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Content

Family Relations


Family Relations



HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME

By Thomas Heise

HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME picks up the biographical pieces of a family torn apart through the end of the 19th and into the 20th century. It is about people who by chance found each other, only then to lose each other. Now it is their descendants, their children and grandchildren who are beginning to disappear.

This is all about speaking and silence. First love and happiness lost. Fathers and mothers, sons and brothers, the affairs, the hurt and the joy in landscapes of transition - each bearing the intertwining, hallmarks of their times. A collage of images, sounds, letters, diaries, notes, voices, fragments of time and space.

HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME is a journey of reflection of time and the love held within using sounds, images and language. Yet some of it shall remain forever lost.

The material used in this film is what remains of my family. The remnants of those I knew, whose circumstances I had been part of or had otherwise experienced. Remnants that mirror history. A history that is just as much my own.


DVD (German, Korean With English Subtitles, Color, Black and White) / 2019 / 218 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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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 w/ English subtitles) / 2018 / 84 minutes

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GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY

By Yang Mingming

Rising Chinese director Yang Mingming both directs and stars in GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY - a mother-daughter story that goes for the jugular.

Wu (Yang Mingming) and her mother (Nai An) live in a Beijing hutong - an old community of cramped alleyways where everyone knows your business and houses are so close together you can smell when neighbors start using a new cooking oil.

It's not just the neighborhood that's claustrophobic. At the heart of GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY is the relationship between Wu, an aspiring screenwriter in her 20s, and her bitter, superstitious mother, who has recently turned to writing as well. The tension between the pair is raw, honest, mean, and sometimes funny - with no blow too low and no memory too painful to poke at. But their relationship has its moments of intimacy and tenderness too, especially over meals in their leaky, jam-packed home.

As Wu and her mother bicker, they also worry about money and carry on their own misadventures in love. Wu dates and then dumps an older film professor (Zhang Xianmin, playing himself), while her mother cynically cares for Wu's grandfather, hoping the women will be written into his will.

GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY is a more conventional narrative film than Yang Mingming's earlier work. But it is no less remarkable - marked by the keen eye for visual detail, and unique sense of humor and irony she previously showed in her genre-bending film FEMALE DIRECTORS. Particularly striking are the shots of Wu on her scooter - bright, carefully composed sequences that follow her through the alleyways of the hutong and the broad boulevards of Beijing.

Emotionally intense and sometimes jarring, GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY is a film about fraught relationships, life in contemporary Beijing, and the challenge of finding your way forward while tied down by the past.


DVD (Mandarin With English Subtitles, Color) / 2018 / 116 minutes

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HOME TRUTH

By April Hayes and Katia Maguire

Filmed over the course of nine years, HOME TRUTH chronicles one family's pursuit of justice, shedding light on how our society responds to domestic violence and how the trauma from domestic violence tragedies can linger throughout generations.

In 1999, Colorado mother Jessica Gonzales experienced every parent's worst nightmare when her three young daughters were killed after being abducted by their father in violation of a domestic violence restraining order. Devastated, Jessica sued her local police department for failing to adequately enforce her restraining order despite her repeated calls for help that night. Determined to make sure her daughters did not die in vain, Jessica pursued her case to the US Supreme Court and an international human rights tribunal, seeking to strengthen legal rights for domestic violence victims. When her legal journey finally achieved widespread national change and she became an acclaimed activist, Jessica struggled to put her life and relationships back together.


DVD (Color) / 2018 / 72 minutes

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LOVESICK

By Ann S. Kim & Priya Giri Desai

In India, where marriage is a must but AIDS carries a stigma, what are HIV-positive people to do?

After discovering India's first case of HIV in 1986, Dr. Suniti Solomon left a prestigious academic post to found India's premier HIV/AIDS clinic. Twenty-five years later, India now produces its own anti-retroviral medications, enabling Dr. Solomon's to patients live longer - and face the pressure to marry. At the age if seventy-two, and in the twilight of her bold and unconventional career, Dr. Solomon has taken on a new role: marriage matchmaker. Like other Indian matchmakers, Dr. Solomon matches by religion, education, and income; but she also matches by white blood cell counts and viral loads. For her, this isn't just about romance - it is a way to stem the spread of HIV and fight stigma.

