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New Releases - Documentary & Filmss
Directed by Beth Gage & George Gage
Tells the story of Tim DeChristopher's extraordinary, ingenious and effective act of civil disobedience drawing attention to the need for action on climate change.
BIDDER 70 is Tim DeChristopher, the student who monkey-wrenched the 2008 fraudulent Bureau of Land Management Oil and Gas Lease Auction. Bidding $1.8 million to save 22,000 acres of pristine Utah wilderness surrounding Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, with no intention to pay or drill, Tim brought the BLM auction to an abrupt halt. A month later, Barack Obama became president and on February 4, 2009, new Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, invalidated the entire BLM Auction.
Nevertheless, DeChristopher was indicted on two federal felonies facing penalties of up to ten years in prison and $750,000 in fines. During the two years awaiting his trial, DeChristopher stepped up his activism, evolved into a climate justice leader, and waited through nine trial postponements until, on February 28, 2011 his trial began. BIDDER 70 is Tim's journey from economics student to incarcerated felon.
Amonst those featured are Bill McKibben, James Hansen, Robert Redford, John Schuchardt, David Harris, Larry Gibson, Terry Tempest Williams, and members of Salt Lake City's Peaceful Uprising.
Reviews
"One man's story that speaks volumes about what's at stake for all of us." - Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege
"Topped my list for the most inspiring film." - Stephanie Penn Spears, EcoWatch
"Powerful, intelligent and very entertaining, BIDDER 70 will show you how one person can change the world." - Frank Marshall, Kennedy-Marshall Company
Awards
Best US Feature Film, Traverse City Film Festival
Moving Mountains Award, Mountainfilm in Telluride
People's Choice & Spirit of Activism Awards, Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival
Best Film & Audience Award, Frozen River Film Festival
Audience Choice & Green Fire Awards, American Conservation Film Festival
Best of Festival & Best of Category Awards, Montana Cine Film Festival
Best Documentary & Act Now Awards, Crested Butte Film Festival
Fork in the Road Award, Greentopia Film Festival
Audience Award, Driftless Film Festival
DVD / 2013 / (Grades 10 -12, College, Adults) / 72 minutes
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Director: Laura Archibald
Featuring poignant interviews with Pete Seeger, Kris Kristofferson, Don McLean, Peter Yarrow, Arlo Guthrie, Lucy and Carly Simon, Tom Chapin and Judy Collins, among dozens of other music luminaries, GREENWICH VILLAGE: MUSIC THAT DEFINED A GENERATION combines talking heads with rare archival footage and new live performances to tell a story about a community that created a generation-defining music. Greenwich Village was the birthplace of the singer/songwriter and songs of love and relationships. Between 1961-1973, many musicians in The Village banded together to sing about the radical social upheaval of the time. As these new singers emerged, Greenwich blossomed as a place that promoted a better future. Their music challenged the status quo by singing about taboo subjects - fighting for civil liberties, protesting the Vietnam War, and holding governments accountable for their actions. Their views, which were controversial at the time, weren't always greeted with open arms. On Sunday April 9, 1961, over 500 young musicians gathered in Greenwich Village's Washington Square to sing folk songs to promote peace and harmony. This act of passive protest resulted in riot squads attacking singers and civilians alike with billy clubs, leading to several arrests. The incident became known around the world as the Washington Square Folk Riot and was cited as the first 'freedom of speech' revolt. It also made Greenwich Village a beacon of hope for an entire generation. And this is just one of the important stories which make up the vibrant history of The Village music scene. GREENWICH VILLAGE: MUSIC THAT DEFINED A GENERATION is the amazing untold story about the very people whose music helped change the world.
DVD (Color) / 2013 / 92 minutes
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By Marlo Poras
A tale of two sisters living in the shadow of two Chinas, this documentary by award-winning filmmaker Marlo Poras (Mai's America; Run Grany Run) follows Juma and Latso, young women from one of the world's last remaining matriarchal societies. Thrust into the worldwide economic downturn after losing jobs in Beijing and left with few options, they return to their remote Himalayan village. But growing exposure to modernity has irreparably altered traditions of the Mosuo, their tiny ethnic miniority, and home is not the same. Determined to keep their family out of poverty, one sister sacrifices her educational dreams and stays home to farm, while the other leaves, trying her luck in the city. The changes test them in unexpected ways. This visually stunning film highlights today's realities of women's lives and China's vast cultural and economic divides while offering rare views of a surviving matriarchy.
