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Documentary and Film (New Releases)
Directed by Dale Bell
Investigates the largest auto scam in the world, tracing VW's deliberate installation of defeat devices in their diesel cars to circumvent California and US vehicle emissions standards.
BACKFIRED: When VW Lied to America tells the inside story of the VW scandal as it unravels beginning at West Virginia University in 2013 where a group of unsuspecting students accidentally discover the defeat device while doing rare on-road testing. They immediately share their stunning discovery with CARB (California Air Resources Board) that verifies the findings and engages with the EPA and DOJ to plot carefully filing suit against VW's top executives. VW is slapped with the largest fine in US auto history: $15 billion in what's now known as "Dieselgate." And, it gets worse. Most recently, it was discovered that VW secretly tested emissions from defeat devices on innocent monkeys at a lab in New Mexico.
From West Virginia to California, to Washington DC, to Germany and Paris, we hear from those who broke the case and sought justice. BACKFIRED will leave viewers with new insight into the role of regulators, the power of money, and the willingness of major corporations knowingly to endanger the health of millions and to increase carbon emissions dramatically. Most important, it will inspire viewers to think about our obligation to our children and to continue the fight for clean air and a livable planet.
DVD / 2018 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adults) / 61 minutes
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Directed by Anne de Mare
Four friends travel to Cumberland County, NC--posterchild for voter suppression in 2016--intent on proving that the big idea of American democracy can be defended by small acts of individual citizens.
In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court invalidates the part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring certain states to submit changes in voting laws to the Justice Department for approval. Almost immediately, certain states take voter suppression measures such as enacting voter ID laws, redrawing district boundaries, and repealing same-day registration.
Three months before the 2016 election, a group of volunteers across the country mobilizes to work on voter protection - to observe elections and to assure that all those who wish to vote are legally allowed to do so. Laverne Berry, Steven Miller, and Claire Wright head to North Carolina. What they find at the polls serves as both a warning and a call to action for anyone interested in protecting the "One Man, One Vote" fundamental of our democracy.
Dealing with themes that are constantly sensationalized and manipulated by the media - Left vs. Right, North vs. South, Black vs. White - CAPTURING THE FLAG offers instead deeply personal, often surprising perspectives on the 2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath.
DVD / 2018 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adults) / 76 minutes
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By Wang Bing
In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as "ultra-rightists" in the Communist Party's Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the Jiabiangou and Mingshui reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.
DVD (Mandarin, Color, With English Subtitles) / 2018 / 495 minutes
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Directors: Joseph Dorman, Toby Perl Freilich
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) did not just live in the twentieth century, he strode across it: a colossus of ideas and a man of deeds. He was an influential intellectual and sociologist, policy specialist, ambassador and long-serving senator. In an age of rigid ideologies, he was a man who embraced the contradictions and complexity of public policy without ever despairing of the role of government in the lives of its citizens. Fifteen years after his death, as the nation sinks further into hyper-partisanship and politics has become dominated by the frenzy of social media, the first feature length documentary about his life captures Moynihan as never before.
DVD / 2018 / 104 minutes
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Directed by Charles Burnett & Daniel Loewenthal
The untold story of how the twin struggles for racial justice and healthcare intersected: creating Medicare and desegregating thousands of hospitals at the same time.
POWER TO HEAL tells a poignant chapter in the historic struggle to secure equal and adequate access to healthcare for all Americans. Central to the story is the tale of how a new national program, Medicare, was used to mount a dramatic, coordinated effort that desegregated thousands of hospitals across the country in a matter of months.
Before Medicare, disparities in access to hospital care were dramatic. Less than half the nation's hospitals served black and white patients equally, and in the South, 1/3 of hospitals would not admit African-Americans even for emergencies.
Using the carrot of Medicare dollars, the federal government virtually ended the practice of racially segregating patients, doctors, medical staffs, blood supplies and linens. POWER TO HEAL illustrates how Movement leaders and grass-roots volunteers pressed and worked with the federal government to achieve justice and fairness for African-Americans.
