Santa Teresa & Other Stories (2015)
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Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.
Why do 11,000 people die in America each year at the hands of gun violence? Talking heads yelling from every TV camera blame everything from Satan to video games. But are we that much different from many other countries? What sets us apart? How have we become both the master and victim of such enormous amounts of violence? This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi. From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston, from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist's Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old, Bowling for Columbine is a journey through America, through our past, hoping to discover why our pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.
Among the most important films from the post-war American independent scene are Lionel Rogosinâs On the Bowery and Come Back, Africa â two incredible documents of bygone eras that still resonate today. From the beginning, Rogosinâs style as an independent filmmaker was straightforward and compassionate. His films, made âfrom the insideâ showed the subjects he chose in their normal surroundings and allowed them to speak in their own words. By choosing ordinary people caught up in universal problems â homelessness, racial discrimination, war and peace, labor relations, and poverty â Rogosin made his point poignantly. The Oscar®-nominated On the Bowery is a masterpiece of the American blend of documentary/fiction.
The story of the battle to free Debbie Peagler, an incarcerated survivor of brutal domestic violence. Over 26 years in prison cannot crush the spirit of this determined African-American woman, despite the injustices she has experienced, first at the hands of a duplicitous boyfriend who beat her and forced her into prostitution, and later by prosecutors who cornered her into a life behind bars for her connection to the murder of her abuser. Her story takes an unexpected turn two decades later when a pair of rookie land-use attorneys cut their teeth on her case -- and attract global attention to the troubled intersection of domestic violence and criminal justice.
A chilling reminder of the dangerous world we live in, this riveting documentary reveals the innermost workings of some of the most warped minds in recent history. From the violent shooting spree in a San Ysidro MacDonald's restaurant to the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan to the predations of serial murderer Henry Lee Lucas, see the pattern of violence as it extends in our culture and society.
Physicists are on the cusp of the greatest scientific discovery of all time -- or perhaps their greatest failure.
The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three Violence Interrupters â former gang members who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once caused.
Documentary following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesiser from the experimental fringes to the centre of the pop stage.
This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life eventâthe arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbafâas the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
Kirby Dick's provocative documentary investigates the secretive and inconsistent process by which the Motion Picture Association of America rates films, revealing the organization's underhanded efforts to control culture. Dick questions whether certain studios get preferential treatment and exposes the discrepancies in how the MPAA views sex and violence.
Martinez's second feature documentary assembles a theatre group of deaf actors in order to portray their lives and at the same time avoid any pedagogic representation of the non-hearing people. Coming from different environments and provinces, la troupe has to overcome various difficulties to put on stage their last play, hoping to attract an audience beyond the Argentine deaf community.
A yellow cab is driving through the vibrant and colourful streets of Tehran. Very diverse passengers enter the taxi, each candidly expressing their views while being interviewed by the driver who is no one else but the director Jafar Panahi himself. His camera placed on the dashboard of his mobile film studio captures the spirit of Iranian society through this comedic and dramatic driveâ¦
Vampir-Cuadecuc is a 1970 experimental feature film by Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella. The entire film is photographed on high contrast black & white film stock, which gives it the appearance of a degraded film print, evoking early Expressionist horror films such as F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu or Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr. It was shot on the set of Jesus Franco's Count Dracula, starring Christopher Lee and Herbert Lom. The sound track is by frequent Portabella collaborator Carles Santos, and the only spoken dialogue in the film appears only in the last scene, which features Lee reading from Bram Stoker's original novel.
Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.
"Touring makes you crazy," Frank Zappa says, explaining that the idea for this film came to him while the Mothers of Invention were touring. The story, interspersed with performances by the Mothers and the Royal Symphony Orchestra, is a tale of life on the road. The band members' main concerns are the search for groupies and the desire to get paid.
About a filmmaker not only revisiting, but also recreating (not in a conventional sense) one of his first films, The Perfect Human / Det perfekte menneske (1967)
Delving into our collective nightmares, this horror-documentary investigates the origins of our most terrifying urban legends and the true stories that may have inspired them.
Pray The Devil Back To Hell documents a peace movement called Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. Organized by social worker Leymah Gbowee, the movement started with praying and singing in a fish market. [2] Leymah Gbowee organized the Christian and Muslim women of Monrovia, Liberia to pray for peace and to organize nonviolence protests. Dressed in white to symbolize peace, and numbering in the thousands, the women became a political force against violence and against their government.
With a first-person look at the notorious Crips and Bloods, this film examines the conditions that have lead to decades of devastating gang violence among young African Americans growing up in South Los Angeles.
While the rest of America slept, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews has made over 30 experimental features. Set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California), they are populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes filtered through Giuseppe's John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility. Director Adam Rifkin (Look, The Dark Backward) creates a wildly surreal, outrageously funny and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist inhabiting a world few of us even know exists, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, Garbanzo Gas, starring Vietnam Ron as a Cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. An Official Selection of Hot Docs 2014, Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) and the Rooftop Films Summer Series.
