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Family Relations

Family Relations

CIRCUS BOY

Director: L.A. Alfonso

In today's world, what is family? This question is explored in the documentary Circus Boy, about a gay man named Thomas who seeks reconciliation with his mother after he and his husband, Michael, adopt a boy he's training for circus school. Thomas is an avid believer that the circus is accessible to all people, and he takes joy from helping others find their flow by developing circus skills. He coaches 17 different circus disciplines to all age groups, with his primary love being the challenging Cyr Wheel.

When their adoptive son Ethan came into their lives, Thomas and Michael fell in love all over again. And Ethan has a natural talent for the Cyr. But now, Thomas is nervous about introducing Ethan to his visiting mother, who wants to meet Ethan's 'bio-mom' and have a chat. What emerges from this fraught situation is the story of an unconventional family that chooses an alternate path to love and parenthood. Challenging our social norms, the film embraces inclusion as we see how some can work out their problems through circus arts - and acceptance.

DVD / 2021 / 52 minutes

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LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

By Ahmet Necdet Cupur

In a village in the south east of Turkey, Mahmut wants to divorce his newly-wed wife. At the same time, his sister Zeynep enrolls in an open high school and takes on a job in a factory. Against her father's wishes, she wants to leave the village and ultimately go to university. The siblings' demands become the center of conflict in their conservative family and community, who are not used to what Mahmut and Zeynep strive for in life. Intimately captured by their older brother Ahmet Necdet Cupur, who left the village twenty years ago to pursue his studies, LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES is a story of clashes between generations, between the past and the present.

DVD (Turkish, Arabic With English Subtitles, Color) / 2021 / 93 minutes

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NORTH BY CURRENT

By Angelo Madsen Minax

After the inconclusive death of his young niece, filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown, preparing to make a film about a broken criminal justice system. Instead, he pivots to excavate the depths of generational addiction, Christian fervor, and trans embodiment.

Lyrically assembled images, decades of home movies, and ethereal narration form an idiosyncratic and poetic undertow that guide a viewer through lifetimes and relationships. Like the relentless Michigan seasons, the meaning of family shifts, as Madsen, his sister, and his parents strive tirelessly to accept each other.

Poised to incite more internal searching than provide clear statements or easy answers, NORTH BY CURRENT dives head first into the challenges of creating identity, the agony of growing up, and the ever-fickle nuances of family.

DVD / 2021 / 85 minutes

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METAMORPHOSIS OF BIRDS, THE

By Catarina Vasconcelos

An extraordinarily beautiful and fascinating documentary that has the feel of a precious heirloom, this impressionistic yet emotionally rich film finds Portuguese filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos sifting through the memories and dreams of her ancestors.

In prismatic images, richly shot on 16mm film, we get the sense of a family's entire lineage, starting with her naval officer grandfather, Henrique, who married her grandmother, Beatriz, on her 21st birthday; he then spent extended periods at sea, leaving her with an expanding brood of children. This is the beginning of a generational saga, told in shards of memory and voiceover.

The Metamorphosis of Birds achingly evokes the natural world-the changing seasons, the play of sunlight, the ever-flowing tides, and the plant and animal life-that counterbalances and nurtures human life cycles.

DVD / 2020 / 101 minutes

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CONFUCIAN DREAM

Director: Mijie Li

Filmmaker Mijie Li's first feature (she co-produced Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert's American Factory), Confucian Dream is an observational documentary about a Chinese woman's embrace of the ancient philosophy of Confucianism and how it affects her family.

Chaoyan, a young wife and mother, believes the ancient teachings of Confucianism will restore balance, respect and morality to her home. She involves her four-year-old son in the rigorous routine of chanting daily mantras. Little Chen may not yet understand the recitations' meanings, but mom is confident she's planting a seed for the future.

Chaoyan's husband finds the daily practice excessive, and indeed many Chinese people today criticize it as feudalistic, conservative, and counter-revolutionary. While Confucianism's primary purpose is to instill peace and harmony, the opposite occurs between Chaoyan and her husband as their beliefs clash and their arguments escalate, bringing forth a gripping portrait of marital and parental crisis.

DVD (Mandarin with English Subtitles) / 2019 / 82 minutes

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FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO

Director: Daniel Karslake

FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO, a new documentary that explores the intersection of religion, sexual orientation and gender identity in current-day America.