DVD / 2018 / (Grades 9-12, College, Adults) / 56 minutes
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Directed by Peter Armstrong
Looks at the influential work of David Fleming, who dared to re-imagine a thriving civilization after the collapse of our current mainstream economies and inspired the Transition Towns movement.
Opening with a powerful 'deep time' perspective, from the beginning of the Earth to our present moment, this film recognizes the fundamental unsustainability of today's society and dares to ask the big question: What will follow?
Around the world, fresh shoots are already emerging as people develop the skills, will and resources necessary to recapture the initiative and re-imagine civilization, often in the ruins of collapsed mainstream economies.
We encounter extraordinary projects and people from four continents, from renegade economist Kate Raworth, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and Gaian ecologist Stephan Harding to localization revolutionary Helena Norberg-Hodge, inspirational practivist Rob Hopkins, eco-pioneer Jonathon Porritt and philanthropist/composer Peter Buffett. They are cultivating a resilience not reliant on the impossible promise of eternal economic growth; developing diverse, convivial, satisfying contexts for lives well lived.
All were inspired by the posthumously published lifework of the late David Fleming, "Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It", a work of rare depth that is rekindling optimism in the creativity and intelligence of humans to nurse our communities and ecology back to health.
DVD / 2018 / (Grades 7-9, College, Adults) / 61 minutes
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By Gerd Kroske
In 1970, Dr. Wolfgang Huber and a group of patients founded the anti-psychiatric "Socialist Patient's Collective" in Heidelberg. Controversial therapy methods, political demands, and a massive interest in the movement from patients deeply distrustful of convention "custodial psychiatry," led to run-ins with the University of Heidelberg and local authorities. The conflict quickly escalated and resulted in the radicalization of the SPK. Their experiment in group therapy ultimately ended in arrests, prison, and the revocation of Huber's license to practice medicine.
From a historical perspective, the SPK court cases seem to anticipate the Stammheim trials, with the exclusion of defense attorneys, the total non-compliance of the defendants, and harsh penalties for both Huber and his wife. The severity of the sentences handed down appears hardly proportional to the actual deeds of the accused. The allegation of having supported the RAF, and thus of being complicit in their terrorism, still clings to the SPK and overlies what the movement was originally about: the rights of psychiatric patients, resistance, and self-empowerment - issues that are still relevant today.
SPK COMPLEX focuses on the untold story of events before the "German Autumn" and their consequences up to the present day. A story of insanity, public perception, and (un)avoidable violence.
DVD (German, With English Subtitles, Color) / 2018 / 111 minutes
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Directed by Alexandra Shiva
Sundance award-winner puts a human face on the global refugee crisis by providing an intimate portrait of four Syrian refugees arriving in the US and struggling to find their footing.
THIS IS HOME is an intimate portrait of four Syrian refugee families arriving in America and struggling to find their footing. With only eight months of help from the International Rescue Committee to become self-sufficient, they must forge ahead to rebuild their lives in a new home: Baltimore, Maryland. They attend cultural orientation classes and job training sessions where they must "learn America" -- everything from how to take public transportation to negotiating new gender roles.
When the newly imposed travel ban adds further questions and complications, their strength and resilience are put to the test. Through humor and heartbreak, this universal story illuminates what it's like to start over, no matter the obstacles. THIS IS HOME goes beyond the statistics, headlines, and political rhetoric to tell deeply personal stories, putting a human face on the global refugee crisis.
DVD / 2018 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 91 minutes
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Director: Hava Kohav Beller
In the Land of Pomegranates, a suspenseful, multi-layered documentary centered on a group of young people who were born into a violent and insidious ongoing war.
They are young Palestinians and Israelis invited to Germany to join a retreat called 'Vacation From War' where they live under the same roof and face each other every day. In highly charged encounters they confront the entrenched myths and grievances that each side has for the other. Woven into this intense footage are the stories of other embattled lives in the Occupied Territories and Israel: a mother and four children living in the shadow of Gaza's border wall; an imprisoned Palestinian and the subsequent path he's taken; a traumatized Israeli survivor of a suicide bombing; and a daring Palestinian mother whose son's life is saved by an Israeli doctor.