Documentary about urban violence in Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro. Policemen, drug dealers, and shantytown dwellers get trapped into a daily war that knows no winners.
A look at how one investigator spent ten years trying to expose Bernie Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme that scammed an estimated $18 billion from investors.
How do you reconcile a commitment to non-violence when faced with violence? Why do the poor often seem happier than the rich? Must a society lose its traditions in order to move into the future? These are some of the questions posed to His Holiness the Dalai Lama by filmmaker and explorer Rick Ray. Ray examines some of the fundamental questions of our time by weaving together observations from his own journeys throughout India and the Middle East, and the wisdom of an extraordinary spiritual leader. This is his story, as told and filmed by Rick Ray during a private visit to his monastery in Dharamsala, India over the course of several months. Also included is rare historical footage as well as footage supplied by individuals who at great personal risk, filmed with hidden cameras within Tibet.
Documentary film that examines the rise and fall of the Third Reich, incorporating puppetry, rear-screen projection, and a Wagnerian score into a singular epic vision. The director, who grew up under Nazi tyranny, ruminates on good and evil and the rest of humanity's complicity in the horrors of the holocaust.
Longinotto's documentary is about Brenda Myers-Powell, who fights against sexual exploitation and supports prostitutes in Chicago. Brenda knows what she is talking about: her own story, involving teenage prostitution and a life of violence and abuse, is in stark contrast to her dauntless energy and optimism.
An experimental self-portrait, MMXIII explores phenomenological subtlety, intersections of construct and verité, and the ways in which technology, landscape, and beauty coalesce.
Twenty years ago, Kurt Cobain was found dead of an apparent gunshot wound to the head. The world was told it was a suicide, but evidence would lead many people to believe it might be otherwise. The film investigates the possibilities that exist that Kurt Cobain's death might not have been a suicide, that the Seattle Police Department rushed their verdict, and the global media perpetuated lies and misinformation fed to them by Courtney Love that created the belief in many that Cobain killed himself, but when revealed to be lies, lead many to now question what happened.
It takes two or three generations for the monarch butterfly to reach the Canadian breeding grounds, but it is one "supergeneration" that makes the 2,000 mile return trip back south into central Mexico. The documentary film covers Dr Fred Urquhart's interest in monarch butterflies, with perspectives of Urquhart as a child wondering where the butterflies went, his years of research and study into their life and migration, to his time decades-later as a senior scientist looking back at his investigations and discoveries about the insect's life pattern.
An experimental documentary film that uses archival footage, interviews, and fictionalized scenarios to tell the story of the people around Jeffrey Dahmer during the summer of his arrest in 1991.
Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill is pulled into an unexpected journey as he chases down the hidden truth behind America's expanding covert wars.
Chronicling the search for truth and peace in post-genocide Rwanda. Director Deborah Scranton explores issues of peace, retribution, accountability and justice, ultimately discovering a blueprint for ending the cycle of violence. Examining the personal and political repercussions of the deadly conflict in this east African country.
The head of a gang of toughs, in an insensitive futuristic society, is conditioned to become physically ill at sex and violence during a prison sentence. When he is released, he's brutally beaten by all of his old adversaries.
World War II soldier-turned-U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, but his efforts are compromised by his own troubling visions and by Dr. Cawley.
An average family is thrust into the spotlight after the father commits a seemingly self-defense murder at his diner.
This fake documentary which appears quite real on the surface is about a young man making a movie about his everyday life and discovering something important about himself and his reality. This film is not a real documentary or is it?
Based on the true story of a Russian serial killer who, over many years, claimed victim to over 50 people. His victims were mostly under the age of 17. In what was then a communists state, the police investigations were hampered by bureaucracy, incompetence and those in power. The story is told from the viewpoint of the detective in charge of the case.
Filmmakers James Franco and Travis Mathews re-imagine the lost 40 minutes from "Cruising" as a starting point to a broader exploration of sexual and creative freedom.
The film is a graphic depiction of the war atrocities committed by the Japanese at Unit 731, the secret biological weapons experimentation unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The film details the various cruel medical experiments Unit 731 inflicted upon the Chinese and Soviet prisoners at the tail-end of the war.
The recently deceased Mona Dearly (Bette Midler) was many things: an abusive wife, a domineering mother, a loud-mouthed neighbor and a violent malcontent. So when her car and corpse are discovered in the Hudson River, police Chief Wyatt Rash (Danny DeVito) immediately suspects murder rather than an accident. But, since the whole community of Verplanck, N.Y., shares a deep hatred for this unceasingly spiteful woman, Rash finds his murder investigation overwhelmed with potential suspects.
The idyllic life of a young Cajun boy and his pet raccoon is disrupted when the tranquility of the bayou is broken by an oil well drilling near his home.