LOVESICK interweaves Dr. Solomon's personal and professional journeys with the lives of two patients: Karthik, a reticent bachelor, and Manu who, like many women in India, was infected by her first husband. As Karthik and Manu search for love, they learn how to survive under the shadow of HIV. Shot over eight years and told with humor and compassion, LOVESICK is a surprising and hopeful story about the universal desire for love.


DVD (English, Tamil, Hindi, Color) / 2018 / 74 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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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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INSIDE THE CHINESE CLOSET

By Sophia Luvara

In a nondescript lounge somewhere in Shanghai, men and women giggle, eyeing prospective partners, visibly nervous about making the first move. This isn't your average matchmaking event-it's a "fake-marriage fair," where gay men and women meet to make matrimonial deals with members of the opposite sex in order to satisfy social and familial expectations of heterosexual unions. Inside the Chinese Closet is the intricate tale of Andy and Cherry looking for love and happiness in vibrant Shanghai. They are both homosexual but their families demand a (heterosexual) marriage and a baby from them. Because being single and childless would mean an unacceptable loss of face for their rural families, particularly in the remote countryside where they live. Will Andy and Cherry deny their happiness and sexual orientation to satisfy their parents' wishes? The stories of Andy and Cherry mirror the legal and cultural progress that is happening in China against the backdrop of a nation coming to terms with new moral values.


DVD (Color) / 2016 / 70 minutes

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SIBERIAN LOVE

By Olga Delane

In rural Siberia, romantic expectations are traditional and practical. The man is the head of the household. The woman takes care of the housekeeping and the children. But filmmaker Olga Delane doesn't agree. While she was born in this small Siberian village, as a teenager she migrated to Berlin with her family, and 20 years of living in Germany has changed her expectations. SIBERIAN LOVE follows Delane home to her community of birth, where she interviews family and neighbors about their lives and relationships. Amusing and moving, this elegant film paints a picture of a world completely outside of technology, a hard-farming community where life is hard and marriage is sometimes unhappy - but where there are also unexpected paths to joy and family togetherness. Through clashing ideals of modern and traditional womanhood, SIBERIAN LOVE is a fascinating study of a country little known in the US and of a rural community that raises questions about domesticity, gender expectations, domestic abuse, childcare, and romance. Excellent for anthropology, women's studies, sociology, Russian and Eastern European Studies.


DVD (Color) / 2016 / 82 minutes

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THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD

By Angelique Molina

In View Park, California, an extended African-American family experience demographic changes and reflect on their shifting community.

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD intimately follows an extended Black family of View Park, California as they experience demographic changes due to gentrification and reflect on their shifting community. View Park is the largest Black middle-class neighborhood in the country. Adele Cadres is a longtime resident and mother of three who gives us insight into the history of the neighborhood. Her eldest daughter Ayana Cadres raises her biracial children with the hopes that they foster the utmost respect and reverence for the Black community she grew up in. Adele's youngest daughter, Aida, struggles to find an affordable home in the neighborhood due to increasing property value. As the family and other residents reflect on the history and culture of their neighborhood, they debate the issues of maintaining a changing community.


DVD (Color) / 2016 / 27 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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BEYOND MY GRANDFATHER ALLENDE

By Marcia Tambutti Allende

More than 40 years have passed since a military coup in Chile deposed the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. The death of Allende and the years of military dictatorship that followed have left deep scars in both the country and in Allende's immediate family. In BEYOND MY GRANDFATHER ALLENDE (ALLENDE MI ABUELO ALLENDE), his granddaughter Marcia Tambutti Allende goes in search of Salvador Allende the man.