They are all caught in the duality of the pomegranate: will they embrace rebirth and each other's humanity, or will they pull the pin on the grenade?
DVD (Arabic & Hebrew with English subtitles) / 2017 / 125 minutes
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Directed by Avi Lewis
Following El Salvador's civil war, a farmers' cooperative puts down roots, builds resilience and provides a model of how to mitigate climate change and resist unsustainable, extractive development.
In a fertile floodplain in El Salvador, where the great river meets the sea, a peasant movement puts down roots - growing resilience in the scorched earth of exile and civil war. But soon these farmers and fishing folk discover new challenges, and this time they are global: climate crisis, exacerbated by an economy of ruinous extraction. The solutions they come up with will be a revelation for audiences in the prosperous north. On the surface, the life of these campesinos may resemble the past: but in their model may lie the key to the future.
Canadian journalist, media personality and documentarian Avi Lewis, along with his wife, author Naomi Klein, has advocated for radically new social and political structures as the only viable and effective response to climate change. In KEEPERS OF THE FUTURE he profiles the Baja Lempa coordinadora, a farmers' cooperative that demonstrates how "deep local democracy" can help even a poor population build environmental, economic and political resilience.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 24 minutes
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Director: Roger Paradiso
Greenwich Village, once a bohemian sanctuary for starving artists and college students who went on to change the world's culture, has turned into a ghoulish hang out for cover bands and Wall Street hipsters unable to recreate something that is lost. NYU is now a real estate company extracting outrageous fees and tuition from students as they take over more and more historic land in the Village. Student debt is at an all-time high while student prostitution and suicide are on the rise.
With a provocative eye and fearless tone, Roger Paradiso's documentary THE LOST VILLAGE pulls back the curtain on this greedy land grab to discover what the hell happened to the place that gave us Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, Jimi Hendrix, Lady Gaga, Richard Pryor, Judy Collins, Allen Ginsberg and so many more.
DVD / 2017 / 88 minutes
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Director: Barbara Albert
Set in 18th century Vienna, this is the true story of Maria Theresia von Paradis, a gifted piano player and close friend of Mozart, who lost her eye-sight as a child. Desperate to cure their talented daughter, the Paradis entrust Maria to Dr. Mesmer, a forward-thinking-physician who gives her the care and attention that she requires. With the doctor's innovative techniques of magnetism, Maria slowly recovers her sight. But this miracle comes at a price as the woman progressively starts to lose her gift for music. Faced with a heavy dilemma, Mademoiselle Paradis will have to choose: an ordinary life in the light or an extraordinary life in darkness, as a virtuoso.
DVD (German & French with English subtitles) / 2017 / 97 minutes
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Directed by David Garrett Byars
Behind the scenes account of the occupation of Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by armed militants and their 41-day standoff with federal authorities.
NO MAN'S LAND gives a detailed, on-the-ground account of the 2016 standoff between protestors occupying Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and federal authorities. What began as a protest to condemn the sentencing of two ranchers quickly morphed into a catchall for those eager to register their militant antipathy toward the federal government. During the 41-day siege, director David Byars was granted remarkable access to the inner workings of the insurrection as the protestors went about the daily business of engaging in an armed occupation.
NO MAN'S LAND documents the occupation from inception to its dramatic demise and tells the story of those on the inside of this movement - the ideologues, the disenfranchised, and the dangerously quixotic, attempting to uncover what draws Americans to the edge of revolution.
DVD / 2017 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 82 minutes
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Directors: Chris Valdes, Ted Griswold
Olancho is the story of the most lawless province in Honduras, the most murderous country in the world. It is the story of a group of musicians who perform for the powerful drug cartels there. Their songs glorify the traffickers who have destroyed their country, and who sometimes threaten the lives of their loved ones. But in a world where the cartels wield the most power, do the musicians have any other choice?