Reviews
"A well-shot, confidently crafted feature with the firm narrative drive of an old-fashioned novel, one that pulls its leading figures' fates at the fore . . . " - Dennis Harvey, Variety
"A quietly stunning portrait of modern China." - Boston Globe
"Does what good documentaries should: provide insight into the unseen." - Loren King, Rocky Mountain Outlook
DVD (Mandarin/Mosuo/Tibetan, Color) / 2013 / 80 minutes
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Director: Katie Dellamaggiore
Brooklyn Castle tells the stories of five members of the chess team at a below-the-poverty-line inner city junior high school that has won more national championships than any other in the country. The film follows the challenges these kids face in their personal lives as well as on the chessboard, and is as much about the sting of their losses as it is about the anticipation of their victories.
Reviews
"Beyond telling the touching stories of these unlikely champions, Brooklyn Castle serves to raise a battle cry for funding for after-school programs." - Time Magazine
"As inspirational academic stories go, it doesn't get much better than this." - Christian Science Monitor
"Deeply satisfying...Irresistible." - The New York Times
DVD / 2012 / 102 minutes
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By Karima Zoubir
Working as a videographer at weddings in Casablanca, Khadija Harrad is part of the new generation of young, divorced Moroccan women seeking to realize their desires for freedom and independence while honoring their families' wishes. Mother of an 11-year-old son and primary breadwinner for her parents and siblings as well, she navigates daily between the elaborate fantasy world of the parties she films and harassment from her traditionally conservative family, which disapproves of her occupation and wants her only to remarry. CAMERA/WOMAN, shot in verite style, follows Khadija on the job, at home, and with supportive women friends who are divorced and share similar experiences. As it unveils the issues that confront working-class Muslim women in societies now undergoing profound change, this arresting film reveals that for Khadija, unbowed in the face of overwhelming odds, the camera becomes a liberating force.
Reviews
"Moving and amazing....Camera/Woman is shot in a strikingly intimate style...These are women desperate to provide for their families whose brains cannot collude in the fiction that they can't do anything, just because they're women." - Nisha Lilia Diu, The Telegraph, UK
"It is a world of great beauty and sweet dreams in the videos that Khadija's films, but in reality the weddings are an expression of the struggles women face in contemporary Morocco to combat exclusion and oppression and somehow move beyond them." - Brit Doc
Award
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), WorldView Award
DVD (Arabic, Color) / 2012 / 59 minutes
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By Alice Arnold
New screen-based sign systems are putting TV-style advertising into the public domain in cities around the globe. These electronic signs are re-shaping urban environments and re-defining areas of public space by intensifying the commercialization of the public sphere.
In addition to the explosion of screens in public spaces, screens are ubiquitous in work spaces and in people's daily life activities. These seamless, illuminated electronic surfaces are becoming the devices through which we frame our experiences. ELECTRIC SIGNS explores this new screen culture as it unfolds in the global city.
The film's narrator, a city observer modeled on the critic Walter Benjamin, takes us on a journey through a variety of urban landscapes, examining public spaces and making connections between light, perception and the culture of attractions in today's consumer society.
The film is structured as a documentary essay in the spirit of city symphony films, and features footage in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities around the world. Also featured are interviews with prominent lighting designers; advertising and marketing professionals; urban sociologists and visual culture experts; and community activists.
The filmmakers traveled around the world to collect footage of electronic signs and media facades from cities on four continents. The film captures the beauty and excitement of these illuminated signs while examining their messages, and looks at city life from many perspectives, so as to capture the intensification of urban life amidst the vast spaces beneath the skyscrapers.
Reviews
"Electric Signs provides an incisive guide to the seductive blight of the increasingly ubiquitous intrusions of public space by blinding private media. This hallucinatory landscape is at once a terrible sublime and a numbingly coercive condition that affects us all in ways we only begin to understand. The film lucidly unpacks the the transformation of the city by this synesthetic tsumami and points to grave dangers ahead." - Michael Sorkin, Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York
"Alice Arnold take us on a fascinating journey to urban screens around the world and asks us to see this dynamic electronic landscape through new eyes. The film mixes striking footage of screens large and small with the voices of diverse stakeholders - advertisers, artists, designers, citizens, consumers, activists - and invites us to rethink how we manage public space in contemporary media cities." - Scott McQuire, Associate Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne and author of "The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space" (2008).
"The documentary is an ideal introduction for understanding the complexities for contemporary media architecture and media facades in global cities. Through showcasing various examples from cities around the world the viewer understands that large screens in the public domain are perceived by the public in very different ways. Age, cultural background play an important role here. Further the documentary also outlines the risks and challenges for cities, governance and citizens when transforming cities from the pre- and post-industrial age into 21st century cities through digital technology. Arnold captures all these aspects in the documentary and make this film a must for critics and campaigners for large screens in cities." - Dr. M. Hank Haeusler, Media Architecture Institute
DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2012 / 58 minutes
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Director: Brad Bernstein
One man's wild, lifelong adventure of testing society's boundaries through his subversive art, Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story combines traditional documentary storytelling with original animation culled from seven decades worth of art from the renegade children's book author and illustrator.
