Social & External
The people behind it
What images do we associate with abortion and why? Where do these images and the emotional scripts in our head come from? How do they influence women who (want to) have an abortion, how do they shape the general discussion? Franzis Kabisch’s personal desktop documentary investigates these questions with great precision, clarity and humour (yes, humour, too!).
A cheerful documentary about the daily life of a community of Franciscan sisters. “Hasta mañana, si Dios quiere” (See you tomorrow, God willing) is a film born from the desire to understand that mysterious feminine universe that gives up its life and leaves behind family, home, lovers, disobedience, and physical love.
For the last quarter century, Houston native Arden Eversmeyer journeyed across the country to record hundreds of oral "herstories" with a mostly invisible population that is rapidly disappearing. Old Lesbians honors Arden's legacy by animating the resilient, joyful voices she preserved in the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project, from first crush to first love, from the closet to coming out, and finally from loss to connection.
Rap de Saia is a documentary that reports, through the voices and rhymes of the protagonists themselves, part of the historical trajectory of Female Rap in the State of Rio de Janeiro. In addition to its historical trajectory, Rap de Saia brings a collection of themes that leads us to reflect on women in today's society.
Exploring the concept of the Ecology of Emotions, this musical film portrays an inner journey through the secret garden of creativity put into frame by the nature of Iceland. Hidden Eden is a metaphor for our inner secret garden of creativity. This project bloomed during an art residency in Iceland, sparked by conversations around our shared philosophies on voice and emotional connection. The nature of Iceland inspired us to make the connection on how the landscape reflects the emotional states of creativity and how it helps manage the homeostasis of our inner emotional landscapes. This exchange between emotion and the landscape opens a space for healing. Creativity provides us with the tools to access a garden of our authentic being, nourishing and balancing us. Allowing ourselves to explore the spectrum of our emotions through the lens of our relationship with the Earth invites others to do the same. The creative process can affect our well being and is a key to human evolution.
As a result of the Holocaust and later, AIDS, the male homosexual community has sustained bitter losses and, according to Praunheim, lesbian women have now placed themselves at the head of the so-called queer movement. The female protagonists in the film represent two different generations; they also incorporate the past and present status of homosexuals in society.
As the peaceful and determined Hirak movement gathers momentum and hopes for profound political change sweep across Algeria, women are combining femininity and feminism in the past, present, and future.
Since the cult success of Merci Patron!, activist/journalist/filmmaker François Ruffin has become an MP. Here, he attempts to table a law aimed at upholding the rights of what in Quebec are known as caregivers, and shows us in passing how a law whose need seems patently obvious is put together, debated, voted on and . . . dies on the battleground of French politics. A stirring documentary about social injustice that somehow manages to make us bust a gut laughing as we rage with indignation. And also cry at the beauty of it all, thanks to the director’s humanist sensibility and a deft play between reality and fiction.
Seven women and one non binary person share their personal experiences with masturbation through short anecdotes and a revolutionary washing machine.
TOMBOY explores the obstacles that young girls encounter on the recreational stage, the stereotypes, language issues and cultural disparities that follow, and ultimately the insufficient media coverage and compensation that afflicts elite professional athletes seeking full recognition for their talents. The journey of the female athlete is often discouraging, and despite progress achieved during the Title IX era, gender equity in athletics has a long way to go.
“Touch one, touch us all” is a slogan of the women who took over the streets in Brazil and organized themselves in social networks to face male chauvinist and conservatism. Through testimonies of women who have been subjected to violence, the documentary reveals that, despite legal achievements, the woman still remains vulnerable. Amongst other deponents are Maria da Penha, Joanna Maranhão, Luíza Brunet, and Clara Averbuck.
In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein received a call from Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparked a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism and shamanism. This short film uses art, animation and storytelling to celebrate this wild adventure. Now more than 40 years later, award-winning Dr. Gloria Feman Orenstein is a feminist art critic and pioneer scholar of women in Surrealism and ecofeminism in the arts. Her delightful tale brings alive an often unseen history of women in the arts.
As America's first international woman concert pianist, renowned lecturer, author, music critic, famous conductor's wife and champion for equal rights for women in music, Olga Samaroff was at the center of a musical life that to this day embodies the imprint of her artistry and achievements. Her life story also portrays an era in our American cultural heritage that has largely been underserved in the documentary film genre. Texas-born Olga Samaroff a.k.a. Lucy Hickenlooper lived at a time when music was dominated by men and Old World prejudices----and she emerged as a leader among many. Against tremendous odds she rose from complete obscurity to be the most successful American woman concert pianist of the early 20th Century.
The Mangueira slum is the scenario where Tantinho and the old samba composers remember stories about the slums and samba.
Some time after her death, film director Jill Craigie (1911- 99), re-opens an old suitcase, prompting memories of the extraordinary life and loves of this forceful, charismatic woman, whose work has been long neglected. Craigie was one of the first women to direct documentaries. Working outside the British Documentary Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, her films such as To Be Woman (1951), on equal pay, and Out of Chaos (1944), the first film about artists at work, featuring Henry Moore and Paul Nash, tackled new subjects for the cinema through a unique blend of drama, polemic and humour. Independent Miss Craigie uses the director’s unseen papers, and her films, to reveal her energetic struggles to get her radical projects made and distributed, including her last one, on the Yugoslav conflict, made when she was 83, with her husband, former Labour leader, Michael Foot.
Two actresses take us through a series of 'raps' and sketches about what it means to be beautiful and black.
On the evening of April 30, 1971, a standing room only audience of local literati and feminists packed New York City’s Town Hall to watch Norman Mailer, who had just written “The Prisoner of Sex,” grapple with a panel of passionate feminists. The subject was Women’s Liberation, an issue on which Mailer seemed like the devil’s own advocate.