DVD (Spanish with English subtitles) / 2017 / 70 minutes
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By Chivas DeVinck
Writers Syl Cheney-Coker and Niyi Osundare drink wine on a balcony while discussing the personal and professional friendship that has nurtured their lives and careers for more than 35 years. (They also speculate on why they think New York filmmaker Chivas DeVinck is making a documentary about them.) Cheney-Coker grew up in Sierra Leone, and lives there today after having spent many years overseas. Osundare, from Nigeria, also spent years in exile and currently lives in the US. The two first met in 1980, when they were both professors in Nigeria and discovered each was teaching the other's work.
THE POETS accompanies Cheney-Coker and Osundare over three weeks, as they return to the landscapes and places that formed their early influences, shaping their writing for decades to come. Through visits to family homes, upper-crust colonial-era schools, university campuses and other locations, we see how each man's poetics have been shaped by place, time, and current events.
THE POETS skilfully blends the story of the two men's journey with their poetry. As they read their works - either on camera, or over evocative imagery - we see their words on-screen, as written in their own hand. Whether writing about deeply personal issues such as his wife's death from cancer, or on more philosophical questions like the sea as embodiment of history, Cheney-Coker's work is marked by striking imagery and a powerful intimacy.
Osundare has long been an outspoken critic of injustice and champion of free speech. As a university student, he was beaten with an axe in an attempt to silence him. (He points to that, and his near-drowning during Hurricane Katrina as the two most traumatic events of his life.) A winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Osundare writes in both English and Yoruba. In the title poem from his collection The Word is an Egg, Osundare celebrates the power of language: "The word is the woodpecker's beak / Which rattles the jungle of silence / The cat's eye which pierces the garment of night."
Whether speaking to admiring high school students, standing in a traditional Nigerian market and comparing it to the alienating experience of shopping in America, or talking politics and censorship in a cab, Osundare and Cheney-Coker are fascinating companions. THE POETS is a major contribution to understanding the lives and work of these two giants of contemporary African literature.
DVD (English, Krio, Yoruba With English Subtitles, Color, Black and White, Closed Captioned) / 2017 / 99 minutes
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By Cai Chengjie
Winner of the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, director Cai Chengjie's debut feature is, like its titular protagonist, defiantly low-fi, unexpectedly powerful and fiercely unpredictable.
Deemed cursed by the local villagers, three-time widow Er Hao (played by Tian Tian) has her hands full with a rogue fireworks explosion, a tagalong teenager, and a veritable army of crazed local men who can't keep their hands off her. Turned away when she seeks shelter from her neighbors and forced to take up residence in a cold camper van, Er Hao's future looks as bleak as the stark, snowy countryside.
But a series of fluke changes in fortune causes Er Hao to embrace the mystical identity her villagers have assigned to her. As a sort of modern shaman, she steers superstitions into small subversions, helping others who once shunned her and proving that to survive as a woman is a kind of magic.
THE WIDOWED WITCH fearlessly addresses the power of religion in China which, according to the dictates of Communism, is effectively banned. It also conveys the cruelty that can come with village life, and counters the Western narrative of China as a superpower by showing a place where the rule of law is all but nonexistent. Not only is there no recourse or safety net, even the rape that Er Hao suffers goes unpunished. Abused and shunned, Er Hao gains power over the men who have wronged her - but can she find a place in a misogynist, patriarchal and deeply lonely social structure?
With a stunning array of visual styles and a genre-exploding approach to storytelling, THE WIDOWED WITCH is a simultaneously idealistic and despairing film - a bleak view wrapped in a fabulist aesthetic, and one that encompasses both magic realism and crushing social satire.
DVD (Mandarin with English subtitles, Color, Black and White) / 2017 / 118 minutes
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Directed by John Hopkins
In North Lake, Canada, the spectacular Atlantic bluefin tuna are so plentiful they eat out of people's hands but scientific evidence shows the species is on the brink of collapse.
