The Pact (2006)

The Secret Life of Geisha

Documentary about the world of the Japanese geisha. Unattainable by all but the wealthy and powerful, geisha are the ultimate massagers of the male ego. Behind the delicate fan and enigmatic smile can also be found a darker side to the geisha story, including treachery and suicide.

Manufacturing Dissent

"Michael Moore doesn't like documentaries. That's why he doesn't make them." A documentary that looks to distinguish what's fact, fiction, legend, and otherwise as a camera crew trails Michael Moore as he tours with his film, Fahrenheit 9/11.

The World According to Monsanto

Monsanto is the world leader in genetically modified organisms (GMOs), as well as one of the most controversial corporations in industrial history. This century-old empire has created some of the most toxic products ever sold, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and the herbicide Agent Orange. Based on a painstaking investigation, The World According to Monsanto puts together the pieces of the company’s history, calling on hitherto unpublished documents and numerous first-hand accounts.

De brand van Leuven

At the end of August 1914 Leuven became the victim of blind rage war. Virtually the entire city center was systematically destroyed by the Germans. War journalist Rudi Vranckx explains what happened.

Little White Lie

Lacey Schwartz grew up in a typical upper-middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity - despite the open questions from those around her about how a white girl could have such dark skin. She believes her family's explanation that her looks were inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather. But when her parents abruptly split, her gut starts to tell her something different. At age of 18, she finally confronts her mother and learns the truth: her biological father was not the man who raised her, but a black man named Rodney with whom her mother had had an affair.

Ouaga Girls

A group of young women from Ouagadougou study at a girl school to become auto mechanics. The classmates become their port of safety, joy and sisterhood, all while they are going through the life changing transition into becoming adults in a country boiling with political changes. In a country with youth unemployment at 52 percent, jobs are a hot issue. The young girls at a mechanics school in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou are right in the middle of a crucial point in life when their dreams, hopes and courage are confronted with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be. Using interesting narrative solutions, Theresa Traore Dahlberg depicts their last school years and at the same time succeeds in showing the country’s violent past and present. This is a feature-film debut and coming-of-age film with much warmth, laughs, heartbreak and depth.

The Hacker Wars

h)ac(k)tivist-noun: a person who uses technology to bring about social change. The Hacker Wars - a film about the targeting of (h)ac(k)tivists, activists and journalists by the US government. There is a war going on- the war for our minds. The Hacker Wars.

Dark Horse

The larger than life true story of how a barmaid in a poor Welsh mining village convinces some of her fellow residents to pool their resources to compete in the "sport of kings" with a racehorse they would breed and raise.

Time

Fox Rich, indomitable matriarch and modern-day abolitionist, strives to keep her family together while fighting for the release of her incarcerated husband. An intimate, epic, and unconventional love story, filmed over two decades.

Out of Print

A documentary exploring the importance of revival cinema and 35mm exhibition - seen through the lens of the patrons of the New Beverly Cinema - a unique and independent revival cinema in Los Angeles.

Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

You Can't Be Neutral documents the life and times of the historian, activist and author of the best selling classic "A People's History of the United States". Featuring rare archival materials, interviews with Howard Zinn as well as colleagues and friends including Noam Chomsky, Marian Wright Edelman, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hayden and Alice Walker.

Amy!

Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo from Great Britain to Australia. Mulvey and Wollen’s experimental documentary combines newsreel footage of the aviator’s arrival, dramatic recreations of events from her life and contemporary discussions by feminist groups on the subject of heroism in this most unconventional biopic.

Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator

A documentary exploring the rise and fall of 80s skateboard legend Mark "Gator" Rogowski.

Harlan County U.S.A.

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with New York Women in Film & Television in 2004.

Mine

MINE is the powerful story about the essential bond between humans and animals told against the backdrop of one of the worst natural disasters in the U.S

The Cult of JT LeRoy

A feature documentary about the writer JT LeRoy - Ethically charged, controversial, and confusing, JT’s life and death sprang open a Pandora’s box of powerful questions about literature and culture, identity and celebrity, and the reality of the society we live in. Fraud? Art? Mental illness? Complicity? The Cult of JT Leroy will be a testament to this bizarre and elaborate story that has captured the attention and fascination of the world’s media, and perplexes to this day.

Derrida

Documentary about French philosopher (and author of deconstructionism) Jacques Derrida, who sparked fierce debate throughout American academia.

Terra Femme

Amateur travelogues by women in the 1920s-50s are woven into this meditation on the traveler’s gaze. A mountaineer, a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, an antique merchant and others are revealed through their own optical autobiographies.

