In 2001, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain traveled to Venezuela to videotape a behind-the-scenes profile of President Hugo Chavez. While filmming in 2002, they found themselves in the midst of a coup attempt against Chavez.
Nobody wants to be at the Battle Hospital. The giant tented camp close to the Iraqi border is run by Britain's Territorial Army, and was sent out in advance of the allied invasion of 2003 to provide crucial trauma care to coalition soldiers...
Old Believers documents a strongly religious community where time seems to stand still, but does it? During the 17th century, Russian immigrants of a minority faith settled in a remote area of Romania's Danube Delta, allowing them to preserve their original language and beliefs, but yet the people enjoy modern conveniences.
This feature debut by scriptwriter and director Theodora Remundová is made up of two independent stories oscillating between documentary and fiction. The first,Standard, began life as the author's graduation film at FAMU and describes the painful relationships between three women bound by close family ties – the seventy-five-year-old mother Irena, her widowed fifty-year-old daughter Masha and her twenty-seven-year-old granddaughter Patricia.The protagonist of the second half, No Regrets, is seventy-one-year-old Danuše Pánková, who experienced not only happiness and success in her life, but whose relationship to life and the people around her is in sharp contrast to the suffocating relationships in the preceding family. Marriage, motherhood, family life – these intimate and very concrete themes become the starting point for thoughts about the meaning of human existence.
The director Vít Klusák is shooting a film about his father, the well-known composer Emil Viklický, but the latter wants nothing to do with it. This creates a portrait without portraiture, since the director places a double in the role of his father, whom he finds through an advertisement published in newspapers.What is interesting is that Klusák does not know his real father personally, but only meets him (or fails to meet him) for the second time in his life while filming ...y meets him (or fails to meet him) for the second time in his life while filming.
Nick Broomfield's second documentary on Aileen Carol Wuornos. The film focuses on Wuornos' declining mental state and the questionable judgment to execute her despite her being of unsound mind.
In 1969 as the Vietnam War was raging, a group of student activists announced its intention to overthrow the United States government - by any means necessary.
UNPRECEDENTED: THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Narrated by Peter Coyote, this 50-minute film examines the controversial occurrences in Florida during the 2000 presidential election leading up to the eventual administration of George W. Bush...
100 Doors is a look behind some of the 100 doors that filmmaker Kerri Davenport-Burton slept behind between the ages of 12 and 21. Her candid and honest exploration of her own 'hidden homelessness' approaches this serious subject with humour and personal insight.
Marc Isaacs carefully juxtaposes the lives of asylum seekers, expats and English day trippers, in the french port town of Calais. Prompting each to reflect on life in their home country...
Power Trip exposes the electricity crisis in the country of Georgia shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. It looks at the chaos and riots that occurred in Tbilisi, Georgia, shortly after the AES Corporation, an American global power company...
Investigates the disappearance of Allen Ross, a filmmaker and Cameraman from Chicago who went missing only a few weeks after he had shot a film about the Mississippi River together with director Christian Bauer.
Spellbound follows eight teenagers on their quest to win the 1999 National Spelling Bee. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature
Twenty-five years ago Khozh-Ahmed Noukhayev founded a Moscow-based underground movement, which later became known as the feared Chechen mafia. To the Chechens, however, it was the cradle of their liberation movement...
A highly acclaimed beautifully made documentary about an old fashioned circus in India where about 50 girls, sold by their parents and separated from the rest of society, are trained to become circus artists.
In the summer of 2000, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were on the brink of reaching a peace agreement. After years of negotiation, both sides seemed ready to move forward. Never before had the dream of peace seemed so close...
A fascinating film essay by Asher de Bentolila Tlalim on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of those living at a distance.
A film shot in the summer of 2002 in Bourj Al Barajneh, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon.
Bread Day unflinchingly depicts a community of pensioners living in near isolation outside of St. Petersberg as it enacts the weekly ritual of bringing a delivery of bread—left at a rail junction two hours away—into the village for distribution.
An ethnographic poem about Kazakhstan, Chastie follows a nomadic shepherd's camp in Kazakhstan - and indifferently allows you to observe the rhythm of life on the grand, severe steppe. The film consists of thirty sequences that demonstrate that even the most elementary activities (eating, sleeping) can possess a great beauty, bliss and especially humour.
Ou Dede and His Daughters takes the viewer to a China few have seen before - centuries away from the bright neon lights of Shanghai and Beijing. Ou Dede is the village musician and repository of his tribe's culture. With a tradition of passing songs and dances down from father to son, Ou Dede is faced with a dilemma - his three offspring are all female. With the local government deciding that the preservation of traditional Chinese cultures should now be a priority, Ou Dede is faced with either passing his knowledge on to one of his girls or to another boy in the village. This huge cultural crisis facing Ou Dede forms the backbone of this engrossing anthropological study. Who will he choose and what will be the consequences?