The arrival of marriage equality was seen by many as the pinnacle achievement of the march toward full equality for LGBTQ people. But for many on the Right, it was the last straw, and their public backlash has been swift, severe and successful. In collaboration with religious conservatives, politicians are invoking both the Bible and the U.S. Constitution in their campaigns for the 'religious freedom' to legally discriminate. By telling the stories of four families struggling with these issues, the film offers healing and understanding to those caught in the crosshairs of scripture, sexuality, and identity.

DVD / 2019 / 91 minutes

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MARKIE IN MILWAUKEE

By Matt Kliegman, Larry Fessenden

A 7-foot-tall fundamentalist Baptist minister, Markie Wenzel made the decision at age 46 to come out as a transgender woman and start living as female. It was a decision that ended her 20-year marriage and estranged her from her three children. It also saw her dismissed from her church and exiled to the margins of her community.

We meet Markie in 2008 as she is putting the pieces of her life back together, employed as a TSA agent and working toward her goal of sexual reassignment surgery. But over the course of the following decade, Markie begins to question her path. She misses the births of her grandchildren, struggles to present as feminine, and starts to re-evaluate her faith. On the eve of her gender reassignment surgery, she must decide for good whether to abandon her female identity and return to living as Mark, for whom life seemed so much easier.

With over a decade of vérité footage and contemporaneous interviews, filmmaker Matt Kliegman approaches the film with a Diane Arbus-like observational style that is at once intimate and voyeuristic, tragic and hopeful. Markie's aim is simple: to be a good person, and lead a simple devout life. But her struggles are emblematic of a larger conversation rooted in our country's fixation on identity-political, spiritual and personal-and the fear of those who don't fit neatly within their own communities. When those around you won't accept you for who you are, how can you accept yourself?

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 88 minutes

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SEAT 20D

Director: Jill Campbell

Suse Lowenstein lost her son Alex in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In an effort to come to terms with her grief, Suse turned to her art. She began to sculpt herself naked, frozen in the position she fell into upon hearing the news of her son's death. Creating the sculpture brought her solace, and when Suse posted about her project in the Pan Am Victims' Family Newsletter, inviting others to participate, 75 women responded.

Suse spent fifteen years completing the monumental sculpture she titled "Dark Elegy," a memorial to the victims of the brutal attack that altered American history. In her new documentary Seat 20D, director Jill Campbell explores how art cradled a mother's soul and touches all who view it.

DVD / 2019 / 70 minutes

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URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD: INTO HER OWN

By Daniel Traub

"I have been able to manipulate cedar in ways that are almost outrageous." - Ursula von Rydingsvard

The sculptures are massive, yet strangely intimate. Some feel imbued with an almost primal energy: a series of installations reminiscent of wings in New York's Battery Park, a monumental yet inviting piece outside Brooklyn's Barclays Center, the stunning "Scientia" which evokes the power of nature and the firing of brain synapses.

URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD: INTO HER OWN is an artistic biography of one of the few women in the world working in monumental sculpture. Von Rydingsvard's work has been featured in the Venice Biennale and is held in the collections of some of the world's great museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But she may be best-known for work in public spaces - imposing pieces painstakingly crafted (usually from cedar), with complex surfaces.

In this documentary, we go behind the scenes with von Rydingsvard, as she and her collaborators - cutters, metalsmiths, and others - produce new work, including challenging commissions in copper and bronze. But the film also delves into the artist's personal life, and how it has shaped her work. Born in Poland during the Second World War, she was partly raised in a displaced persons camp and came to the US as a refugee with her nine-person family. Her younger brother shares memories of being raised by their violent, domineering father - a man whose influence von Rydingsvard continues to feel. Brought up in a blue-collar environment, she became a teacher and then, as a single mother, moved to New York in the 1970s to take up her artistic practice full-time, while making ends meet by delivering meals. There was a flowering of high-profile female artists working in the city at the time - from Yoko Ono to Cindy Sherman - and von Rydingsvard finally felt at home.

In conversations with curators, patrons, family, and fellow artists, we come to know von Rydingsvard as a driven but compassionate sculptor with a deep commitment to her art and the world around her. Speaking with her husband, the late Nobel Prize-winning brain researcher Paul Greengard, von Rydingsvard talks about how both art and science pay homage to nature. Over images of organic-looking work installed outdoors, she says, "I read a lot of things from nature. Whether it's from animals, whether it's from plants, what the clouds do, what the skies do, she's my major teacher."

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 57 minutes

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BACK TO THE FATHERLAND

Directors: Kat Rohrer, Gil Levanon

Back to the Fatherland is the story of young people leaving their home country to try their luck somewhere else... a universal tale in today's globalized world. The difference in this story is that these young people are moving from Israel to Germany and Austria - countries where their families were persecuted and killed less than a century ago.