She attempts to reconstruct the past through informal interviews with her family, quickly discovering that they don't talk about "Chico," as he was affectionately known. Memories of him have been buried deep and seem too painful to drag up. Nevertheless, the filmmaker's aged grandmother slowly but surely becomes accustomed to her compassionate but sharp interviewing style and starts to talk more about Allende, her marriage and her role as the president's wife. Other members of the family, many of whom never knew Allende personally, also start to talk.

Marcia goes in search of family photos and videos, and as a result we get to know the kind of man her grandfather was. The film also provides a thorough impression of the complex political situation of the Allende family over the past 40 years.


DVD (Color, Black and White) / 2015 / 98 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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INVISIBLE SCARS

Director: Johnna Janis & Sergio Myers

"I am Johnna Janis and 'Invisible Scars' is based on my life as a survivor of child sexual abuse. Many years ago someone shared their personal story of abuse, and urged me to begin focusing on healing from my past. Years later, this gave me strength and courage to begin my own healing journey." - Johnna Janis, Filmmaker

Although she projects strength and confidence, Johnna reveals the life-long struggles she has faced from the events that have haunted her since childhood. With the help of experts and leaders in the fight against CSA, she comes to understand how her emotional trauma has negatively impacted her self-image, her inter-personal relationships, and nearly all significant decisions in her life. Armed with this awareness, she explores tools and resources which are available to help CSA victims overcome the debilitating effects of their childhood experiences.

Every child deserves to be loved, and the opportunity to lead a happy and healthy life. Unfortunately, statistics show that childhood sexual abuse is rampant in our society: one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused by the age of 18. There are currently somewhere around 40 million adult survivors of CSA; the odds are we all know someone who was targeted.

Those children who are victimized carry 'invisible scars' throughout their adult lives. Child sexual abuse is difficult for people to talk about, causing fear, shame, and anxiety, all of which promote silence. Predators rely on that silence to remain undetected and perpetrate their abuse, while imposing a lifetime of suffering on their innocent victims. The first step in the fight against CSA is to raise awareness of the devastating traumatic impact on its victims - to shatter the silence that protects the perpetrators. Invisible Scars opens that dialogue.


DVD / 2015 / 86 minutes

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NO HOME MOVIE

By Chantal Akerman

"At the center of Chantal Akerman's enormous body of work is her mother, a Holocaust survivor who married and raised a family in Brussels. In recent years, the filmmaker has explicitly depicted, in videos, books, and installation works, her mother's life and their own intense connection to each other. No Home Movie is a portrait by Akerman, the daughter, of Akerman, the mother, in the last years of her life. It is an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles." - New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center


DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 115 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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CAFe

By Hatuey Viveros Lavielle

Jorge is preparing to graduate from law school-the first person from the indigenous Mexican village of Quetzalan ever to do so. Chayo, his pregnant and unmarried teenaged sister, faces the most difficult decision of her life. Meanwhile their quiet and methodical mother, Tere, does her best to support them both, selling handmade napkin holders for 15 pesos (about $1) apiece. How will they cope in the year following the death of Antonio, the children's father?

CAFe is a beautifully observed, intimate film that documents the family during one crucial year. Director and cinematographer Hatuey Viveros Lavielle's brings a deliberate and poetic sensibility to ritualistic daily moments marking life in the mountain village: sorting coffee beans; roasting coffee in a dented pan; flipping tortillas over an open fire; feeding turkeys that will become a feast marking the first anniversary of Antonio's death.

Whether accompanying Jorge to one of his first cases as a lawyer-helping a woman who has been coerced into taking out a loan on behalf of her employer-or listening to Tere and Chayo discussing the possibility of seeking an abortion, CAFe (alternately known by the titles COFFEE: CHANTS OF SMOKE and CAFe: CANTOS DE HUMO), immerses viewers in the lives of its compelling protagonists as, in a year following personal tragedy, they struggle to find their futures.


DVD (Color) / 2014 / 80 minutes

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KNOW HOW

Director: Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza

Written and acted by young people in New York City's foster care system, Know How presents dramatic stories ripped from their own life experiences. Five characters' worlds intersect as they confront loss, heartbreak, adulthood, and bureaucracy in this tale about transience and perseverance.