Out in the Night

Under the neon lights in a gay-friendly neighborhood of New York City, four young African-American lesbians are violently and sexually threatened by a man on the street. They defend themselves against him and are charged and convicted in the courts and in the media as a 'Gang of Killer Lesbians'.

Three Lives

Photographed by an all-female crew and directed by the author of Sexual Politics, these are autobiographical interiews with three very different women who talk frankly about their lives, conflicts, and contrasting life styles.

Fabulous Frogs

Sir David Attenborough takes us on a journey through the weird and wonderful world of frogs, shedding new light on these charismatic, colorful and frequently bizarre little animals through first-hand stories, the latest science, and cutting-edge technology. Frogs from around the world are used to demonstrate the wide variety of frog anatomy, appearance and behavior. Their amazing adaptations and survival techniques have made them the most successful of all amphibians.

The Rape of Recy Taylor

Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists. The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice. The film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

A homeless musician finds meaning in his life when he starts a friendship with dozens of parrots.

India Cabaret

A documentary exploring the "respectable" and "immoral" stereotypes of women in Indian society told from the point of view of 2 strip-tease dancers in a cabaret house in Bombay.

Microcosmos

A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentlessly pushing its ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider creating an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.

Dig!

A documentary on the once promising American rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. The friendship between respective founders, Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor, escalated into bitter rivalry as the Dandy Warhols garnered major international success while the Brian Jonestown Massacre imploded in a haze of drugs.

In the Realms of the Unreal

In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Town Bloody Hall

Norman Mailer and a panel of feminists — Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling — debate the issue of Women's Liberation.

Elie Wiesel Goes Home

A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?

The Zerda or the Songs of Forgetting

“La Zerda and the songs of oblivion” (1982) is one of only two films made by the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, with “La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua” (1977). Powerful poetic essay based on archives, in which Assia Djebar – in collaboration with the poet Malek Alloula and the composer Ahmed Essyad – deconstructs the French colonial propaganda of the Pathé-Gaumont newsreels from 1912 to 1942, to reveal the signs of revolt among the subjugated North African population. Through the reassembly of these propaganda images, Djebar recovers the history of the Zerda ceremonies, suggesting that the power and mysticism of this tradition were obliterated and erased by the predatory voyeurism of the colonial gaze. This very gaze is thus subverted and a hidden tradition of resistance and struggle is revealed, against any exoticizing and orientalist temptation.

One October

Reporter Clay Pigeon interviews New Yorkers in October, 2008.

Back on Board: Greg Louganis

Feature-length documentary about the greatest diver of all time. Four-time Olympic champion Greg Louganis has faced more than his share of challenges. In 2011, he is far from the public eye and struggling to pay his mortgage. Now, the openly gay, HIV+ world-class athlete returns to diving to mentor the USA Olympic hopefuls. This may be his best chance to regain the notoriety -- and financial stability -- he enjoyed at the height of his career.

Daughters of the Forest

A small group of girls in one of the most remote forests left on earth attend a radical high school where they learn to protect the threatened forest and forge a better future for themselves. Set in the untamed wilds of the Mbaracayu Reserve in rural Paraguay, this intimate verite documentary offers a rare glimpse of a disappearing world where timid girls grow into brave young women even as they are transformed by their unlikely friendships with one another.

The Horror of It All

A collection of film clips from horror movies and interviews with the actors and directors who made them.

Joanna

Joanna is famous because of her blog on confronting a terminal disease. The movie shows her everyday life.

Transgenders: Pakistan's Open Secret

Day to day lives and hardships of Pakistan's discriminated transgender class.

Fog

A finely-woven tapestry, unifying things that are incommensurate. What is it about? Something that we all know, but which resonates differently with each of us, that cannot be put into words. You could call it our inner hum.

Devil's Playground

The Devil's Playground is a fascinating and moving documentary about a little-known aspect of Amish life. Amish are not permitted to join the church until their late teens, and have to do so of their own volition. The film explores Rumspringa, wherein young Amish are given the opportunity to explore the "English" way of life.

Abducted in Plain Sight

A family falls prey to the manipulative charms of a neighbor, who abducts their adolescent daughter. Twice.

6999 Doors

Located on the île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, the Paris Law Court looks like an impenetrable fortress. Like Kafka’s castle, it guards its secrets well. It is the place of power. The filmmaker, who worked there for several years as a crime reporter, is extremely familiar with its labyrinthine spaces, its practices, its ceremonies. She comes back to it now, while the Courthouse, such as she knows it, is about to disappear: its relocation is planned in 2017. So, she explores it, camera in hand, on the traces of her experience.