This deeply human and revealing film explores the challenges and opportunities for reconciliation and understanding between the Third Generation on both sides of the Shoah.

DVD / 2018 / 77 minutes

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BRIDGE MASTER'S DAUGHTER, THE

Directors: Matthew Leahy & Elisa Stone

In the remote Andean highlands of Peru, Victoriano Arisapana cares for the woven footbridge that has stretched over the gorge for hundreds of years. The secrets of this bridge, the only one left from the ancient Incan empire, have been passed down by the men of Victoriano's family for 300 years. Victoriano is the Bridge Master, the one who has inherited the sacred task of weaving the bridge and of making the sacrificial offerings to the mountain spirits each year. Like his father before him, he has begun to pass on these secrets to his children.

The children in these villages walk for miles each day to reach their school, where they are given glimpses of another world, far from the adobe huts of their families. And when they reach their final year, these students each make their own choice: whether they will remain in their close-knit but very primitive communities, or whether they will follow the possibilities that await in the city.

Among those who face these crossroads are Vidal, Yuri, and Laurita, the children of the Bridge Master. To stay is to embrace a rich culture and an honored heritage, but the price is a difficult, arduous future. To go could mean a whole world of financial, relational and personal fulfillment, but Victoriano, the last Bridge Master, would be left alone.

DVD (Spanish with English Subtitles) / 2018 / 81 minutes

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CHASING PORTRAITS

Director: Elizabeth Rynecki

Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943) was a prolific Warsaw-based artist who painted scenes of the Polish-Jewish community until he was murdered at Majdanek. After the Holocaust, Moshe's wife was only able to recover a small fraction of his work, but unbeknownst to the family, many other pieces survived.

For more than a decade his great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Rynecki, has searched for the missing art, with remarkable and unexpected success. Spanning three generations, Chasing Portraits is a deeply moving narrative of the richness of one man's art, the devastation of war, and one woman's unexpected path to healing.

DVD / 2018 / 78 minutes

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COLOSSUS

Director: Jonathan Schienberg

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" - from The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus

Told through the eyes of 15-year-old Jamil Sunsin, Colossus is a modern-day immigrant tale of one family's desperate struggle after deportation leads to family separation, and the elusive search for the American dream.

Jamil is the only person in his family born in the U.S. His parents and sister came from Honduras and lived in America for a decade before Jamil's father was arrested for being undocumented. The entire family was forced to return to Honduras, a country wracked with violence. After a knife attack traumatizes Jamil, his family makes an excruciating choice to send him back to the U.S. alone.

Now 15, Jamil tries to survive without his family and fights against a broken immigration system. Back in Honduras, his sister Mirka, who would've been eligible for DACA had she remained in the U.S., hopes to someday reunite with Jamil. This intimate portrait is a rare look into the aftermath of deportation and family separation, amidst the current backlash against America's immigrants.

DVD (English, Spanish, With English Subtitles) / 2018 / 84 minutes

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FARMSTEADERS

Directed by Shaena Mallett

Follows Nick and Celeste Nolan and their young family on a journey to resurrect Nick's grandfather's dairy farm as agriculture moves toward large-scale farming.

FARMSTEADERS is a love story, a farm story, and a story of contemporary rural America. Nick Nolan, his wife Celeste, and their young family are on a journey to resurrect his grandfather's dairy farm - fighting to keep this homeland from "drying up and blowing away," something that has happened to about 4.7 million farms in the U.S. as the pressures of corporate-driven food have left deep scars in the region.

Director Shaena Mallet points an honest and tender lens at the beauty and hardship of everyday life on a family farm, as the Nolans work to balance their fears and hopes with so much at stake.

Nick and Celeste's meditations on life, legacy, and resistance bring complexity and depth to the national conversation and characterization of the rural white American. For the Nolans, only three things remain certain: family is everything, nothing ever stays the same, and the land holds it all together.

DVD / 2018 / (Grades 7-12, College Adults) / 52 minutes

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JADDOLAND

By Nadia Shihab

Jaddoland explores the meaning of home and the search for belonging across generations.

When the filmmaker returns to her hometown in the Texas panhandle to visit her mother, an artist from Iraq, she turns her lens on her mother's increasingly isolated life, as well as the beauty and solace that emerge through her creative process. Soon, the filmmaker's charismatic grandfather arrives, still longing for the homeland he recently left.