Addie lives with her Aunt Janet in what's known as "kinship" care; her biological parent is unfit to care for her. Addie's closest friends are from her block: Juice, a drug dealer, and Marie, a girl on the verge of spiraling out of control.

Marie's grandmother has been in the hospital for months now and the prognosis is bleak. Her boyfriend Trey takes care of her as best he can, but both of them are struggling in the foster system.

When the Administration for Children's services (ACS) finds out that Megan's been physically and sexually abused they remove her from her family. Separated from her sister Kayla, she's placed in a treatment facility that is anything but safe.

Eva only has one more year of school, and yet her sister Desi cannot seem to find the time to attend classes. When ACS discovers their father's crack addiction, the family is torn apart.

Austin and his brother James have been living on the street-hungry for a good meal. Desperate, they resort to petty crimes to survive, but soon find themselves embroiled in a turf war that's bigger than they are.

Know How captures the reality of life in foster care from the point of view of those living in it. It's not a documentary nor is it fiction. It's a hybrid approach for using film to create social change. Instead of professional screenwriters and actors, these true stories are written and performed by a cast of ordinary foster care youth, and their performances are powerful, moving, and eye-opening. KNOW HOW is also a musical that brings authentic voices and unseen stories to the screen, and emerged from the efforts of The Possibility Project, a non-profit organization in NYC that brings teenagers together to transform the negative forces in their lives into positive action through projects like this one.

Why make a film by young people in foster care? Because the system doesn't work and the human cost of its dysfunction is too great to ignore. Consider this: a few years after aging out of foster care, only 50% of young people will complete high school or a GED, 60% will be convicted of a crime, 75% will receive public assistance, and only 6% will complete a college degree. The system needs to change.


DVD / 2014 / 106 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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MOSUO SISTERS, THE

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.


DVD (Mandarin/Mosuo/Tibetan, Color) / 2013 / 80 minutes

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MOTHERS

By XU Huijing

Mothers is a gripping cinema verite documentary that shows how China's one-child policy plays out in the daily lives of women in a northern Chinese village.

There are not a lot of job prospects in Ma, a community of 2,000 in Shanxi Province. Factories have closed, young people are leaving, and declining numbers are more of a problem than over-population. Still, town officials must strictly enforce the one-child policy. In the case of Ma, this means meeting an annual quota for the sterilization of women who have had more than one child.

At the heart of the documentary lies a high stakes cat-and-mouse game. On one side are the male deputy mayor Zhang Guo-hong and the female local director of women's care, Zhang Qing-mei, On the other: a schoolteacher named Rong Rong who is a mother of two - and who has managed so far to avoid sterilization. Now - faced with the prospect of failing to meet their quota - Qing-mei and Guo-hong are determined to make sure Rong Rong doesn't outwit them again. They appear at her house early in the morning, try to track her down through her relatives (including a grandmother who emphatically berates Guo-hong), and hold out a carrot in the form of the residency papers she will need for her second child.

Meanwhile, Qing-mei also travels through town on her red scooter, spreading the gospel of family planning at rallies and celebrations, and trying to exhort as many women as possible to submit to sterilization.

Without resorting to voice-over, Mothers offers a powerful feminist perspective, as we watch men developing and enforcing reproductive policies for women. Here, women's bodies are not an ideological battleground, but the epicenter of the conflict over the most banal of undertakings: meeting a quota. Eventually, even Guo-hong admits to the camera, "We're just scared of losing our jobs. Do you think I am really committed to this?"


DVD / 2013 / 68 minutes

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SALMA

By Kim Longinotto

When Salma, a young Muslim girl in a south Indian village, was 13 years old, her family locked her up for 25 years, forbidding her to study and forcing her into marriage. During that time, words were Salma's salvation. She began covertly composing poems on scraps of paper and, through an intricate system, was able to sneak them out of the house, eventually getting them into the hands of a publisher. Against the odds, Salma became the most famous Tamil poet: the first step to discovering her own freedom and challenging the traditions and code of conduct in her village.