Using a palette of 20th century events to paint an artist's epic yet controversial life story, the film offers a retrospective of Ungerer's life and art, and ponders the complexities and contradictions of a man who, armed with an acerbic wit, an accusing finger and a razor sharp pencil, gave visual representation to the revolutionary voices during one of the most tantalizing and dramatic periods in American history.
Reviews
"Easily the most wildly fascinating artist profiled in a documentary since CRUMB." - Movies.com
"Thoroughly entertaining!" - The Hollywood Reporter
DVD / 2012 / 98 minutes
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By Barbara Miller
Their voices are suppressed, prohibited and censored. But world-famous bloggers Yoani Sanchez, Zeng Jinyan and Farnaz Seifi are unafraid of their dictatorial regimes. These fearless women represent a new, networked generation of modern rebels. In Cuba, China and Iran their blogs shake the foundations of the state information monopoly, putting them at great risk.
This film accompanies these brave young cyberfeminists on perilous journeys. Eyewitness reports and clandestine footage show Sanchez's brutal beating by Cuban police for criticizing her country's regime; Chinese human rights activist Jinyan under house arrest for four years; and Iranian journalist and women's advocate Seifi forced into exile, where she blogs under a pseudonym. Tracing each woman's use of social media to denounce and combat violations of human rights and free speech in her home country, FORBIDDEN VOICES attests to the Internet's potential for building international awareness and political pressure.
Reviews
"An incredible moving story of three women bloggers fighting to keep telling the truth. As First Lady Michelle Obama says: "Courage can actually be contagious." - Melissa Silverstein, Indiewire.com
"Tell the truth in a country where there is no freedom of expression? These women use the new media as a weapon against censorship." - Kristen Rammus, Estonian Human Rights Centre
"The documentary shows beautifully deep sorrow of exile." - livinginnyon.com
DVD (Color) / 2012 / 96 minutes
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Director: Cathryne Czubek
A Girl and A Gun shows the female perspective on an object whose history is deeply bound to men and masculinity. The classic Hollywood portrayals of pistol packin' mamas, tomboy sharp shooters, sexually twisted femme fatales, and high-heeled, cold-blooded assassins are caricatures. In truth, the typical woman who hangs out at rifle ranges and keeps ammo in her purse is the girl-next-door, the single mom, a hard working sister or aunt. Maybe she's a realist or has learned tough lessons from life; either way, she cares about her personal safety and may even find salvation, comfort or something satisfying in possessing a gun. In a word, she is empowered.
Breaking through the caricatures, A Girl and a Gun reveals America's diverse and far-ranging female gun community. It depicts how this community is portrayed by the media and targeted by the gun industry; and shows, through personal stories, how guns change women's lives.
DVD / 2012 / 76 minutes
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By Ann Fessler
From 1945-73, 1.5 million unmarried young American women, facing enormous social pressures, surrendered babies to adoption. Lacking sex education and easy access to birth control, they were forced into hiding while pregnant and then into "abandoning" their infants. In her latest film, Ann Fessler, Professor of Photography at Rhode Island School of Design, reprises the subject of her award-winning The Girls Who Went Away (National Book Critics Circle; Ballard Book Prize), which Ms. readers named an all-time best feminist book.
Drawing on interviews with 100 women, Fessler lets them have their say and brings hidden history to light. We hear only their voices, which detail wrenching experiences against images from vintage newsreel and educational films reinforcing stereotypes of women's roles following WWII. This gripping documentary will help today's students grasp what life was like before the sexual and feminist revolutions had fully dawned.
Reviews
"A compelling glimpse into an era in which voiceless young women had no rights, rarely saw or held their newborns and were threatened with psychiatric commitment if they questioned the mandate to relinquish a child." - Silverdocs Film Festival
"Heart-wrenching,..precise, daunting, and also allusive, this story recalls those bad old days when ignorance, silence, and repression were the preferred social strategies." - Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters
"A Girl Like Her packs an emotional wallop greater than most other films released this year, documentary or fiction." - Dan Schindel, Otste
DVD (Color) / 2012 / 48 minutes
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Director: Xavier Dolan
Focusing on the relationship between Hubert Minel (Xavier Dolan), a 16-year-old Quebecois living in suburban Montreal, and his single mother Chantale (Anne Dorval), I KILLED MY MOTHER beautifully captures the anxieties of a mother-son relationship. While he gauges her with contempt, only seeing her out-of-date sweater and kitschy decor, the ingrained mechanisms (i.e. manipulation and guilt) of their relationship beautifully (and tragically) unravel on the big screen.
DVD (Color, Black & White, French with English subtitles) / 2012 / 96 minutes
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By Tinatin Gurchiani
A filmmaker puts out a casting call for young adults, aged 15- to 23. The director wants to make a film about growing up in her home country, Georgia, and find commonalities across social and ethnic lines. She travels through cities and villages interviewing the candidates who responded and filming their daily lives.
