Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
to
to
Exclude
Only includes titles with the selected topics
to
In minutes
to
1-7 of 7
- Bologna, 1954. Taddeo, a young man of 18 whom everyone calls Kid, dreams of becoming one of the regulars of the mythical Margherita Café, located under the portico across from his family's home. Through a ploy, he manages to get work as the chauffeur for Al, the neighborhood's most glamorous and mysterious resident. Having been taken under Al's wing, Taddeo gets to witness the adventures of Bep, who is in love with Marcella the entraineuse; the trials and tribulations of Gian, an aspiring singer and the victim of a horrible practical joke; the crazy behavior of Manuelo, a small-time robber with a sex phobia; the meanness of Zanchi, inventor of the elastic necktie; and the bizarre manias of Sarti, a ballroom dancing champion who wears his tux day and night. And Taddeo's home life is no less out of the ordinary, considering his mother is being led on by the family physician while his grandfather has fallen head over heels for a well-built piano teacher.
- Michael and Jackie are a happily betrothed twosome - as the raw footage attests. Their initial meeting at a party was captured on videotape; Michael has arranged for his marriage proposal to be taped; and there will also, of course, be a video of their wedding. Why not frame such pivotal moments within a complete chronicle of the wedding planning process, they wonder? So the couple enlists the help of a friend to follow them around and catch all the precious moments on camera: choosing bridesmaids' dresses, addressing invitations, hosting family dinners. But when tensions begin to rise, their videographer finds himself tracking more drama than scenes of bliss. While Jackie tries valiantly to manage the turmoil, the charming but hapless Michael finds himself caught between his relatives and his bride-to-be. And as the carefree spirit in which they undertook their documentary project dissipates, a happy ending looks through the viewfinder to be increasingly uncertain.
- In Tibet, the word for woman translates as "lower rebirth." In a remote eastern region of the country, the Tsoknyi Nangchen nuns defy this definition. Devoted to the ancient practices of Tibetan Buddhism - once primarily a male domain - over 3,000 nuns have attained elevated status. Director Victress Hitchcock honors them in this moving documentary, which follows the journey of a small group of Western women to remote mountain hermitages to meet these nuns. Buddhist teacher and spiritual leader Tsoknyi Rinpoche III leads the group, imparts his knowledge, and bridges the gap between cultures. Narrated by Richard Gere, Blessings explains the Tibetan Buddhist monastic system and the changing role of women within it, incorporating historic black-and-white footage from the 1960s Cultural Revolution of the People's Republic of China, when all forty Nangchen nunneries were destroyed. Many of the nuns were imprisoned in work camps; others scattered back to their nomadic families. A few survivors hid in caves until, years later, they surfaced to rebuild the nunneries, stone by stone. Elders who kept the yogic tradition alive now teach it to young women. Hitchcock interviews both the nuns and the women who come so far, physically and spiritually, to meet them. The former, some fresh from a three-year retreat, explain why they chose their path; the latter speak candidly of the trip's profound impact upon them, as egos and twenty-first-century concerns fall away. Inspirational as it is, though, Blessings doesn't lack a lighter side. In one memorable scene, the nuns chant and play their music for their guests, who respond in kind by dancing to the tune of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."
- Heavy mist hangs over the towering Peruvian mountains as a young subsistence farmer, Feliciano, his wife Locrecia, and their small son Royer till their fertile land. Farming the fields above the Sacred Valley in southern Peru is all the indigenous people of Mullacas know - that and the taste of the local fermented corn beverage, chicha. Though theirs appears at first glance to be a peaceful life, isolation and lack of schooling have given rise to feelings of social inequality and an increase in alcoholism. So while he values the beauty of their surroundings, Feliciano wants his son, as his father wanted him, to move to the city so he can get an education and have a better life. Marking director Jason Burlage's feature debut, this moving documentary chronicles the young family's struggles through the planting season and Feliciano's more lucrative work as a porter along the Incan trails to Machu Picchu. These days, only a small percentage of indigenous Peruvians farm, as one in three members of the population now lives in Lima -sixty percent of whose residents occupy the slums. Yet among mountain communities, the belief that life is better in the city is widely held - and thus the traditions of "planting according to the stars," as their fathers and their fathers' fathers taught them, are slowly disappearing. The crucial practice known as ayni, for instance, or communal reciprocity in the form of such acts as plowing one another's fields, is being lost. Through such unsettling details, Burlage paints a vivid portrait of the complexities facing the future of rural communities throughout Peru.
- The guardian of America's experimental cinema, as Jonas Mekas is sometimes called, is at the center of this documentary about the underground film movement. In the 1950s, Mekas began bringing together filmmakers who were working in noncommercial forms, largely in isolation. Over the course of many years, he became colleagues with and/or mentored such luminaries as Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol, Peter Bogdanovich, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, David Lynch, and William Burroughs, recognizing in their work his own mission: to make people see in new ways. This homage to Mekas and to the Anthology Film Archives he founded, which has preserved countless underground films over the decades, eschews nostalgia, offering instead a wealth of heretofore unseen material. Along with interviews by numerous colleagues of Mekas who share their history in and thoughts on the movement and film in general, Visionaries offers excerpts from more than 100 works that challenge narrative convention. A few titles will be easily recognized by enthusiasts (Scorpio Rising; Putney Swope), but the great part of the footage will be new to most viewers. Writer/director Chuck Workman (A House on a Hill, SDFF 23) - best known for his Academy Award-winning short Precious Images and his HBO documentary on the history of mainstream cinema, The First One Hundred Years - takes a long pan across the kooky, the strangely poetic, the sexually adventurous, and the completely abstract expanse. The result is a rich, stimulating experience for the senses, with clip after clip forgoing predictability in favor of immediacy. Visionaries reveals the depth of thought and breadth of approach that characterize the movement; as Mekas himself says, just when you think you've understood what experimental filmmaking is, someone takes it in an entirely new direction.
- Centered around a 2008 revival of The Brig, the inflammatory 1963 play that exposed the harsh realities inside a US Marine prison, this documentary by Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies puts former Marine Kenneth H. Brown's drama into historical perspective - and makes a case for its ongoing relevance - through powerful scenes from the recent production in Berlin as well as illuminating interviews with directors of the play past and present, revival cast members, and the playwright himself. When Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the founders of New York's radical Living Theater, brought The Brig to their stage in the early 1960s, many theater critics - not to mention the US Department of Defense - found it not just obnoxious but subversive. Rooted in the surrealist model of Theater of Cruelty, Brown's claustrophobic vision of young, caged Marines being transformed into automatons - performing a kind of foot-stamping ballet at double-time as they're verbally abused and punched in the gut by their guards - outraged many and stirred others to antiwar action. More than four decades later, with Americans again on the battlefield, the play still strikes raw nerves. One of the young cast members, explaining how violently it changes shape with each performance, admits, "I'm under psychic stress for two hours."
- The raid on Swift meatpacking plants in Greeley and six other locations nationwide in December 2006 by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau (ICE) ignited a heated debate about the place of undocumented workers in the United States and their exploitation by employers. More than 1,200 workers were arrested, and many have been held in legal limbo ever since as their cases are sorted out - while others were immediately deported back to Mexico and Central America. Human rights advocates accused law enforcement officers of casting the workers as dangerous criminals, noting the atypical and unusually public steps of not only long-term incarceration but also burdensome fines imposed before deportation. A Swift official's description of the raids (or "enforcement actions," as one district attorney calls them) makes clear that ICE had planned its sweep with the single goal of making Swift an example for other companies.