As with her other work (PINK SARIS, ROUGH AUNTIES, SISTERS IN LAW), master documentarian Kim Longinotto trains her camera on an iconoclastic woman. Salma's extraordinary story is one of courage and resilience. Salma has hopes for a different life for the next generation of girls, but as she witnesses, familial ties run deep, and change happens very slowly. SALMA helps us understand why the goal of global education of girls is one the most critical areas of empowerment and development of women worldwide.


DVD (Tamil, Color) / 2013 / 89 minutes

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CAMERA/WOMAN

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.


DVD (Arabic, Color) / 2012 / 59 minutes

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EGG AND STONE

By Huang Ji

Huang Ji's brave personal film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. Set in her home village in rural Hunan province, EGG AND STONE is a powerful autobiographical portrait of a 14-year-old girl's attempts to come to terms with her emerging sexual maturity. Since her parents moved to the city to work, she has been forced to live with her uncle and aunt for seven years. Alone with her own inchoate fears and desires, she grapples with a terrifying world of sexual awakening and danger. Huang Ji's visual sophistication, narrative fluency, and technical polish belie her youth. Cinematographer Ryuji Otsuka (also the film's producer and editor) contributes beautifully crafted cinematic images, fearfully intimate, softly pulsing with light, saturated with complex emotional power.


DVD (Color, Hunan with English Subtitles) / 2012 / 98 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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OTHER DAY, THE

By Ignacio Aguero

The home of acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Ignacio Aguero (AGUSTIN'S NEWSPAPER, 100 CHILDREN WAITING FOR A TRAIN) is filled with objects that speak to both his family's history and to the tumultuous history of his country.

Seeking to make a quiet, personal film centered on his home and his memories, it is fitting that THE OTHER DAY begins when a ray of sunlight shines on a photograph of his parents.

But Aguero's reveries are often interrupted by what seems like an unending stream of people knocking at his door: poor people asking for food, friends, neighbors, delivery men, young graduates looking for jobs.

Aguero turns the tables on his uninvited guests, and asks them if he may knock on their doors too. His spontaneous excursions into their neighborhoods and homes broaden the film's scope, bringing different aspects of contemporary Chilean society into the picture.

Interweaving these threads, collapsing past and present, interior and exterior, THE OTHER DAY is an elegant reflection on layers of history, and ways they are reflected in families and communities.


DVD (Color) / 2012 / 120 minutes

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RED WEDDING: WOMEN UNDER THE KHMER ROUGE

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.


DVD (Cambodian, Color) / 2012 / 58 minutes

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THREE SISTERS (SAN ZIMEI)

By Wang Bing

One of his generation's most important documentary filmmakers, director Wang Bing is at the height of his powers in THREE SISTERS. The film introduces viewers to 10-year-old YingYing, 6-year-old Zhenzhen and 4-year-old Fenfen, who live alone in Xiyangtang, a tiny rural village in the high mountains of China's Yunnan province. Their father is away working in the city; their mother left the family long ago.

The girls help their grandfather or aunt in exchange for meals. They spend their days at grueling tasks: herding sheep, goats and pigs, searching for firewood, collecting dung. Games are few and far between. The eldest, Yingying, is her sisters' primary caretaker, shouldering responsibilities far beyond her years.

Wang's hand-held footage beautifully captures the region's dramatic landscapes and plunging, mountainous scenery in THREE SISTERS, an essential part of the international film canon.


DVD (Color, Mandarin and Yunnan dialect with English Subtitles) / 2012 / 153 minutes

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11 FLOWERS

Director: Wang Xiaoshuai

One of China's foremost Sixth Generation directors, Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle, Shanghai Dreams) tells a striking, autobiographical coming-of-age tale set in the final days of China's Cultural Revolution in his new film 11 Flowers.

Eleven-year-old Wang Han lives with his family in a remote village in Guizhou province. Life is tough, but they make the most of what little they have. When Wang is selected to lead his school through their daily gymnastic regimen, his teacher recommends that he wear a clean, new shirt in honor of this important position a request that forces his family to make a great sacrifice. But one afternoon, soon after Wang is given the precious shirt, he encounters a desperate, wounded man, who takes it from him. The man is on the run, wanted by the authorities for murder. In no time the fates of Wang and the fugitive are intertwined.