BLUEFIN is a tale of epic stakes set in "the tuna capital of the world," North Lake, Prince Edward Island, Canada. The film explores the baffling mystery of why the normally wary bluefin tuna no longer fear humans. Local fishermen swear tuna are so starving and abundant now that they will literally eat out of people's hands like pets. But something is not right. Have these "endangered" tuna stocks suddenly recovered as the fishermen claim? Or are we actually hunting down the last of them--like the buffalo--as scientists claim? One thing is certain: this sudden and incredible abundance of tuna off their shores flies in the face of scientific assessments claiming endangered stocks are down by 90 percent.
With stunning cinematography, director John Hopkins documents this mystery and brings the issues into sharp focus. At the heart of this documentary lies a passionate concern by all about the fate of the giant bluefin tuna. Isn't it time we learned to appreciate the giant, and relentlessly hunted, bluefin as extraordinary "wildlife," in the same way we love whales, dolphins and panda bears?
DVD / 2016 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adults) / 53 minutes
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By Stuart A. Staples
Music by tindersticks
This meditative, immersive film by tindersticks' Stuart A. Staples is a tribute to the astonishing work and achievements of naturalist, inventor and pioneering British filmmaker F. Percy Smith (1880-1945).
Based in a studio in north London in the early years of the 20th century, Percy Smith developed the use of time-lapse, animation and micro-photographic techniques to capture nature's secrets in action. He worked in a number of public roles, including the Royal Navy and British Instructional Films, Smith was prolific and driven, often directing several films simultaneously, apparently on a mission to explore and capture nature's hidden terrains.
Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith is an interpretative work that combines Smith's original film footage - preserved within the BFI National Archive - with a new contemporary score by tindersticks with Thomas Belhom and Christine Ott. It creates a hypnotic, alien yet familiar dreamscape that connects us to the sense of wonder Smith must have felt as he peered through his own lenses and saw these micro-worlds for the first time.
DVD (Black and White) / 2016 / 55 minutes
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By Ricardo Figueredo Oliva
Seven pounds of rice, five pounds sugar, four ounces coffee, half a pound cooking oil, five eggs, 10 ounces beans, a small bread roll and a pound a half of meat - that's the monthly allotment for Cubans under the country's rationing system.
An independent film financed through crowd-funding and without the financial support of traditional Cuban film institutions, THE SINGULAR STORY OF UNLUCKY JUAN is a comprehensive, accessible examination of the particularities of the Cuban economy. Using a fictional worker called Juan as an example, the film shows how the economy affects the daily lives of ordinary citizens - and how badly it squeezes those who don't have access to hard currency.
Cuba has two currencies: the Cuban Peso and the CUC - a far more valuable currency pegged to international exchange rates. Tourists pay in CUCs and shop at CUC stores, which stock higher quality goods at a huge premium.
Divided into chapters covering rations, the marketplace, CUC stores, private business, corruption, economic migration, and future Cuba, the documentary walks us through how each of these affects Juan and those like him. The film interviews a cross-section of Cuban workers and an economist who favours a more free-market approach, and offers sometimes hypnotic shots evoking economic activity: butchers cutting meat, fruit vendors at markets, shops lined with luxury goods inaccessible to most.
Juan starts the month with 250 Cuban pesos. But once he's paid for his food rations, extra food to meet his needs for the month, transit, utilities, and the new energy-efficient fridge he was obliged to buy (and use 20% of his monthly salary to pay off over a 10-year term), there is little left. No wonder so many Cubans rely on living with relatives, overseas remittances, or getting involved in corruption and the black market.
As bad as things are, Cubans worry about what the future will look like once relations with the United States eventually become normalized. Speaking about the US, they worry the Americans "will swallow us whole" and use words like "crushed" and "assimilated" to describe what may lie ahead. The door has already been slightly opened - with a new foreign economic development zone and relaxed rules allowing some Cubans to own private businesses. But these are no panacea either. Small-business owners report frequent harassment, ticketing for endless infractions, and bureaucratic roadblocks. "I don't own this business," says a tired-looking woman, "I am its slave."
DVD (Spanish, With English Subtitles, Color) / 2016 / 52 minutes
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