While the shadow of geopolitical and historical forces looms on the periphery, the filmmaker searches for unexpected moments of meaning in the everyday, subtly weaving threads between past and present, her mother's work and her own. In doing so, she draws an artful and deeply intimate portrait of one family reimagining its relationships to the places they call home.

DVD / 2018 / 90 minutes

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THAT WAY MADNESS LIES

Director: Sandra Luckow

What do you do when your brother descends into a black hole of mental instability - starting with falling for a Nigerian email scam but eventually winding up involuntary committed into the hospital made famous by 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'?

Award-winning filmmaker Sandra Luckow unflinchingly turns her camera on her own family as they attempt to navigate the broken mental health system in an effort to save their brother, Duanne, whose iPhone video diary ultimately becomes an unfiltered look at the mind of a man with untreated schizophrenia as well as an indictment of how the system failed.

DVD / 2018 / 101 minutes

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CHILDREN OF 209 SAINT-MAUR STREET, THE

By Ruth Zylberman

209 Saint-Maur Street is a classic Haussmann building in the 10th arrondissement of Paris: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, about a third of them Jewish.

And then came the Nazi occupation. Parents rounded up and deported. Children left on their own. Neighbors hiding Jewish kids under the blankets.

THE CHILDREN OF 209 SAINT-MAUR STREET is filmmaker Ruth Zylberman's painstakingly researched reconstruction of life in the building before and during the Second World War. (At one point she wrote to every single person in France with a particular last name trying to find a resident of the building.) There's the small grocer whose husband is deported and who loses her business when it is "Aryanized." The deaf woman who eagerly writes down the names and locations of Jews so the Nazis can find them. The girl whose father hid Jews in the apartment and threatened to murder his collaborator son if anything should happen to them. And the Jewish children themselves, now elderly, many living abroad, who recall the rumors of roundups, the hiding, and the friends they played with. "I wonder if all of this was real," one of them, the son of Polish immigrants, says.

Zylberman finds Henry Osman, a 79-year-old American whose parents placed him in the care of an organization that hid Jewish children. Osman knows almost nothing about them. And he's not sure he wants to know. He's put that all behind him. But Zylberman has documents and photos. She convinces him to come to 209, where he stares at the flagstones in the courtyard, and wonders if his parents once walked on them.

Zylberman creates a living reconstruction of 209, using a drawing of the building and appending images and archival documents about individuals to it. During interviews, she sparks memories with models of everyday objects like furniture or sewing machines. Throughout the film, we also see images of daily life in the building today, as children practice music and families come and go with their groceries.

For the documentary's final scene, she invites all the now-elderly "children" who lived here to return to the building. Some come with their own descendants. It's as though the pieces of the puzzle she has spent years assembling have finally come together.

DVD (French, English, With English Subtitles, Color) / 2017 / 100 minutes

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LIFE AND NOTHING MORE

By Antonio Mendez Esparza

In his remarkable second feature - Spanish-born filmmaker Antonio Mendez Esparza follows-up his debut drama with another sensitive portrait of a struggling family. Stressed by her job in a diner, single mother Regina (Regina Williams) is raising her two children in northern Florida. When her 14-year-old son Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) has another brush with the law, she worries he'll wind up in prison like his father. Mendez Esparza employs documentary-style realism in this snapshot of race, class and the bonds of family in contemporary America.

DVD / 2017 / 114 minutes

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OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING, THE

By Mila Turajlic

A locked door inside a Belgrade home has kept one family separated from their past for generations. An intimate conversation between the director and her mother, the dynamic activist and scholar Srbijanka Turajlic, reveals a house and a country haunted by history. What begins as the chronicle of a childhood home grows into an elegant portrait of a charismatic and brilliant woman in times of great political turmoil.

DVD (Serbian Wiht English Subtitles, Color) / 2017 / 104 minutes

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QUEST

Director: Jonathan Olshefski

Filmed with verite intimacy over the course of nearly a decade, Quest is the moving portrait of the Rainey family living in North Philadelphia. Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Quest Rainey and his wife Christine'a raise a family while nurturing a community of hip hop artists in their home music studio - a safe space where all are welcome. But this creative sanctuary can't always shield them from the strife that grips their neighborhood. Epic in scope, Quest is a vivid illumination of race and class in America, and a testament to love, healing and hope.

DVD / 2017 / 105 minutes

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I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW I FEEL

By Su Friedrich

Su Friedrich has taken up the camera again in her ongoing quest to film the battleground of family life. Her mother Lore-who played the lead in The Ties That Bind (1984), a film about her experiences growing up in Germany during the Second World War - plays the lead again, this time kicking and protesting against being moved at the age of 94 from her home in Chicago.