This documentary highlights the evolution of Brazil's Circo Voador venue from homespun artists' performance space to national cultural institution.
A documentary that resurrects the buried history of the outrageous, often brilliant women who founded the modern women's movement from 1966 to 1971.
On 12 June 2000, in Rio de Janeiro, Ônibus 174 was taken by an armed young man, threatening to kill all the passengers. Transmitted live on all national networks, this shocking and tragic event became one of violence's most shocking portraits, and one of the most terrifying examples of police incompetence and abuse in recent years.
In a crime-plagued neighborhood near Miami, brutal, bare-knuckled backyard fights give young men a chance to earn money -- and self-respect.
Award-winning journalist Daniela Arbex examines the horrors of the Colônia psychiatric hospital, where more than 60,000 people were killed over decades.
Alexander McQueen's rags-to-riches story is a modern-day fairy tale, laced with the gothic. Mirroring the savage beauty, boldness and vivacity of his design, this documentary is an intimate revelation of McQueen's own world, both tortured and inspired, which celebrates a radical and mesmerizing genius of profound influence.
With rare access and no holds barred, the acclaimed documentarian investigates a growing ultra-masculine network and its controversial influencers.
NUDE explores perceptions of nudity in art by chronicling the creative process of photographer David Bellemere as he's commissioned by NU Muses founder Steve Shaw to shoot a fine art calendar of nude photographs.
The world's greatest pin-up model and cult icon, Bettie Page, recounts the true story of how her free expression overcame government witch-hunts to help launch America's sexual revolution. When she saw the film The Notorious Bettie Page, produced by HBO in 2006, the main person concerned reacted unequivocally: “Lies! Lies!” In a long interview recorded shortly before her death, the woman who entered the collective unconscious as the ultimate pin-up gave her version of events to director Mark Mori. In a gravelly voice, Bettie Page tells her own story and lifts the veil on areas often hidden by images that have made so many men and women fantasize since the 1950s: her abused childhood, an eclipse that lasted forty years, her mental illness. Through testimonies and unpublished archives, this documentary brings back to life a body and a face endlessly declined before our eyes, just as Bettie wanted: “I would like people to remember me as I was in the photos.”
In the winter of 2011, after a controversial election, Vladimir Putin was reinstalled as president of Russia. In response, hundreds of thousands of citizens rose up all over the country to challenge the legitimacy of Putin’s rule. Among them were a group of young, radical-feminist punk rockers, better known as Pussy Riot. Wearing colored balaclavas, tights, and summer dresses, they entered Moscow’s most venerated cathedral and dared to sing “Mother Mary, Banish Putin!” Now they have become victims of a “show” trial.
An uplifting feature documentary highlighting the transformative power of art and the beauty of the human spirit. Top-selling contemporary artist Vik Muniz takes us on an emotional journey from Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to the heights of international art stardom. Vik collaborates with the brilliant catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, true Shakespearean characters who live and work in the garbage quoting Machiavelli and showing us how to recycle ourselves.
The film MISS REPRESENTATION exposes how American youth are being sold the concept that women and girls’ value lies in their youth, beauty and sexuality. Explores the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America, and challenges the media's limited portrayal of what it means to be a powerful woman. It’s time to break that cycle of mistruths.
49 Up is the seventh film in a series of landmark documentaries that began 42 years ago when UK-based Granada's World in Action team, inspired by the Jesuit maxim "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man," interviewed a diverse group of seven-year-old children from all over England, asking them about their lives and their dreams for the future. Michael Apted, a researcher for the original film, has returned to interview the "children" every seven years since, at ages 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 and now again at age 49.In this latest chapter, more life-changing decisions are revealed, more shocking announcements made and more of the original group take part than ever before, speaking out on a variety of subjects including love, marriage, career, class and prejudice.
Over 35 years after Bob Lazar's revelations, this documentary exposes secrets of a facility the government still denies. Featuring Lazar's testimony, recreations, and new evidence, it reopens a case that continues to spark global curiosity
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
When a feminist filmmaker sets out to document the mysterious and polarizing world of the Men’s Rights Movement, she begins to question her own beliefs. Chronicling Cassie Jaye’s journey exploring an alternate perspective on gender equality, power and privilege.
A vivid journey into the mysterious subterranean world of mycelium and its fruit— the mushroom. A story that begins 3.5 billion years ago, fungi makes the soil that supports life, connecting vast systems of roots from plants and trees all over the planet, like an underground Internet. Through the eyes of renowned mycologist Paul Stamets, professor of forest ecology Suzanne Simard, best selling author Michael Pollan, food naturalist Eugenia Bone and others, we experience the power, beauty and complexity of the fungi kingdom.
In an intimate and joyful story of love in the face of loss, celebrated poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley find strength—and unexpected hilarity—in what might be their final year together.
An inside look at one of the most anticipated movie sequels ever with James Cameron and cast.
Veteran naturalist Sir David Attenborough tells the story of a remarkable group of gorillas, from his first encounter in the '70s to the present day.
Join the likes of Jeremy Renner, Hailee Steinfeld, Florence Pugh, and Vincent D’Onofrio as they reveal how Marvel Studios’ “Hawkeye” was conceived and created. Witness firsthand what it took to pull off the show’s pulse-pounding action set pieces, and discover how iconic characters from the pages of Marvel Comics such as Kate Bishop were adapted and brought to life for the six-episode series.
Marlon Riggs, with assistance from other gay Black men, especially poet Essex Hemphill, celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act. The film intercuts footage of Hemphill reciting his poetry, Riggs telling the story of his growing up, scenes of men in social intercourse and dance, and various comic riffs, including a visit to the "Institute of Snap!thology," where men take lessons in how to snap their fingers: the sling snap, the point snap, the diva snap.