The boys and girls who responded to the call are radically different from one another, as are their personal reasons for auditioning. Some want be movie stars and see the film as a means to that end; others want to tell their personal story. One girl wants to call to account the mother who abandoned her; one boy wants to share the experience of caring for his handicapped family members; another wants to clear the name of a brother, currently serving a jail sentence.
Together, their tales weave a kaleidoscopic tapestry of war and love, wealth and poverty, creating an extraordinarily complex vision of a modern society that still echoes with its Soviet past.
Reviews
"Mixing metanarrative with heightened visual aesthetics, THE MACHINE WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR intuitively penetrates individual lives to conjure a richly layered, indelible portrait of a society, brilliantly becoming more than the sum of its parts." - Sundance Film Festival
"Tinatin Gurchiani's accomplished first feature THE MACHINE WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR offers an impressionistic, somewhat poetical view of current life in her native former Soviet territory...ample human interest and handsome lensing." - Dennis Harvey, Variety
"Director Tinatin Gurchiani opens a window into the lives of common folk in her native Georgia, where the post-Soviet era has been plagued by strife, using the premise of a casting call to pull confessions of hopes and dreams from her subjects." - Steve Dollar, The Wall Street Journal
Awards
Best Director, World Cinema Documentary, 2013 Sundance Film Festival
Best Georgian Film, 2012 Tblisi International Film Festival
DVD (Color) / 2012 / 101 minutes
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Directed by Kum-Kum Bhavnani
The story of Mott Green and the solar-powered Grenada Chocolate Company, a farmers' and chocolate-makers' co-op, which makes organic chocolate from tree-to-bar.
NOTHING LIKE CHOCOLATE tells the poweful story of Mott Green and the Grenada Chocolate Company he founded, which is a farmers' and workers' cooperative. This tree-to-bar factory, claimed to be the smallest in the world, turns out luscious creations that are organic and ethical.
In a world saturated with industrial chocolate--often made with cocoa harvested by exploited child labor--this solar-powered workers' co-op provides a viable model for creating sustainable communities in the global South and beyond.
Also featured are Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, and Christian Parenti.
Reviews
"A deeply layered, subtle, and visionary film." - Michael A. Santoro, Professor of Business Ethics, Rutgers University
"Mixing the bitter with the sweet, the factual and the idealistic, the documentary Nothing like Chocolate gives a macro and micro perspective on the beloved sweet stuff. Smartly directed..." - Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara Independent
"An engaging movie that provokes both the brain and the taste buds." - Brent Simon, Shockya.com
Awards
Winner, Silver Reel, Lucerne Film Festival
Best Documentary, ITN Film Festival, Los Angeles
Best Documentary Feature, Independents' Film Festival, Tampa Bay
Best of the Fest Selection, Santa Barbara International Film Festival
DVD / 2012 / (Grades 10 - 12, College, Adults) / 68 minutes
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Director: Jessica Wolfson, Paul Lovelace
Legendary radio personality Bob Fass revolutionized the FM airwaves in the 1960s and '70s with his free-form program Radio Unnameable, a cultural hub for music, politics, and audience engagement.
For nearly 50 years, he has been heard at midnight on New York City listener-sponsored station WBAI, utilizing the airwaves for mobilization long before today's innovations in social media. Drawing from Fass's extraordinary personal archive of audio recordings, including interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman, and performances by Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, and Carly Simon, Radio Unnameable celebrates the profoundly influential career of one of radio's unsung heroes.
DVD (Color) / 2012 / 87 minutes
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By Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon
The Killing Fields in Cambodia became known to the world but little is known about the struggles of the women left behind. From 1975-79, Pol Pot's campaign to increase the population forced at least 250,000 young Cambodian women to marry Khmer Rouge soldiers they had never met before. Sochan Pen was one of them. At 16, she was beaten and raped by her husband before managing to escape, though deeply scarred by her experience. After 30 years of silence, Sochan is ready to file a complaint with the international tribunal that will try former Khmer leaders. With quiet dignity, she starts demanding answers from those who carried out the regime's orders.
To tell a story little known outside Cambodia, Cambodian Lida Chan and French-Cambodian Guillaume Suon include Khmer Rouge era footage underscoring war's traumatic legacy for Sochan's generation of women. Awarded two prizes at Amsterdam's prestigious International Documentary Film Festival, RED WEDDING demonstrates the liberating power of speech and memory in the quest for justice.