Su and her two siblings fill out the supporting roles, cajoling, comforting, and freaking out, but they cannot deny that their mother is no longer able to care for herself. Lore has severe memory loss and is convinced that her doorman has been robbing her. She often asks Su the same question repeatedly and cannot remember what she ate for breakfast. In an effort for Su and her siblings to be closer to her, they move her from her home of 50 years to an "independent living" facility in Long Island, New York.

I Cannot Tell You How I Feel is heartfelt examination of growing old in today's society, and the responsibility of adult children to their parents.

DVD (Color) / 2016 / 42 minutes

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ONLY ME GENERATION - AN INTROSPECTIVE LOOK INTO CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY

The one-child policy, a part of China's family planning policy, was a population planning policy of installed by the Chinese government. It was introduced in 1979 and began to be formally phased out in 2015

"Only Me Generation" is a documentary that explores the effects of the China's "One Child Policy" from the perspective of the policy's first generation point of view.

Almost 30 years ago, the Chinese government first introduced the "one child policy" to alleviate social, economic and environmental problems. Three decades later, they are now looking at a relaxation of the policy. The result is that the babies born under the current policy are a unique population set with issues and challenges that are different from those of other Chinese generations; most notably that they grew up as "only children".

This film provides a unique look into a unprecedented government policy that changed the rules of a society, impacted far more than a generation, and can now be studied on a variety of fronts. The film raises numerous questions and serves as a wonderful launching point for discussion and debate.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of "only children" in a generation of only "only children"?

What are the pressures that these children, the results of the policy, have lived under?

How have parental expectations changes due to family limits on the number of children permitted?

What are their social experiences now that these Only Me Generation children are now adults?

What are the ramifications, if any, of relaxing the policy now after so many years?

DVD (Color) / 2016 / 58 minutes

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TWO FACES OF A BAMILEKE WOMAN, THE

By Rosine Mbakam

Rosine Mbakam left Cameroon at 27 to live in Belgium. Seven years later-having studied film and married a European-she returns, accompanied by her son. Motivated by a desire to better understand her past and the place she grew up, Rosine is nonetheless surprised by the revelations her mother and other women make in startlingly intimate conversations.

THE TWO FACES OF A BAMILEKE WOMAN opens with Rosine making what she calls a journey into darkness-to the village of her birth, and later to the capital city of Yaounde, where her mother now lives most of the year. In the village of Tonga, her mother, Ma Breh, shares memories of the horrors of the war against French colonizers, and of daily life for a Cameroonian woman in an arranged marriage-a fate Rosine herself barely escaped, leaving the family of an angry ex-fiance behind.

Rosine accompanies her mother, aunts, and other women while they go about daily tasks: cooking fish, serving kokistew to a crowd, and selling goods at a thriving market stall. Like many immigrants, she finds herself distant from her home country, yet drawn to its rituals and memories. She goes through a dusty suitcase of her late father's documents, asks if she has damaged family traditions by marrying a white man, teaches her son to say "I love you grandma" in Bamikele, and asks her mother to do a traditional post-birth ritual several years after the fact.

As she spends more time with her mother and the women around her, Rosine reveals the strength of their solidarity and their ability to face adversity-whether hiding for their lives from French soldiers or being committed to a man for marriage at age eight. This world of women's work and women's struggles is one that surrounded her in her early years, but she couldn't recognize it-or its complexity-until she had been away from the social structures of her country.

THE TWO FACES OF A BAMILEKE WOMAN is a sharply observed, nuanced and powerful feature documentary debut that captures the relationship between a woman and her mother-and subtly expresses the dislocation of emigration.

DVD (French, Bamileke, With English Subtitles, Color) / 2016 / 76 minutes

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FROM THIS DAY FORWARD

Directed by Sharon Shattuck

Tells the story of a love, and family, that survived the most intimate of transformations.

With her own wedding just around the corner, filmmaker Sharon Shattuck returns home to examine the mystery at the heart of her upbringing: How her transgender father Trisha and her straight-identified mother Marcia stayed together against all odds. From This Day Forward is a moving portrayal of an American family coping with the most intimate of transformations.

As the film evolves into a conversation about love and acceptance in a modern American family, it raises questions relevant to all of us. As individuals how do we adapt to sustain long-term love and relationships? Where do sexuality and gender intersect? And how do families stay together, when external forces are pulling them apart?