Beautifully performed by a troupe of child actors, and vividly creating a sense of time and place, 11 Flowers is a delicate and moving film about growing up in a time of great upheaval.


DVD (Mandarin, Shanghainese with English Subtitles) / 2011 / 115 minutes

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BITTERSWEET JOKE

By Paik Yeonah

There remains a strong social taboo against single parenthood in South Korea, where single mothers are still referred to as "unwed". BITTERSWEET JOKE is the first Korean film in which single mothers appear with their faces unobscured, and speak frankly about problems they face in a society that treats them as a problem.

Hyunjin, 27, was abandoned by her boyfriend when she became pregnant and decided to keep her baby. Her daughter's father refuses to pay child support, and she struggles to navigate a legal system that is not designed to accommodate the needs of single parents.

Hyungsook, 40, is more outspoken. She avoided marrying the father of her son, Junseo, who is now 6. She works as an activist fighting for women's rights, and the rights of single mothers in particular, speaking at conferences, and volunteering at Seoul's "Human Library", where people are invited to talk with representatives of groups against whom they harbor prejudice.

But while Hyungsook is not ashamed of the choices she has made, she still faces social pressure. When she decided to raise her son alone, her family stopped speaking to her, and when a television program on which she appeared showed the exterior of her beauty parlor, business dropped 50%, forcing her to close the shop.

Ntertwined with these individual stories are conversational segments in which groups of single mothers speak together, discussing their lives, and both the difficulties and joys of raising a child alone in South Korea.

BITTERSWEET JOKE sheds light on the experiences of single mothers who live in a society that treats their lives as shameful.


DVD (Color) / 2011 / 52 minutes

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LOVING STORY, THE

By Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth Haviland James

Oscar-shortlist selection THE LOVING STORY, the debut feature by Full Frame documentary festival founder Nancy Buirski, is the definitive account of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage.

This evocative documentary, which incorporates luminous, newly discovered 16mm footage of the Lovings and their young ACLU lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, as well as first-person testimony and rare documentary photographs by LIFE magazine photographer Grey Villet, recounts the little-known story of the Loving family. The marriage of Mildred (who was part-black and part-Native American) and Richard (who was white) was declared illegal in 1958 by their home state of Virginia. They refused to leave one another and, with the help of the ACLU, relentlessly pursued their right to happiness.

Their case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decision finally struck down state laws against interracial marriage throughout the country. THE LOVING STORY takes us behind the scenes of the legal challenges and the emotional turmoil that they entailed, documenting a seminal moment in history and reflecting a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.


DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2011 / 77 minutes

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MOTHERS OF BEDFORD

By Jenifer McShane

Women are the fastest-growing U.S. prison population today. Eighty percent are mothers of school-age children. Jenifer McShane's absorbing documentary gives human dimensions to these rarely reported statistics, taking us inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison north of New York City. Shot over four years, MOTHERS OF BEDFORD follows five women - of diverse backgrounds and incarcerated for different reasons- in dual struggles to be engaged in their children's lives and become their better selves. It shows how long-term sentences affect mother-child relationships and how Bedford's innovative Children's Center helps women maintain and improve bonds with children and adult relatives awaiting their return. Whether it be parenting's normal frustrations to celebrating a special day, from both inside and out of the prison walls, this moving film provides unprecedented access to a little known, rarely shown, community of women.


DVD (Color) / 2011 / 96 minutes

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OLD DOG (LAO GOU/KHYI RGAN)

By PEMA Tseden

A family on the Himalayan plains discovers their dog is worth a fortune, but selling it comes at a terrible price.

The Tibetan nomad mastiff is an exotic prize dog in China, fetching as much as millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese. When a young man notices several thefts of mastiffs from Tibetan farm families, he decides to sell his family's dog before it is stolen and sold on the black market. His father, an aging Tibetan herder, is furious when he discovers their dog missing. When the father seeks to buy the dog back, it leads to a series of tragicomic events that threaten to tear the family apart, while showing the erosion of Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary society.

