Renowned filmmakers D A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus follow determined animal rights activist Steven Wise into the courtroom for an unprecedented battle that seeks to utilize the writ of habeas corpus to expand legal “personhood” to include certain animals. Wise’s unusual plaintiffs—chimpanzees Tommy and Kiko, once famed showbiz stars—are now living in filth, struggling to survive. Wise and his impassioned legal team take us into the field, revealing gripping evidence of such abuse and plunging us into the intricacies of their case as they probe preconceived notions of what it means to be a non-human animal.
A beautiful blonde joins a small group of men running an oil station in the Sahara Desert and starts the emotions soaring.
Short film built from photographs, sped up like a traditional stop motion and is meant to be an evocation of the English Eerie and Folk Horror.
Set in the year 2065 and tells the story of a man who enters an old holographic booth, intending to take a nap, but accidentally activating the resident sexual hologram.
In a third part of the trilogy Mishka, Dimka and Lenka are graduating high school and meet the adult life.
One minute he's Peter Parker the college student, and the next he's Spiderman!
A group of Salem teens discover a cursed knife that unleashes a demon that forces them to play gruesome, deadly versions of childhood games where there can be no winners, only survivors.
Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creators of the hit television series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, reflect on the creation of the masterful series.
In the fifth installment of the Gabriel's Inferno series, Gabriel and Julia’s happiness is threatened by a conspiring student and academic politics. When Gabriel is confronted by the university administration, will he succumb to Dante's fate? Or will he fight to keep Julia, his Beatrice, forever?
F/X man Rollie Tyler is now a toymaker. Mike, the ex-husband of his girlfriend Kim, is a cop. He asks Rollie to help catch a killer. The operation goes well until some unknown man kills both the killer and Mike. Mike's boss, Silak says it was the killer who killed Mike but Rollie knows it wasn't. Obviously, Silak is involved with Mike's death, so he calls on Leo McCarthy, the cop from the last movie, who is now a P.I., for help and they discover it's not just Silak they have to worry about.
It was a pre-destined love and marriage for Sonoko and Tetsuo. They tied the knot and became husband and wife no questions asked. All is well then. Well, perhaps not. Each holds a secret that even the binds of matrimony cannot untie.
The Tokyo Olympics are about to open, and Rynosuke Chagawa is excited to receive a new TV set to watch the upcoming events. His wife Hiromi is pregnant and he has built a second level on his shop to provide his adopted son Junnosuke with a private space to study for entrance to Tokyo University to set up a career with a major company. He dreams of sparing Junnosuke the struggles that he has faced as a writer. The family continues to rely upon Hiromi's income from her bar. Meanwhile a rival story, The Virus, by a new writer has appeared in the periodical that has been publishing his stories "Boy's Adventure Book" and he fears the new competition. Norifumi Suzuki also receives a new TV, but more of a deluxe model. Mutsuko Hoshino (Roku) is still the principal mechanic in the Suzuki family's auto repair shop, but she dresses up some mornings to go to a nearby street with the hope of a "chance" meeting with Dr...
1943, The Netherlands is under total Nazi occupation. In Amsterdam, Jack, an unassuming accountant, first meets Ina at a birthday party - a 20-year-old beauty from a wealthy diamond manufacturing family who instantly steals his heart. But Jack's pursuit of love will be complicated; he is poor and married to Manja, a flirtatious and mercurial spouse. When the Jews are being deported, the husband, the wife and the lover find themselves at the same concentration camp; actually living in the same barracks. When Jack's wife objects to the "girlfriend" in spite of their unhappy marriage, Jack and Ina resort to writing secret love letters, which sustain them throughout the horrible circumstances of the war.
Truck driver Teddy's late night stop at a gas station takes a dark turn when he meets the mysterious hooker Katerina, leading to unexpected consequences.
The deconstruction of the Avatar scenes and sets
To celebrate Yves’ 50th birthday, his friends plan to take him to the sunny paradise of Paros in Greece. But due to a cancelled flight, the holiday will take place in a far less glamorous and much rainier destination: Yves’ family home in Brittany. During the vacation, their bonds are challenged by Antoine’s constant complaining, Yves’ pride, Baptiste’s superstition and Laurent’s jealousy of Jean-Mich’s perfect life and family. On top of that, Antoine’s supposedly harmless joke – offering Yves a DNA ancestry test – has unforeseen consequences…
Mario, an Italian war orphan, sees Luca Rossi commit a murder. Eager for a home and family life, Mario promises not to tell the police if Luca takes him into his household and family. Luca fears and hates Mario, but his father, mother and sister all come to love him.
A photographer and a filmmaker challenge each other to shoot—one to photograph the other to film—two young actresses, one from Tokyo, the other from the countryside. The photographer seeks naturalism in his compositions, and Kawase observes and comments on his work. The competition between the photographer, the filmmaker, and the actresses creates a charged atmosphere.
Teatro Amazonas is an elaborate, intriguing formalist experiment investigating the cinematic gaze and cultural exchange, and offering an unconventional ethnographic record of its Amazonian subjects engaged (and disengaged) in the act of spectatorship.