Reviews
"Subtly and poetically illuminates the absolute necessity of a country to shine the light on the truth about its own history." - Geneva Human Rights Film Festival
"The story of a survivor who pits humanity against an ideology and a system designed to annihilate people like her." - Foundation Alter Cine
"Combines all the elements of a great documentary: a powerful historical episode, retold from an unexpected angle, and a first-rate photography." - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam Jury
Award
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), NTF IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary
DVD (Cambodian, Color) / 2012 / 58 minutes
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Director: Scott Thurman
In Austin, Texas, fifteen people influence what is taught to the next generation of American children. Once every decade, the highly politicized Texas State Board of Education rewrites the teaching and textbook standards for its nearly 5 million schoolchildren. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas affects the nation as a whole.
Don McLeroy, a dentist, Sunday school teacher, and avowed young-earth creationist, leads the Religious Right charge. After briefly serving on his local school board, McLeroy was elected to the Texas State Board of Education and later appointed chairman. During his time on the board, McLeroy has overseen the adoption of new science and history curriculum standards, drawing national attention and placing Texas on the front line of the so-called "culture wars."
In his last term, McLeroy, aided by Cynthia Dunbar, an attorney from Houston and professor of Law at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, finds himself not only fighting to change what Americans are taught, but also fighting to retain his seat on the board. Challenged by Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, and Ron Wetherington, an anthropology professor from Southern Methodist University in Texas, McLeroy faces his toughest term yet.
THE REVISIONARIES follows the rise and fall of some of the most controversial figures in American education through some of their most tumultuous intellectual battles.
DVD (Color) / 2012 / 83 minutes
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Director: T.C. Johnstone
American cycling legend Jock Boyer moved to Rwanda, Africa to help a group of struggling genocide survivors pursue their dream of a national team. Rising From Ashes follows Boyer and Team Rwanda as they set out against impossible odds and rise from the ashes of their past.
Team Rwanda started out as a cycling organization but soon took on a greater mission. Many of the riders could not read or write, lived in homes without water, electricity, were malnourished, and had never received healthcare, or even knew what a dentist was. But there was still a greater issue: These riders were all recovering from the traumatic psychological effects of the 1994 genocide.
Team Rwanda has not solved all of these problems but it is making a difference. Riders are provided a modest salary to help provide for themselves and their families, equivalent to three times the national average income. Riders are given English lessons and taught how to read and write. Healthcare is provided for the ongoing issues of malaria and water-borne diseases, and, when funds are available, the riders are given regular health checks and dental care.
While the team has tried to address riders' physical and mental issues it has provided something greater. The riders of Team Rwanda have become ambassadors of hope. They have given the country a vision of something greater then themselves and a renewed sense of purpose.
Rising From Ashes is more than a movie; it's a gateway of hope. But this is just the beginning. Since 2005 Team Rwanda has developed a model for caring for passionate athletes and it's about to expand the vision. In 2012 Team Rwanda will begin the next phase, the development of Africa's first all-black, all African team to attempt the greatest cycling event in the world, The Tour de France.
Review
"Cycling is an excruciating sport -- a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain -- and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose." - The New Yorker on Team Rwanda
DVD / 2012 / 82 minutes
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By Marcia Rock and Patricia Lee Stotter
Women make up 15 percent of today's military. That number is expected to double in 10 years. SERVICE highlights the resourcefulness of seven amazing women who represent the first wave of mothers, daughters and sisters returning home from the frontless wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Portraying the courage of women veterans as they transition from active duty to their civilian lives, this powerful film describes the horrific traumas they have faced, the inadequate care they often receive on return, and the large and small accomplishments they work mightily to achieve.
These are the stories we hear about from men returning from war, but rarely from women veterans. Through compelling portraits, we watch these women wrestle with prostheses, homelessness, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Military Sexual Trauma. The documentary takes the audience on a journey from the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq to rural Tennessee and urban New York City, from coping with amputations, to flashbacks, triggers and depression to ways to support other vets. An eye-opening look at the specific challenges facing women veterans with a special focus on the disabled, SERVICE can be used for courses in military studies, women's studies, peace and conflict courses and veteran support groups.
Reviews
"This work is a delicately balanced portrayal of our women warriors' battles and victories over insurmountable odds...a must see!" - Lourdes Alvarado-Ramos, Director, Washington State Dept. of Veteran Affairs
"Without doubt, the most powerful film I've seen about women veterans. It tears you to pieces to watch it and restores your soul . . . All at the same time. It's a documentary about hope. It's the best film you haven't seen yet. Tell everyone you know about it." - Wendi Goodman, 18-year Army veteran, author of One Weary Soldier blog
"The film stuns. These women veterans show extraordinary character and resolve as they deal with unforgiving injuries, and a culture dull with ignorance. Hawk or dove, we need to understand and appreciate this special group." - Associate English Professor Nancy Nevins, Pierce and Glendale Colleges, CA
DVD (Color) / 2012 / 55 minutes
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Directed by John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson
A poem about a city, its people, and 20,000 crows.