DVD / 2015 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adults) / 76 minutes

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WHAT OUR FATHERS DID: A NAZI LEGACY

Directed by David Evans

Two elderly men possess starkly contrasting attitudes towards their high-ranking Nazi fathers. A study of brutality, self-deception, guilt and the nature of justice.

A bracingly rigorous examination of inherited guilt and pain, WHAT OUR FATHERS DID explores the relationship between two men, each of whom are the children of very high-ranking Nazi officials but possess starkly contrasting attitudes toward their fathers.

The film was written and is hosted by eminent human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, who became fascinated by its central figures, Niklas Frank and Horst von Wachter, while researching the Nuremberg trials.

The film comes to a climax when they travel to Lviv in Ukraine, where it becomes clear that Frank and von Wachter's Nazi fathers were responsible for the annihilation of Sands' own Jewish grandfather's entire family. WHAT OUR FATHERS DID is a compelling examination of brutality, self-deception, guilt and the nature of justice.

"This is both an intensely personal story for me as well as one with contemporary and universal relevance as anti-Semitism spreads across Europe and the wounds created in Ukraine during WWII can still be felt today." - Philippe Sands

DVD / 2015 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 92 minutes

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STRAY DOG

Directed by Debra Granik

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Debra Granik ("Winter's Bone") returns to SW Missouri for her first documentary, looking at the life of Vietnam vet, Ron "Stray Dog" Hall, and shattering some stereotypes.

Ron "Stray Dog" Hall lives in Southern Missouri where he owns and operates the At Ease RV Park. After years of living alone with his dogs, he is adjusting to life with his wife, Alicia, who is newly arrived from Mexico. Anchored by his small dogs and big bikes, Stray Dog seeks to strike a balance between his commitment to his family, neighbors, biker brotherhood, and fellow veterans. As part of the legacy of fighting in the Vietnam War, he wrestles with the everlasting puzzle of conscience, remorse, and forgiveness.

With Stray Dog as our guide, we experience the restlessness of ex-warriors as he tries to make peace with what he can't change and weathers the incomprehension of those who have never been to war. Stray Dog navigates the pressures of everyday life including the economic survival of his grandchildren and the increasing poverty of his community. The arrival of Alicia's twin sons from Mexico throws into harsh relief the current state of opportunity that newcomers seek and that America can or cannot offer.

Stray Dog continues to tally the cost of war, bearing witness to the soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan: both the dead and the living. The questions of contemporary American life loom larger and thornier, leaving us to wonder what is next for Stray Dog and his blended, multi-ethnic family.

DVD / 2014 / (Grades 8-12, College, Adults) / 102 minutes

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FORGET ME NOT: LOSING MEMORY - FINDING LOVE

Directed by David Sieveking

An astonishingly candid, loving and revelatory chronicle of the changes his mother's Alzheimer's disease has on the filmmaker's family.

Leading documentary filmmaker David Sieveking (David Wants to Fly) weaves an astonishingly candid, loving and revelatory chronicle of the changes his mother's Alzheimer's has on his family.

Although dealing with his mother's disease is painful, caring for her does offer Sieveking a chance to reconnect with his family and immerses himself in the secrets and passions of his parents long and fascinating life. Some stories are heroic, while others have left a painful legacy in the couple's long marriage.

Throughout, Sieveking's delicate handling of these revelations moves the focus of the story away from his mother's irreversible mental decline to that of a loving tribute to his mother as a human being with a remarkable life story. What emerges is a poignant and rich study of family ties, the delicate nature of marriage, and the unexpected rewards that come from living life to the fullest.

DVD (German with English subtitles) / 2012 / (Grades 10-12) / 88 minutes

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LEAST OF THESE, THE (FAMILY DETENTION IN AMERICA)

By Jesse Lyda and Clark Lyda

THE LEAST OF THESE takes a penetrating look at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a former medium-security prison that re-opened in 2006 as a prototype family detention center.

The facility houses immigrant children and their parents from all over the world who are awaiting asylum hearings or deportation proceedings. As information about troubling conditions at the facility began to leak out, activist attorneys sought to investigate and address the issues. In telling the story of their quest, the film explores the role (and limits) of community and legal activism in bringing about change. The film leads viewers to consider how core American rights and values-protection of children, presumption of innocence, upholding the family structure as the basic unit of civil society, and America as a refuge of last resort-should apply to immigrants, particularly children.

DVD (English and Spanish with English Subtitles) / 2009 / 82 minutes

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