Pema Tseden (THE SILENT HOLY STORIES, THE SEARCH) is the leading filmmaker of a newly emerging Tibetan cinema and the first director in China to film his movies entirely in the Tibetan language. His third feature OLD DOG is both a humorous and tragic allegory and a sober depiction of life among the impoverished rural Tibetan community.


DVD (Tibetan with English Subtitles, Color) / 2011 / 88 minutes

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SKYDANCER

By Katja Esson

Renowned for their balance and skill, six generations of Mohawk men have been leaving their families behind on the reservation to travel to New York City, to work on some of the biggest construction jobs in the world. Jerry and his colleague Sky shuttle between the hard drinking Brooklyn lodging houses they call home during the week and their rural reservation, a gruelling drive six hours north, where a family weekend awaits. Their wives are only too familiar with the sacrifices that their jobs have upon family life. While the men are away working, the women often struggle to keep their children away from the illegal temptations of this economically deprived area. Through rich archive and interviews, Academy Award-nominated director Katja Esson explores the colourful and at times tragic history of the Mohawk skywalkers, bringing us a nuanced portrait of modern Native American life and a visually stunning story of double lives.


DVD (Color) / 2011 / 74 minutes

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CIRCO

Director: Ross McElwee

Gorgeously filmed along the back roads of rural Mexico, Circo follows the Ponce family's hardscrabble circus as it struggles to stay together despite mounting debt, dwindling audiences, and a simmering family conflict. Tino, the ringmaster, is driven by his dream to lead his parents' circus to success and corrals the energy of his whole family, including his four young children, towards this singular goal. But his wife Ivonne is determined to make a change. Feeling exploited by her in-laws, she longs to return to her kids a childhood lost to laboring in the circus. Through this intricately woven story of a marriage in trouble and of a century-old family tradition that hangs in the balance, Circo opens the viewer to the luminous world of a traveling circus while examining the universal themes of family bonds, filial responsibility, and the weight of cultural inheritance.


DVD / 2010 / 75 minutes

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IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY: HONOR KILLINGS IN NORTH AMERICA

By Shelley Saywell

Schoolgirl Aqsa Parvez, sisters Amina and Sarah Said, and college student Fauzia Muhammad were all North American teenagers-and victims of premeditated, murderous attacks by male family members. Only Muhammad survived. Emmy winner Shelley Saywell examines each case in depth in this riveting investigation of "honor killings" of girls in Muslim immigrant families. Not sanctioned by Islam, the brutalization and violence against young women for defying male authority derives from ancient tribal notions of honor and family shame.

As friends and relatives trace escalating tensions leading to the crimes, IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY explores community reactions to the tragic events. The film also delves into the dual, precarious existence of other young Muslim women struggling to bridge two worlds, along with Muslim women's efforts to help girls at special risk. With consummate documentary skills and a passion for human rights, Saywell puts a much needed human face on a subject that is all too often silenced or sensationalized in post-9/11 North America.


DVD (Color) / 2010 / 90 minutes

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MUGABE AND THE WHITE AFRICAN

Director: Andrew Thompson & Lucy Bailey

Selected as one of the 15 feature documentaries on the short list for Oscar consideration, Mugabe and the White African is an intimate account of one family's astonishing bravery as they fight to protect their property, their livelihood and their country.

Family patriarch Mike Campbell is one of the few white farmers left in Zimbabwe since President Robert Mugabe began his violent land seizure program in 2000. Since then the country has descended into chaos, the economy brought to its knees by the reallocation of formerly white-owned farms to Mugabe cronies, who have no knowledge, experience or interest in farming. In 2008, after years of intimidation and threats to his family and farm, Campbell decides to take action. Unable to call upon the protection of any Zimbabwean authorities, he challenges Mugabe before an international court, charging him and his government with racial discrimination and human rights violations.


DVD (English and Shona with English Subtitles) / 2010 / 94 minutes

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