From leaving Egypt 10 years ago, to almost dying a month ago in a car accident. This film is about the journey in between and the massive role the internet played in the life of prominent Youtuber and Yes Theory co-founder Ammar Kandil.
Two women – one passive and resigned, the other aggressive and domineering – interact in various locations in New York city. The film explores the dynamic between them before ending with a showdown at the roller-coaster on Coney Island.
Dan and Rhiannon Humes are filmmakers who craft their fans' dreams and fantasies into personalized, custom videos. The husband and wife team shoot the scripts their fans write and commission. Some are silly, some are sexual, and some are deeply personal experiences the fans want to recreate. Dan and Rhiannon's world is changed forever when they receive an unusual request they can’t refuse.
This short documentary, presented and directed by MGM sound engineer Douglas Shearer, goes behind the scenes to look at how the sound portion of a talking picture is created.
A farming community gathers on a plateau on the border of three regions for the funeral of traditional agriculture. It’s a film to ward off the disappearance of a millenary culture.
Short documentary presents a high-tension soccer match from the perspective of an ever-vigilant referee.
In February 2012, I went to Ishinomaki, a town North of Tokyo that was half destroyed by the tsunami of March 11th, 2011, to meet the disaster victims who now live in temporary housing. I spent several days in the North, under the snow, listening to these people talk candidly about what they had lived through, telling their own stories without the media as an intermediary. Their testimonies were terrifying, harsh and sad, but at the same time touching, sincere and human. From the pictures and interviews that I collected, I decided to make a film, not to reflect how awful the events were, but to communicate the singular and even surreal nature of each person’s experience. My intention wasn’t so much to focus on this particular event in Japan, but rather to make these stories more universal as a way of paying tribute to all the victims of natural disasters throughout the world.
This "Theater of Life" documentary was produced in cooperation with the International Committee, YMCA. It focuses on the work of Dr. Spencer Hatch, as he shows residents of small Mexican villages how to make their land better able to grow food and make them more independent.
Hymn of the Nations, originally titled Arturo Toscanini: Hymn of the Nations, is a 1944 film directed by Alexander Hammid, which features the "Inno delle nazioni," a patriotic work for tenor soloist, chorus, and orchestra, composed by Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi in the early 1860s. (For this musical work, Verdi utilized the national anthems of several European nations.) In December 1943, Arturo Toscanini filmed a performance of this music for inclusion in an Office of War Information documentary about the role of Italian-Americans in aiding the Allies during World War II. Toscanini added a bridge passage to include arrangements of "The Star-Spangled Banner" for the United States and "The Internationale" for the Soviet Union and the Italian partisans. Joining Toscanini in the filmed performance in NBC Studio 8-H, were tenor Jan Peerce, the Westminster Choir, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010.
Naomi Kawase observes people in the city of Shibuya with curiosity and openness, drawing parallels between life and filmmaking and discovering her abilities as a filmmaker.
Kyabakura is a type of hostess club in Japan, inspired by French cabaret. There exists an ambiguous relationship between the clients, the men, and the hostesses, that should never materialize into a sexual relationship...There are strict rules, which of course, are designed to be broken.
Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.
Long before Kim Gordon was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Body/Head, she was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Sonic Youth. In the ’80s, Gordon and her bandmates were fixtures of New York’s downtown art and music scene; one regular haunt of theirs was legendary nightclub Danceteria, which served as the setting for a short film Gordon made sometime around 1985. Now, as Dangerous Minds points out, said video has surfaced online thanks to filmmaker/designer Chris Habib (a.k.a. Visitor Design). “Excellent video I found in my Sonic Youth archive,” Habib writes on the clip’s Vimeo page. “I digitized it for Kim during her [early 2000s] CLUB IN THE SHADOWS exhibition at Kenny Schachter’s old space in the West Village.”
An essay on memory that explores the vision of life and death in the Far East. Shot in five Asian countries over three years, it recounts the director's real experiences.
On February 21, 1945, the Royal Canadian Air Force Halifax bomber NP711 with a crew of seven men took off from the Linton-on-Ouse air base in England for a bombing raid over Worms, Germany. The bomber never made it to its target. The Halifax was struck by anti-aircraft fire and crashed into a mountainside near Leistadt, Germany. All crew members were killed. The crash was so horrific that the wreckage was strewn over 1,000 meters. Seventy-seven years later the wreckage was recovered and the site was deemed a gravesite for the perished crew. This documentary film examines the last days of the seven-member crew and the recovery of the wreckage of Halifax NP711.
This short documentary profiles Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade in Montreal in 1959. The annual parade takes place every June 24th in memory of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, the patron saint of Québec. Candid shots of youngsters preparing their costumes for the festivities are partnered with a lively jazz soundtrack. All the Montrealers and out-of-town tourists featured in this film avidly participate in a public festivity that is dear to their hearts.
Footage of Québec City locations and the artwork of well-known Quebec animator Frédéric Back are used to tell the tale of Champlain’s life in New France – from his first explorations and settlement to his death in 1635.
Documentarian Jon Boorstin follows architect Frank Gehry and his sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, as they attempt a new method of teaching elementary school children in Los Angeles. With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the siblings work together on a pilot program of “design-based learning” that would restructure the typical classroom curriculum, replacing rote math or civics lessons with an imaginary city designed and built entirely by the students themselves. Restored in 2018 by the Academy Film Archive.
A portrait of three Los Angeles area residents who create things with their hands. Angelo Austin decorates wedding cakes; Dean Jeffries designs, manufactures, and paints custom cars; and Pamela Weir-Quiton creates wooden dolls. Restored by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
Leonardi's film about the Living Theatre is less concerned with a straight documentary presentation of the exile theatre group from New York, but rather is concerned with the specific atmospheric factor which is indicated by their name, and which constitutes the highly suggestive effect of their playing. Cutting, for Leonardi, is the most decisive aesthetic device. The result is a wonderfully composed furioso of pictures. The hand-held camera catches rehearsals, conversations without sound, bits of theatre and daily life actions (which, for Living Theatre people, is very often intermixed).