Althea Gibson’s life and achievements transcend sports. A truant from the rough streets of Harlem, Althea emerged as a most unlikely queen of the highly segregated tennis world in the 1950s. Her roots as a sharecropper’s daughter, her family’s migration north to Harlem in the 1930s, mentoring...
A sci-fi documentary that follows the rise and fall of Lyd — a 5,000-year-old metropolis that was once a bustling Palestinian town until it was conquered when the State of Israel was established in 1948. As the film unfolds, a chorus of characters creates a tapestry of the Palestinian experience...
Svetlana Parshina was deeply moved by her childhood reading of Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter. Years later, learning that the now 82-year-old was living incognito in a Madison, Wisconsin retirement home, Parshina phones and requests an interview. After...
Before his journey into exile Jacobo Arbenz, the overthrown President of Guatemala, is presented to photographers stripped down to his underwear: an image seen around the world. Arbenz had led the successful 1944 revolt against the military dictatorship, a regime that had oppressed Guatemala since...
A film about modern Japanese architecture, its roots in the Japanese tradition and its impact on the Nordic building-tradition. Winding its way through visions of the future, traditions, nature, concrete, gardens and high-tech, KOCHUU tells us how contemporary Japanese architects strive to unite...
The night of a lonely photographer with a Polaroid camera, looking for human connections in the alienating Amsterdam nightlife, ends with an indefinable souvenir.
Until the 1950s, the Waorani were able to successfully defended their area of settlement – today’s Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon – with the aid of spears. Then Christian missionaries entered the thick rain forest and paved the way for an oil company. Nowadays many of the...
Haile Gerima and Ryszard Kapuscinski travel around Ethiopia talking to people about their current situations and what needs to be done for a prosperous country.
A documentary of a young couple and their two children living in a squatter settlement in the Philippine capital, Manila. Rather than just a report on poverty, this is a universal story of people experiencing everyday events with a mixture of humor, irritation, weariness, and courage. Cora and...
RARE follows an extraordinary mother in a race against time to find a treatment for her daughter's rare genetic disease. When Donna Appell learned that her infant daughter Ashley had an extremely rare genetic disease that would kill her in thirty years, she set out to track down every person in...
Recounts the founding of Haiti through the eyes of two captured African tribespeople, Sili and Simba. Starting with their capture in Africa, the story follows their trans-Atlantic journey on a slave ship to Haiti. There they escape their slavery on a French plantation and join the fight for...
Two interviews, recorded 16 years apart, illuminating the historic role, personality and thoughts of the novelist, philosopher and political activist who paved the way for Second-Wave Feminism.
The notion of a Cuban civil society is often misrepresented in the U.S. mainstream media. According to most sources, Cuban civil society is limited to the opposition, which has little impact on the Cuban political scenario. Regardless, yearly, the U.S. government allocates tens of millions of...
"SHIGERU BAN features extensive interviews with this innovative young architect (b. 1957), who explains the practical, philosophical and esthetic aspects of his work. In addition to his conservationist interest in using recycled materials, Ban discusses his influences, his concerns with the...
January 22, 1932. An unprecedented peasant uprising erupts in western El Salvador, as a group of Latino and indigenous peasants cut army supply lines, attack a military garrison, and take control over several towns. Retribution is swift. After three days, the army and militias move in and, in some...
”Milk in The Land” weaves together a quirky, alternative history of America’s most committed culinary choice. Food and culture are bound in mysterious ways. Milk is often assumed to be the perfect food, consumed since the beginning of time, delivered to us all as a pure gift of nature. This...
Shot secretly in 1982, this film documents the story of young members of the African National Congress, sentenced to death or to life imprisonment in South Africa for their activities to end apartheid. Interviews the parents they left behind when they fled the country to join the liberation...