Tokyo is a digital metropolis and wellspring of spectacular pop culture, its commercial crossroads carpeted with people day and night. Above them, watching from perches on buildings and power lines, are more than 20,000 crows. As their numbers soared in recent years, Tokyo fought back: trapping them, destroying nests, and securing trash. The crows adapted; they are among the smartest of animals. The 13 million people of Tokyo now live alongside them in a stalemate.
TOKYO WAKA tells this story, and a larger one as well. A Buddhist priest comments on garbage as the remnants of desire; a gardener considers the relentless persistence of nature amidst urban grit; a homeless woman talks about forging community in her tent village deep in the corner of a city park. TOKYO WAKA gives these smart, opportunistic crows their due, but the film is ultimately an episodic and discursive poem about the life and culture of Tokyo, one of the great cities of the world.
Reviews
"One of the most beautiful films I have seen in years...This is a masterwork." - Tobias Wolff, Author, Professor, Stanford University
"An engaging film that welcomes you into the evolving relationship between human and crow cultures. You feel the Japanese perspective and understand the crow's, and you come to see our shared heritage as one deeply molded by the natural world." - John Marzluff, Professor, University of Washington and author Gifts of the Crow
"Tokyo Waka is an engaging window on life today in Tokyo and the part that crows have come to play in it. The film nicely conveys the well-known Japanese appreciation of and attachment to nature as well as the tenor of city life in Japan." - Kenneth Pyle, Professor of History and Asian Studies, University of Washington, Author, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose
Awards
Grand Prize, Best Feature Film, Green Film Festival in Seoul
Cinematography Award, United Nations Association Film Festival, Stanford
DVD (Japanese with English Subtitles) / 2012 / (Grades 7 - 9, College, Adults) / 63 minutes
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By Davy Chou
Between the early 1960s and 1975, Cambodia was home to a vibrant film industry that produced more than 400 features. When the Khmer Rouge seized control of the country, they halted production, demolishing the industry along most of the rest of the country's cultural life. Cinemas were closed, prints destroyed, and the filmmakers, actors, and screenwriters who were not able to flee the country were slaughtered.
Davy Chou's GOLDEN SLUMBERS resurrects this cinema's heyday. Though very few of the films from this period have remained intact, Chou uses the soundtracks, advertisements, posters and lobby cards to recreate his subjects' shared memories of a golden era.
The film contains interviews with the era's surviving artists, including directors Ly Bun Yim, Ly You Sreang, and Yvon Hem, and actor Dy Saveth. Two dedicated cinephiles-one of whom says he can remember the faces of film stars better than those of his brothers and sisters-recall plotlines and trade film trivia. Chou also takes us inside Phnom Penh's shuttered movie palaces, now transformed into karaoke bars, restaurants, and squats.
These reminiscences and recreations testify that while the most of the films of this era have vanished, their memory endures for an entire generation of Cambodians, leaving a complex legacy for today's youth to inherit.
Reviews
"Deeply moving... several impressive notches above standard-issue talking-head fare. The choice of material and manner in which the final images are presented is pure poetry." - Variety
"While Golden Slumbers spotlights Chou's discovery of his filmmaking lineage, the young filmmaker is clearly looking to the future." - Film Comment
"Instructive and poignant viewing...a fragmentary tapestry of memory that says a lot about the traces cinema leaves on our lives, and the energy that keeps stories burning even after the medium that conveyed them has been lost." - Screen Daily
DVD (Color, Black & White ) / 2011 / 96 minutes
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Directed by Frauke Sandig and Eric Black
Six young Maya present a wholly indigenous perspective, in which all life is sacred and connected, as they resist the destruction of their culture and environment.
Featured at every Central and South American Human Rights film festival, HEART OF SKY, HEART OF EARTH follows six young Maya in Guatemala and Chiapas through their daily and ceremonial life. They put forth a wholly indigenous Mayan perspective in their own words, without narration. Their cosmology, in which all life is sacred and interconnected, presents a deeply compelling alternative to the prevailing worldview.
As giant corporations go to the ends of the earth to extract all resources, these Maya reveal their determination to resist the destruction of their culture and environment. they believe they are the guardians of the earth. Each of their stories touches upon a facet of the current global crisis.
Beautifully filmed, the intimate accounts of the protagonists interweave with images associated with the fragile beauty of nature and the creation myth of the Popol Vuh. Ruins of a former Mayan civilization stand in the background as harbingers of our own possible fate.
