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- This little-known World War II battle with Japanese forces on the Alaskan island of Attu includes the accounts of two surviving soldiers. The film tells of the tragic operation that saw ill-prepared American troops take on massive casualties.
- An Autobiography of Michelle Maren is another gripping portrait from the Michel Negroponte, the director of Jupiter's Wife. Once again, Negroponte's subject is a haunted woman whose past will not release her. The film begins with an email from Michelle Maren to the filmmaker because she has seen and admired Jupiter's Wife. A middle-aged former beauty queen, go-go dancer, professional escort, and porn star, Michelle lives on disability checks and struggles with clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders and childhood trauma. Isolated and alone, she is seeking transformation and another chance through film. What unfolds is a cinematic blend of exposure therapy, psychological investigation, and confession. Secrets are revealed and the film builds to a startling conclusion that is as riveting as any fiction.
- The lives of schoolchildren in an isolated, impoverished village in Argentina are affected in unexpected ways when a group of wealthy teenage girls visit on their annual week-long charity mission.
- In 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' a politically active Kansas megachurch splinters, moves to an amusement park, and when that fails, a Best Western motel. Meanwhile, an idealistic farmer revives Kansas' progressive tradition, taking his message all the way to Washington, D.C.
- Fate of the Lhapa is a feature-length documentary about the last three Tibetan shamans living in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal. Each lhapa requested that their story be filmed. Their fear was that the next heir might not appear until after their own deaths. Subsequently, with no lhapa alive to mentor the children, the documentary would be used to transmit the knowledge to the next generation. Their tales of nomadic childhoods, shamanic callings and apprenticeships, cosmologies of disease and treatments, and of their flight from Tibet during the Chinese occupation in the late 1950s is be juxtaposed with images of present-day life in the camp, current healing practices and shared concerns of the future and the fate of their tradition.
- This film provides a broad overview of !Kung life, both past and present, and an intimate portrait of N!ai, a !Kung woman who in 1978 was in her mid-thirties.
- Presents the most important relationships and events in the lives of the Nuer, Nilotic people in Sudan and on the Ethiopian border.
- The conflict between forestry and nature conservation in Finland has been constant during last 20 years. The traditional, freely grazing reindeer herding, dependent of the old forest growth , has been losing its resources but complaint and protests haven't been able to stop this process. In 2005 Saami reindeer herders made an alliance with Greenpeace and established a Forest Rescue Station in the wilderness of Inari. The international pressure from Greenpeace made Finnish forest company Stora Enso stop buying the wood from conflict areas. Kalevi Paadar, a Saami reindeer herder, lodged a complaint to the UN Human Rights Commission. He claimed that logging in his home village violated their right to continue their traditional way of reindeer herding based on free grazing. The UN asked Finland to stop logging. In 2007 Metsähallitus started logging again, this time in the wilderness of Kessi.
- Through the eyes of African filmmakers, an unforgettable portrait of Sierra Leone's heroes as they confront Ebola during the most acute public health emergency of modern times.
- Bonnie Jean Foreshaw was sentenced to the longest prison term of any woman in the state of Connecticut in 1986. She was the first person to shoot and kill a pregnant woman, which she did in self defense against a man. This man, Hector Freeman, testified to pulling the women in front of him, and using her as a shield. Pro life groups campaigned to charge her with double murder for the death of the fetus. After a one day trial, during which many of her rights were violated, Bonnie was sent to prison, where she still sits today. She has been a hero and leader, a mother to the inmates, this is her story.
- This film, shot in 1955, focuses on a small band of /Gwi San living in the arid landscape of the central Kalahari Desert in present-day Botswana.
- A documentary in which an ax fight breaks out during a dispute between tribes in a Yanomami village.
- The film concerns female excision which has long been a practice in various African cultures and has taken a variety of forms. In those European countries and more recently in the United States, which has seen a rise in immigration from formerly inaccessible areas of Africa, the term "female genital mutilation" or "excision" and it's practice by newly transplanted Africans within the context of European and American society, culture and law, has become contested ground. Anthropologists, many of whom have long been aware of the practice, are finding themselves in the center of the debate. BINTOU IN PARIS is an excellent introduction to the theme as we are able to understand the complex mix of the pressure to adhere to tradition, while dealing with the desires of a younger generation infused with a sense of female emancipation to conform to the roles and demands of a new culture with new laws and protections. While the film is acted, the inter familial relationships ring true, as do the circumstances the film constructs. The film enhances our understanding of a volatile topic without resorting to horrific images or descriptions.