About a man whoâs angry at his wife because sheâs met another man on a park bench and they no longer even speak the same language.
In Los Angeles at the turn of the 1970s, drug-fueled detective Larry "Doc" Sportello investigates the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend.
While doing a thesis about violence, Ãngela finds a snuff video where a girl is tortured until death. Soon she discovers that the girl was a former student in her faculty...
Captain S. Melly takes over as the new Commanding Officer at an experimental mixed sex air defence base. It's 1940 and England is under heavy bombardment, but the crew seem more interested in each other than the enemy planes above. Captain Melly plans to put a stop to all this, and becomes the target of a campaign to abandon his separatist ideals...
A story about love deception, the return of the past, a tragedy, or even the violence contained in an everyday detail, appear themselves to push them towards the abyss, into the undeniable pleasure of losing control.
The youngsters Matahi and Reri are in love with each other. The old warrior Hitu announces that Reri is to be the new chosen virgin for the gods. This means she must stay untouched, otherwise she and her lover will be killed. But Matahi abducts and escapes with her to an island ruled by the white man, where their gods would be harmless and powerless. Tabu is the last film from director F.W. Murnau; he died before the filmâs premiere in a car accident.
A prisoner undergoes experimental brain surgery in order to get early parole. He released but has no memories. Things get dangerous when a group of thugs go after him in search of loot he hid before his amnesia.
In the early 1980s, an FBI Agent is assigned to investigate the murder of a respected professor. Through his investigation, he unearths a spider web of international secrets that has been thriving within college campuses across America for decades. His investigation takes him across the Pacific to the island nation of Taiwan, where with the help of the outspoken widow and an unlikely spy, he learns that the Professor's killing was not a random act, but a desperate move by a scandalous government intent on keeping its nefarious activities under wraps. Our detective soon finds himself on a collision course against the U.S. State Department, the Chinese Mafia, and the Nationalist Chinese Government - in a land where the truth is not what it seems and the only people he can trust, cannot be trusted at all. Inspired by actual events.
Robert Neville, a doctor, due to an experimental vaccine, is the only survivor of an apocalyptic war waged with biological weapons. The plague caused by the war has killed everyone else except for a few hundred deformed, nocturnal people calling themselves "The Family". The plague has caused them to become sensitive to light, as well as homicidally psychotic.
Madrid, the beginning of the century. One day, the police inspector Santos Trinidad coming home very drunk, is involved in a triple murder. But there is a witness who managed to escape and that could incriminate him. Santos undertakes an investigation to locate and eliminate the witness. Meanwhile, Chacón a judge in charge of investigating the triple murder, meticulously advances in the search for the murderer. Santos and Chacon soon discover that what seemed a simple case of drug trafficking is actually something far more dangerous.
The story of a drifter named Paul who arrives in a small town seeking revenge on the thugs who murdered his friend. Sisters Mary Anne and Ellen, who run the town's hotel, help Paul in his quest for vengeance.
A fact-based account of ordinary citizens who found themselves arrested and imprisoned without charge for weeks during the October Crisis in 1970 Quebec.
Betrayal and espionage abound as an experimental aircraft is readied for its maiden voyage.
Police detective Paolo Germi and the mysterious Marisa meet each other at a dance hall. Germi is unsuspecting of the secret Marisa is carrying with her: adverse conditions forced her into prostitution. As Germi finds the young girl brutally murdered, he decides to go after her killers. During his investigation, he enters a world of intrigue and obfuscation that leave an endless trail of blood.
Benjamin Garcia, Benny is deported from the United States. Back home and against a bleak picture, Benny gets involved in the drug business, in which he has for the first time in his life, a spectacular rise surrounded by money, women, violence and fun. But very soon he will discover that criminal life does not always keep its promises.
Shadows is an improvisation inspired film about interracial relations during the Beat Generation years in New York City, and was written and directed by John Cassavetes. The film stars Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, Hugh Hurd, and Anthony Ray. Many film scholars consider Shadows one of the highlights of independent film in the U.S. In 1960 the film won the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival.
A young female scanner turns from a sweet young thing into a murderous, power-crazed villain after she takes an experimental drug developed by her father. Her brother, who is also a scanner, is the only one powerful enough to stop her.
After the elevators at a New York City skyscraper begin inexplicably malfunctioning, putting its passengers at risk, mechanic Mark Newman (James Marshall) and reporter Jennifer Evans (Naomi Watts) begin separate investigations. Newman gets resistance from superiors at his company, which manufactured the elevator, while additional elevator incidents cause several gruesome deaths. The police get involved and suspect that terrorists are responsible, but a far stranger explanation looms.
A Muslim fundamentalist in New York kidnaps a liberal Muslim scholar with intent to kill. A closeted lesbian in New Delhi kidnaps her activist bisexual lover with intent to marry. The resulting torture and violence evokes a brutal struggle of identities against unfreedom.
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