Reviews
"An exquisitely, achingly beautiful film--wonderfully conceived and sensitively filmed" - Allen J. Christenson, Professor of Humanities, Brigham Young University
"Visually stunning...This film would be of great interest to students of anthropology, sociology, environmental science, Latin American politics, and filmmaking." - Jennifer Little, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of the Pacific
"A beautiful, powerful, and often painful documentary...Within this film, Mayan voices bear witness to the catastrophic damage to human lives caused by powerful political agendas as well as unconstrained resource extraction. Confronting the greedy appetite of global conglomerates, we are forced to reckon with the violent legacy and continuing toll of colonialism in a place where beauty and brutality walk hand-in-hand." - Patricia McAnany, Kenan Eminent Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Author, Ancestral Maya Economies in Archaeological Perspective
Awards
First Prize, Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival, Toronto
First Prize/Puka?awi Award, Festival Int'l de Cine de los Derechos Humanos (Bolivia)
Audience Award, Natur Film Festival (Germany)
Special Jury Mention, International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights
Special Jury Mention, Festival Int. de Cine de Derechos Humanos (Argentina)
DVD / 2011 / (Grades 10 - 12, College, Adults) / 98 minutes
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Director: Macky Alston
Love Free or Die is about a man whose two defining passions the world cannot reconcile: his love of God and for his partner Mark. It is about church and state, love and marriage, faith and identity ;one man's struggle to dispel the notion that god's love has limits.
Bishop Robinson's 2003 elevation, in the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire, ignited a worldwide firestorm in the Anglican Communion that has threatened schism. Even as he has pushed for greater inclusion within his own church, Bishop Robinson has become a standard bearer in the fight over the rights of LGBT people to receive full acceptance in churches and beyond.
DVD (Color) / 2011 / 83 minutes
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By S. Casper Wong
Unlike anyone you've ever met, LuLu is a hard-living, chain-smoking rebel with a tender heart; poet with a potty mouth; farm girl; former cheerleader; world-class biochemistry pioneer; and beloved professor. Aka Dr. Louise Nutter, she has just discovered a new anti-cancer drug when, at 42, she learns she has terminal breast cancer. Reminiscent of Peter Friedman and Tom Joslin's SILVERLAKE LIFE, THE LULU SESSIONS, via video diary, records the journey S. Casper Wong shared with her former teacher, best friend, and on-again-off-again lover over the last 15 months before LuLu died. Her compelling film chronicles how the two women test the limits of their bond and take on life's ultimate adventure, shedding old presumptions and values while adopting new ones in the process. Reflective, intensely honest, and surprisingly humorous, this unforgettable documentary makes life's last journey accessible in ways rarely seen before on screen.
Reviews
"The pains, unexpected humor and self reflection expressed by those who experience breast cancer (loved ones as well as patients) are recorded with raw immediacy. " - Variety
"At its core . . . Is a completely unconventional love story¡Xan intimate and deeply personal portrait of two people confronting a terminal illness with honesty, laughter and love." - Queer Doc
Awards
Reeling 30 - Chicago Lesbian & Gay Intl Film Fest, Audience Award for Best Documentary
San Diego Asian Film Festival, Special Jury Award
DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, Best Documentary Award
DVD (Color) / 2011 / 86 minutes
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By Ulrike Ottinger
In the Echigo region of northwestern Japan, where heavy snow blankets entire landscapes and villages for more than half the year, a distinctive way of life has evolved. Time follows a different, slower rhythm, and everyday routines, along with religious rituals, wedding traditions, festivals, foods, songs, and games, are adapted to Echigo's austere living conditions and natural beauty. Ulrike Ottinger's latest film leads us into this mythical country, turning her lens on daily and communal life under the snowy mountains. Narrated in English by American literary and media theorist Lawrence A. Rickels, this stunning documentary sequences merge with the tale of students Takeo and Marko, played by Kabuki performers. Their journey through the past and repeated encounters with the present find them wondrously transformed with help from a beautiful vixen fox. Under Snow is clear evidence that Ottinger, whose career spans more than four decades, remains one of world cinema's most original artists.
Reviews
"Ottinger's world can hardly be confused with humdrum reality. Watching her films is like traveling through an undiscovered country of marvels." - Leslie Camhi Leslie Camhi, The Village Voice
"Maintains a gaze that demonstrates wonderment and fundamental sympathy for her surroundings." - Jerusalem Film Festival
"Visually and musically evocative . . . A film for all who wish to take a journey to a mysterious and slow world." - Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Asia-Pacific Weeks
DVD (Color) / 2011 / 103 minutes
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Director: Andres Wood
VIOLETA WENT TO HEAVEN tells the story of famed Chilean singer and folklorist Violeta Parra, tracing her evolution from impoverished child to international sensation and Chile's national hero, while capturing the swirling intensity of her inner contradictions, fallibilities, and passions.
From the marquee that she built in Santiago, Chile, Violeta Parra is visited by people who shaped her life. We gradually find out her secrets, fears, frustrations and joys, not only through performances of her multiple works but also through her memories, her loves, and her hopes. Her achievements are suspended in a passionate journey with the characters who made her dream, laugh and cry.
