Accept (2016)

Reich: Three Tales

"Three Tales" is a video music work by American composer Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot. It is set in three "Acts", each depicting a technological advance of the 20th century and its negative implications on humanity: the dirigible airship Hindenburg and its explosion; the Atom Bomb and its testing on Bikini Atoll; and Dolly the sheep, first successful genetic cloning of a mammal.

The Lost Paradise

He is the most performed contemporary composer in the world. And yet he rarely ventures out in public, prefers to keep quiet about his music, feels at home in the forests of Estonia and generates therewith - perhaps involuntarily - the impression of a recluse, which is attributed to him again and again: Arvo Part. In The Lost Paradise, we follow him over a period of one year in his native Estonia, to Japan and the Vatican. The documentary is framed by the stage production of Adam's Passion, a music theater piece based on the Biblical story of the fall of Adam featuring three key works by Arvo Part. The world-renowned director Robert Wilson has brought this work to the stage in a former submarine factory in Tallinn. Tracing their creative process, the film offers rare and personal insights into the worlds of two of the most fascinating personalities in the international arts and music scene.

The Conductor

Leonard Bernstein’s protégée Marin Alsop reveals how she smashed the glass ceiling to become an internationally renowned conductor.

K-Classics Generation

The film traces the career of some of the winners of this new generation nicknamed the "K-Classics Generation", including the 2 recent winners of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, the soprano Hwang Sumi and the violinist Lim Jiyoung. In Korea, where it all began, and in Germany where most of them have settled.

The Metropolitan Opera: The Exterminating Angel

After the acclaimed Met premiere of Thomas Adès's "The Tempest" in 2012, the composer returned with another masterpiece, this time inspired by filmmaker Luis Buñuel's seminal surrealist classic "El Ángel Exterminador", during the 2017–18 season. As the opera opens, a group of elegant socialites gather for a lavish dinner party, but when it is time to leave for the night, no one is able to escape. Soon, their behavior becomes increasingly erratic and savage. The large ensemble cast tackles both the vocal and dramatic demands of Adès's opera with one riveting performance after another. Tom Cairns, who also penned the work's libretto, directs an engrossing and inventive production, using a towering wooden archway to trap the characters onstage. And Adès himself takes the podium to conduct the frenzied score, which features a host of unconventional instruments, including the eerie electronic ondes Martenot.

The Metropolitan Opera: Marnie

Composer Nico Muhly unveils his second new opera for the Met with this gripping reimagining of Winston Graham’s novel, set in the 1950s, about a beautiful, mysterious young woman who assumes multiple identities. Director Michael Mayer and his creative team have devised a fast-moving, cinematic world for this exhilarating story of denial and deceit, which also inspired a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard sings the enigmatic Marnie, and baritone Christopher Maltman is the man who pursues her—with disastrous results. Robert Spano conducts.

Einstein on the Beach

This seminal work of avant-garde opera from composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson arrives full-circle, coming to France, the site of its 1976 Avignon Festival world premiere, at the tail end of this 2014 revival tour for a landmark Theâtre du Châtelet production and a first ever filming by award-winning arts filmmaker Don Kent. Eschewing conventional narrative, the opera revolves loosely around pacifist Einstein’s relationship to the creation of the atomic bomb.

Tomorrow will be the same

Insatiable lust reigned over senseless flesh. Like august flies, trying to escape certain death, people before the apocalypse started to copulate, until every single one was completely exhausted. Only two people remained untouched. Having merged, like Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, in music that gave them eternal life, they wander timeless, empty spaces. Their destiny - to save humanity. But humanity means nothing to them. Main characters of the movie, Kirill Shirokov and Sasha Elina, are real musicians and founders of 'the same' ensemble, specialized in performing quite music related to certain space and time. During the film they perform music from ‘every day melodies’ series composed by Kirill Shirokov. The movie is the first part of mini-series discovering the territory of contemporary art music.

The Muppets: Classical Chicken

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John Adams conducts John Adams

Like many of John Adams’ operas, Doctor Atomic is based on recent world historical events—here, the effusive Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” anxiously awaits the bomb’s first test in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Adams adapted the work into a symphony, comprising its three main acts. In the second half of the program, Adams conducts his 2015 violin concerto, Scheherazade.2, which restages the tale of the One Thousand and One Nights heroine as a strong woman navigating a patriarchial society, incarnated by the solo violin part. The work was composed specifically for Canadian-American virtuoso Leila Josefowicz and co-commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, who perform it to perfection. The evening then closes out with Tromba Lontana, an orchestral fanfare written to mark the 150th anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836.