- An examination of biculturalism wrapped in an extraordinary personal odyssey.
- Monir explores the life and practice of Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, one of the most innovative and influential artists working in the Middle East today.
- "Language is a weapon, it is not for shaving your armpits" says eminent writer Mahasweta Devi in this documentary about the her life and work. At the center of a half-century of tumultuous change, the lifetime of Mahasweta Devi has spanned the British period, Independence, and fifty years of post-colonial turmoil. Her writing has given Indian literature a new life and inspired two generations of writers, journalists and filmmakers. A celebrated writer and tireless activist for the last two decades, she has led a battled on the behalf of the De-notified tribes of India -indigenous groups who were branded "natural criminals" by the British colonial state, and who face discrimination to this day. Informal in style, this video explores how Mahasweta's daily life and writing is a part of her life as a tireless worker for the rights of the Tribal people's of India.
- In the late 19th century, the Canadian government removed ritual objects from the possession of the Kwakiut'l. In 1921 the Kwakiut'l people of Alert Bay, British Columbia, held their last secret potlatch. In 1980 at Alert Bay, the U'mista Cultural Centre (u'mista means "something of great value that has come back") opened its doors to receive and house the cultural treasures which were seized decades earlier and only then returned to the people. This film documents the cultural significance of these events for today's Kwakiut'l people. It is an eloquent testimony to the persistence and complexity of Kwakiut'l society and to the struggle to redefine cultural identity in one Northwest Coast native American community.
- Ben Thresher's mill is one of the few water-powered woodworking mills left in the United States. Operating in rural Vermont, he makes water tubs by hand.
- Describes the techniques and uses of mud bricks as building materials in Hadhramaut region of southeast Yemen. Discusses the stages of mud construction, its advantages over cement, and the value of lime waterproofing.
- A loving daughter documents her reunion with her mentally-unstable mother in this heartfelt and decidedly personal documentary from filmmaker Tara Wray. When Wray was just a child, her mother was her entire life. A young girl with no father figure to speak of, Wray and her mother became so close that it was nearly impossible to distinguish where daughter ended and mother began. It was during those years, as the pair did their best to elude demons both real and imagined, that Wray first began to see signs of the powerful psychosis that would gradually cloud her mother's mind to the point of total insanity. After loving and protecting her increasingly unstable mother to the best of her abilities, Wray left home at the age of nineteen - when her mother threatened to kill her. Now, five years after that fateful threat, Wray returns to Manhattan, Kansas to re-establish her bond with her mentally disturbed mother, and perhaps help the ailing abstract artist locate the geographic center of the United States - a curious location that just may hold the secret to establishing world peace.
- Is a documentary movie really able to present reality as it is? Or does it rather create a new kind of fiction?
- 'Chaiqian' (demolition) is a portrait of urban space, migrant labor, and ephemeral relationships in the centre of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. Attending first to the formal dimensions of the transforming work-site - including the demands of physical labor and the relationship between human and machine - the film shifts focus to the social dynamics of a group of thirty people who have come from the countryside to work in this ever-changing urban landscape. In exploring the various banal yet striking interactions between these members of China's 'floating population', the city's residents, and the film-maker, 'Chaiqian' simultaneously expresses and resists the fleeting nature of urban experience.
- For generations, Patua (Chitrakar) communities of West Bengal, India have been painters and singers of stories depicted in scrolls. In the past they used to receive food or money for their recital of Muslim and Hindu stories and folk myths. Unfortunately, competition from other media significantly eroded this way of life. In response to this cultural crisis and as a way to make extra money, a group of women from Naya formed a scroll painters' collaborative. They candidly discuss issues of Islam and birth control, victimization of women, female education, poverty and work, religious tolerance and intolerance, and depict some of these ideas in the scrolls. Their stories attest to what it means to be a woman in Bengal and India today, demonstrating how a small group of determined women can empower themselves by adapting an ancient art to new conditions.
- This documentary made with an all native American crew by an indigenous Hopi director examines the representation of so called Indians in our films and in other media.