DVD (Color, Spanish with English subtitles) / 2011 / 110 minutes
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Director: Jacob Hatley
Director Jacob Hatley's intimate documentary finds Levon Helm at home in Woodstock, NY, in the midst of creating his first studio album in 25 years. Shot during the course of two-plus years, this highly anticipated film focuses in on the four-time Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member after his 2007 comeback album, Dirt Farmer, brought him back to the spotlight.
DVD (Color) / 2010 / 83 minutes
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By Marcela Zamora Chamorro
MARIA IN NOBODY'S LAND is an unprecedented and intimate look at the illegal and extremely dangerous journey of three Salvadoran women to the US. Dona Ines, a 60 year old woman, has been looking for her daughter for five years and is following the same route her daughter took. Marta and Sandra, tired of the violence from their husbands and wanting to overcome poverty, decide to leave their families behind to travel to America - with only thirty dollars in their pockets. During their harrowing journey, the three women encounter prostitution, slave trade, rape, kidnapping and even death, in an unwavering quest for a better life.
In making this documentary, a team of six journalists and filmographers rode with migrants on the tops of trains and slept in migrant shelters. As the immigration debate continues to be a hot button issue, this film, which helps to bring understanding to these urgent issues, is essential for courses on human rights, Latin American studies, Chicano studies, immigration, labor, international studies and women's studies, as well as for public libraries and interested community groups.
Reviews
"An impressive documentary that shows how the gangs the police and even the local government collaborate to take any advantage from the migrant's situation. And it suggests that Mexican and Central American governments also have interests to leave the situation unchanged." - Latino Barrio
"These heart-wrenching stories shed light on the thousands of kidnappings, sexual abuse, human trafficking, and torture suffered by migrants who travel across Mexico each year with the hopes of reaching a brighter future in the United States." - UCLA International Institute
DVD (Spanish, Color) / 2010 / 86 minutes
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By Beth Freeman
Canada is one of a handful of countries that permit women to fight in ground combat. In January 2013, the Pentagon lifted its ban on women in combat roles. In 2016, for the first time in American history, women will be permitted to train as combat soldiers. Sisters In Arms reveals the untold stories of three remarkable women in the most difficult and dangerous military professions: facing combat on the frontlines in Afghanistan. Corporal Katie Hodges is a determined infantry soldier; Corporal Tamar Freeman, a trained medical professional; and Master Corporal Kimberley Ashton, a combat engineer and mother who has left behind three young daughters. Using video diaries filmed by the soldiers in Afghanistan and intimate personal interviews, Sisters in Arms tells their stories of loss and inspiration from a uniquely female perspective, challenging our perceptions of what constitutes a soldier.
Reviews
"Sisters in Arms probes with delicate restraint as it shows us women as mothers and life-givers, as well as women as lethal weapons." - Katherine Monk, CanWest News
"An important body of work that candidly captures what many have known but were hesitant to admit; Women are fully capable of serving in any and all capacities in our military." - COL (Ret) Mary A. Baker, U.S. Military
"First to probe deep into Canadian female combat veterans' experience." - Alistair McDonald, The Wall Street Journal
Award
Film North - Huntsville Intl Film Festival, Best Documentary
DVD (Color) / 2010 / 48 minutes
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By Ulrike Ottinger
Ulrike Ottinger's provocative melange of ethnography, stunning tableaux and baroque vignettes was inspired by what she calls the "well-stocked miracle" of Korean wedding chests, assembled according to time-honored customs. This exploration of love and marriage in South Korea looks closely at ancient and present-day rituals, revealing what is old in the new and new in the old. Her inquiry leads us from shamans, temples and priests, to the enchanted maze of 21st-century Seoul, where vendors of medicinal herbs co-exist with high-tech beauty salons for wedding couples and secular marriage palaces. Using film much like a canvas, Ottinger creates a modern fairytale flush with mythological heroes, traditional rites, ancestral symbolism, dreams of eternal love, and a whole lot of Western kitsch. One of her most acclaimed documentaries, it captures the amazing phenomenon of new mega-cities and their contradictory societies caught in a balancing act.
Reviews
"Ulrike Ottinger in top artistic form. . . . A film that echoes the beauty, precision and care of the rituals she examines." - Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times
"A visually striking film... Ottinger's fascinating documentary portrait of wedding customs in contemporary Seoul carefully locates the contemporary wedding industry at the very heart of the intersection of tradition and modernity in Korean culture." - Harvard Film Archives
"Near the beginning . . . We are treated to an explanation by a wedding chest maker of exactly what the chest contains, as she lovingly packs and unpacks it before our amazed eyes. It's exactly the method of Ottinger's delicately observed film." - Hollywood Reporter
DVD (Korean, Color) / 2008 / 82 minutes
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