Fogo Corredor

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The West is a Land of Infinite Beginnings

Alone in the woods, a young man is pursued by a horrifying specter and by visions of his deceased sisters. A meditation on the precarious uncertainty of the American Dream and the role that uncontrollable forces play in our lives, The West is a Land of Infinite Beginnings is inspired by a harrowing scene from the opera Proving Up, by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek.

Shark vs. Surfer

With shark attacks on the rise worldwide, surfers are taking the brunt of the bites. To understand why, a one hour SharkFest special relives the most harrowing of shark vs surfer stories from the world's deadliest shark infested surf beaches.

Shark vs. Tuna

A clash of true oceanic titans sees fights in the remote battlefields of Ascension Island. Tuna are often faster, fitter and bigger than the sharks.

Playboy: Inside the Playboy Mansion

A look inside the Playboy mansion around the year 2000. Features Hugh Hefner and his 7 girlfriends pre-Girls Next Door.

Shark Vs. Whale

A routine drone survey turns deadly when Ryan Johnson, a marine biologist based in South Africa, films a humpback whale being attacked and strategically drowned by a Great white shark. This is a total perspective shift for the creature.

Beyond the Wasteland

Shot in Australia, USA, Italy, France, Germany, and Japan, Beyond the Wasteland follows the fans from around the world who go to extraordinary lengths in the name of Mad Max. Transporting us into the world of Mad Max, we explore the eccentric world of the fans, their costumes, and their machines as these oddball fans find their place amongst the Mad Max community. The documentary also follows original cast member, Bertrand Cadart as he continues his fight against stage IV leukemia and travels from his home on the Sunshine Coast to the “Wasteland,” the desert location of Mad Max 2 in Silverton, for the last time. Beyond the Wasteland not only celebrates life but the ability to change oneself through passion.

Kokoschka: Work and Life

Painter, poet and playwright, teacher and freethinker, lover and traveler, Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was a rare individual who remained lucid and passionate throughout his long life.

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary

Documentarians Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer turn their camera on 81-year-old Traudl Junge, who served as Adolf Hitler's secretary from 1942 to 1945, and allow her to speak about her experiences. Junge sheds light on life in the Third Reich and the days leading up to Hitler's death in the famed bunker, where Junge recorded Hitler's last will and testament. Her gripping account is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Escaping the Castle

In the autumn of 1950, members of the largest Iranian communist party known as "The Toudeh Party" plot an intricate escape from Tehran's most important prison known as "The Castle".

Rendalf the Wizard

A Lord of the Rings tour guide in New Zealand processes his grief in a wonderful way.

Misty Copeland

Misty Copeland was promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre in 2015, becoming the first Black American ballerina to do so in the elite classical company's 75-year history. Misty sheds light on beating all odds through a difficult upbringing and learning ballet at 13 years old. She also expresses the importance of giving back to the communities she hopes to inspire. Friends and colleagues also share their admiration for the prominent dancer and advocate.

BFF

A blurry kind of intimacy between friends, self, lens, and everyone else watching.

Super Juice Me!

The world is facing a “pandemic” of chronic disease – heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, asthma, kidney and liver disease, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune diseases, allergies and skin conditions and many, many more. This year more than 36 million people will die from degenerative conditions – more than from all other causes put together*, and that number is expected to rise to over 50 million within 15 years. At the same time, the amount spent trying to treat these diseases with pharmaceutical drugs is expected to rise by 50% to more than $1.2 trillion! One summer Jason Vale took eight people who collectively suffered from 22 different chronic diseases and put them on his ‘Juice Only’ diet for 28 days. Could these different diseases with their many different prescribed drugs be improved and even cured by one thing? Maybe it’s time to get Super Juiced!

My Name Is Salt

Year after year, just after the monsoon season has finished, thousands of families travel to a bleak desert in Gujerat, India, where they will stay for an endless eight months and extract salt from the earth, using the same painstaking, manual techniques as generations before them. Director Farida Pacha spent a season with one of these families, observing the very particular rhythms of their lives.

Remue-ménage

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Le Pilier de la Solitude

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My Lost Country

Iraqi theater director Mohsen Sadoon Yasin has spent much of his life in involuntary exile. His daughter, Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, has constructed a loving film portrait of her father, and an elegy for a homeland to which they can never return—partly because it has changed so much, and partly because it was perhaps always more a concept than a reality.

Coast Modern

A core group of architects embraced the West Coast from Vancouver to LA with its particular geography and values and left behind a legacy of inspired dwellings. Today, architects celebrate the influence established by their predecessors.