‘Podwórka’ captures six groups of neighbourhood youth as they play in seemingly deserted yards, offering an intimate portrait of daily life in Łódź, Poland. Shot with a fixed camera, this single-channel video projection highlights American artist Sharon Lockhart’s concern for the interrelationship between the still and the moving image.
'Hannah' tells the story of Buddhist pioneer Hannah Nydahl and her life bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West. From her idealistic roots in 1960's Copenhagen to the hippie trail in Nepal, Hannah and her husband Ole became two of the first Western students of His Holiness the 16th Karmapa - the first consciously reincarnated lama of Tibet in 1110. Hannah went on to become an assistant and translator for some of the most powerful Tibetan lamas and a bridge between Buddhism in the East and the West.
Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. This first half of her two-part film opens with a renowned introduction that compares modern Olympians to classical Greek heroes, then goes on to provide thrilling in-the-moment coverage of some of the games' most celebrated moments, including African-American athlete Jesse Owens winning a then-unprecedented four gold medals.
Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. Where the two-part epic's first half, Festival of the Nations, focused on the international aspects of the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, part two, The Festival of Beauty, concentrates on individual athletes such as equestrians, gymnasts, and swimmers, climaxing with American Glenn Morris' performance in the decathalon and the games' majestic closing ceremonies.
This short documentary is a celebration of life on planet Earth. Made from haunting visual images selected from 50 years of NFB productions, the film looks at human beings, their place on earth, and their deep interconnection with all other beings. Evocations of forces that threaten the planet and all its inhabitants also offer avenues for reflection.
A biography of the Portuguese-born Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda, whose most distinctive feature was her tutti-frutti hat. From her arrival in the US as the "Brazilian Bombshell" to her Broadway career and Hollywood stardom in the 1940s.
After giving birth, Joyce attempts to regain her position as a filmmaker while also caring for her new baby. The changes to both her and her husband’s professional lives are remarkable and frustrating. The new parents love the baby but must recognize the limitations she puts on their careers.
A documentary that explores the potential dangers of toxic chemicals in consumer products and the recent spike in unexplained health phenomena.
Spies of Mississippi tells the story of a secret spy agency formed by the state of Mississippi to preserve segregation and maintain white supremacy. The anti-civil rights organization was hidden in plain sight in an unassuming office in the Mississippi State Capitol. Funded with taxpayer dollars and granted extraordinary latitude to carry out its mission, the Commission evolved from a propaganda machine into a full blown spy operation. How do we know this is true? The Commission itself tells us in more than 146,000 pages of files preserved by the State. This wealth of first person primary historical material guides us through one of the most fascinating and yet little known stories of America's quest for Civil Rights.
Vienna’s Prater is an amusement park and a desire machine. No mechanical invention, no novel idea or sensational innovation could escape incorporation into the Prater. The diverse story-telling in Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater” transforms this place of sensations into a modern cinema of attractions. The Prater’s history from the beginning to the present is told by its protagonists and those who have documented it, including contemporary cinematic images of the Prater, interviews with carnies, commentary by Austrians and visitors from abroad, film quotes, and photographic and written documentary materials. The meaning of the Prater, its status as a place of technological innovation, and its role as a cultural medium are reflected in texts by Elfriede Jelinek, Josef von Sternberg, Erich Kästner and Elias Canetti, as well as in music devoted to this amusement venue throughout the course of its history.
A documentary on the once promising American rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. The friendship between respective founders, Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor, escalated into bitter rivalry as the Dandy Warhols garnered major international success while the Brian Jonestown Massacre imploded in a haze of drugs.
In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.
A Zen priest in San Francisco and cookbook author use Zen Buddhism and cooking to relate to everyday life.
"My Own Breathing" is the final documentary of the trilogy, The Murmuring about comfort women during the World War II directed by BYUN Young-joo. This is the completion of her seven years work. BYUN's first and second documentaries spoke of grandmothers' everyday life through the origin of their torment, while My Own Breathing goes back to their past from their everyday life. Deleting any device of narration or music, the camera lets grandmothers talk about themselves. Finally, the film revives their deep voices trampled by harsh history.
At the sea shore, a goat, a child, and a naked man. This is a photograph taken in 1954 by Agnès Varda. The goat was dead, the child was named Ulysses, and the man was naked. Starting from this frozen image, the film explores the real and the imaginary.
There are places that we don’t want to know anything about, places that we would rather pretend don’t exist at all. One such place is a dumpsite. From the humans’ point of view, it is a ghastly place, a stinking desert of trash. But it’s a desert that is teaming with life.
The film is a commemoration of the lost livelihood of the earth, the lost lives of the War and to the work of two of the cinema’s greatest artists.
Joris Ivens and wife Marceline Loridan took their cameras into Pharmacy No. 3 in Shanghai, which in addition to dispensing drugs manages an outreach program of medical services, an extension of the pharmacy’s in-house medical care center.