’s innovation lab with dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg. When Tommy and EJ’s parents leave town for their second honeymoon, the boys join forces to throw a legendary high school party with hopes of making Tommy the king of his class and EJ the next great app developer.
The hopelessly romantic Lisa takes desperate measures to win her former lover back, Alf. But the fact that Alf already has a new girl at his side and that Lisa needs to bring her alcoholic father to an antivaricose-campaign photo shooting without letting him know, is not particularly helping.
A has-been New York rock-star teams up with a wannabe filmmaker to destroy hipster culture in New York… if they don’t destroy each other first.
American citizens in more than 25 states are followed as they set out on the morning of the presidential election, throughout the course of the day, until the polls close in the evening and the results are revealed.
An incident brings a mid-aged Taiwanese woman and a young Filipino guy together. Although they can barely communicate with each other in language, she takes care of him out of instinct before her self-consciousness gets in the way to define what that ambiguous instinct is.
Ten years ago Hurricane Katrina devastated the coast of Louisiana. Five years later the Deepwater Horizon exploded and spilled more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the worst ecologic disaster in North American history. Amazingly those aren’t the worst things facing Louisiana’s coastline today. It is that the state is fast disappearing. When on Earth Day 2010 BP’s Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank many in Louisiana predicted it would change the state’s coastline forever, both its economy and its people. How has the coast changed in the past five years?
At All Costs is a documentary set in the world of elite youth grassroots basketball that explores how the AAU system has professionalized youth basketball in America. We follow highly recruited ‘blue chip’ prospects, their families, and their teams as they navigate the shaky terrain of the AAU circuit in pursuit of their dreams.
In 1990, seven young male dancers joined Madonna on her most controversial world tour. Their journey was captured in Truth or Dare. As a self-proclaimed ‘mother’ to her six gay dancers plus straight Oliver, Madonna used the film to make a stand on gay rights and freedom of expression. The dancers became paragons of pride, inspiring people all over the world to dare to be who you are. Twenty-five years later, the dancers share their own stories about life during and after the tour. What does it really take to express yourself?
In this follow-up to Blood for Irina and Queen of Blood, the vampire Irina rises again like a ghost from her watery grave to bring bloodlust and madness to a lonely woman living in a seaside motel.
We all love food. As a society, we devour countless cooking shows, culinary magazines and foodie blogs. So how could we possibly be throwing nearly 50% of it in the trash? Filmmakers and food lovers Jen and Grant dive into the issue of waste from farm, through retail, all the way to the back of their own fridge. After catching a glimpse of the billions of dollars of good food that is tossed each year in North America, they pledge to quit grocery shopping and survive only on discarded food. What they find is truly shocking.
Yehudi Menuhin was the 20th century’s greatest violinist. He was a child prodigy but the man behind the violin was harder to know. Endlessly touring and crossing continents and cultures, his contract with EMI was the longest in the history of the music industry. He took classical music out of the concert hall because he believed music was for everyone and had the power to change lives. An impassioned idealist, Yehudi wanted to give more to the world – he became a tireless fighter for humanitarian issues he believed in. In this film, commemorating the 100th year of his birth, family and close friends recall his extraordinary musical life, in which he embraced jazz and Indian ragas as much as Bach, Beethoven and Bartok. And incredible home movies take us on an intimate behind-the-scenes journey from his childhood in California, to meeting gypsies in Romania and travelling to India and beyond.
Passionate in his anti-Semitic beliefs, Csanád Szegedi was the rising star of Hungary’s far-right party until he discovers his family’s secret—his maternal grandparents were Jewish. The revelation prompts an improbable but seemingly heartfelt conversion from anti-Semite to Orthodox Jew.
Ancient oceans teeming with life, Norwegian settlers, Native Americans and multinational oil corporations find intimacy in deep time. Following up his 2009 feature Crude Independence (SXSW), Deep Time is director Noah Hutton’s ethereal portrait of the landowners, state officials, and oil workers at the center of the most prolific oil boom on the planet for the past six years. With a new focus on the relationship of the indigenous peoples of North Dakota to their surging fossil wealth, Deep Time casts the ongoing boom in the context of paleo-cycles, climate change, and the dark ecology of the future.
The bliss of a biology teacher’s family life in Delhi is shattered when her daughter, Arya is physically assaulted by Jagan and gang. Does Devki Sabarwal wait for the law to take its course? Or does Devki become Maa Durga and hunt down the perpetrators of the crime?
Cinema Novo is a movie-essay that investigates poetically the most important movement of Latin America cinema, through the thoughts of its main auteurs: Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Glauber Rocha, Leon Hirszman, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Ruy Guerra, Walter Lima Jr., Paulo César Saraceni, among others.
Dr. Pamela Dee is on a mission to “Save The Menopausal Vaginas of America!” Her goal is to de-stigmatize Menopause and start the “Menopause Romance Revolution.”
Another pedestrian has been hit along Twygate Boulevard, this time at the intersection of Juniper Lane. It is the fifth time in three years, and all of its victims have been the elderly. The “answer” to the problem is to put up yet another traffic light that will en-snarl traffic. While everyone agrees the “old folks” should have a safe access over a busy thoroughfare, a group of young people have had enough. They believe the answer to really protecting these seniors is to change their lifestyles and habits instead. Their appearance at the neighborhood board meeting will transform the usual rubber stamp agenda into a manic evening of misstatements and misinterpretation. A sidesplitting comedy of humans being human, “Juniper Lane” takes a funny, fresh new look at the generation gap.
