The Underground Orchestra

The Battle of The Alamo

How Good to See You Alive

Four years after a military coup overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964, all civil rights were suspended and torture became a systematic practice. Using a mix of fiction and documentary this extraordinary film is a searing record of personal memory, political repression and the will to survive. Interviews with eight women who were political prisoners during the military dictatorship are framed by the fantasies and imaginings of an anonymous character, portrayed by actress Irene Ravache.

Menhaden: The Most Important Fish in the Bay

Menhaden: The Most Important Fish in the Bay examines the role of a little-known, oily, little fish in the Chesapeake Bay. From its original concept as a classic man-versus-environment story, the film evolved to reflect the complexity of sustaining a menhaden fishery that many diverse interests depend on. The outcome: a story that seamlessly weaves together different perspectives on the menhaden fishing industry and its culture utilizing engaging personal vignettes, scientific data and creative visual storytelling techniques. Techniques include archival footage blended with cinematic live-action footage, musical performances and original, handmade animations.

Sur les traces de Louis Braille

Grandmas Project – Marillenknödel

Mona Achache delivers a delicious portrait of her grandmother, Suzanne Achache–Wiznitzer, affectionately nicknamed "Mamé". Short film from the Grandmas Project, a collaborative web documentary that invites filmmakers from across the world to document their grandmothers’ signature recipes.

Fannie's Film

A 65-year-old cleaning woman for a professional dancers' exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voiceover about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. A challenge to mainstream media's ongoing stereotypes of women of color who earn their living as domestic workers, this seemingly simple documentary achieves a quiet revolution: the expressive portrait of a fully realized individual.

1971

Forty years before WikiLeaks and the NSA scandal, there was Media, Pennsylvania. In 1971, eight activists plotted an intricate break-in to the local FBI offices to leak stolen documents and expose the illegal surveillance of ordinary Americans in an era of anti-war activism. In this riveting heist story, the perpetrators reveal themselves for the first time, reflecting on their actions and raising broader questions surrounding security leaks in activism today.

Britain's Holocaust Survivors

They experienced perhaps the greatest crimes against humanity the world has ever seen. Yet what do we know about the Holocaust survivors who made Britain their home? Britain's Holocaust Survivors takes a unique approach to recording the experiences of the last generation to have living memories of the Holocaust. The film takes viewers into the homes of a small group of extraordinary survivors, telling their stories with sensitivity, humour and compassion. A compelling cast of characters are revealed as they gradually reveal the horror of their past and how those experiences have shaped their lives.

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.

Prisoners of War

This haunting film comprises of footage shot during WWI from opposite sides of the conflict: Czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. The filmmakers tinted the material with sensual colors from sepia to red, blue, and purple and slowed the footage to analyze the material. The total absence of commentary renders the material eloquent and disturbing. - MoMA

Lo specchio di Diana

In 1926 the remains of two ships built by the Emperor Caligula were found at the bottom of Lake Nemi, near Rome. Mussolini had the lake drained and established a museum as a celebration of the imperial origins of Fascism, but the museum and ships were destroyed by fleeing Nazis in 1944. The film commemorates these events. - MoMA

I'm Going to Santiago

This black-and-white film is a loving portrait of Santiago de Cuba and its people. It provides a view of Cuba as a picturesque country, the product of an earthy mix of black and criollo cultures. The film uses historical images which portray the end of the eighteenth century when Haitian slave owners fled with their slaves to Cuba after the Haitian Revolution.

Flowers from the Mount of Olives

Right alongside Jerusalem, in a Russian Orthodox Convent in the Mount of Olives, in the middle of the Arab quarter, lives the 82-year-old Estonian nun Mother Ksenya.

On the Heights All Is Peace

Found footage anti-war film comprising film documents of the Austro-Hungarian and Italian army on the Alpine front, and from first generation picture material by war-film pioneer Luca Comerio.

Images of the Orient - "Vandalic Tourism"

Working from archives of private film footage from a trip to India by the upper class of the late 1920s, a period of strong anti-colonial outbreak, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi deconstruct the images and analyze the attitude and behavior of Westerners in the East.

People, Years, Life

Using images shot in Russia and Armenia from World War I to the 1930s and retrieved from a Soviet film archive, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi constructed a meditative film about the status of Armenians as a people without a state. Inspired by the diary of Gianikian’s father, People, Years, Life uses rare footage depicting the region’s major historic events: the end of Tsarist Russia, violence in the Caucasus during World War I, the 1918 Armenian exodus from Azerbaijan. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s treatment of the material manipulates the speed of the images, adds color and music, and magnifies various parts of the image, so that the movement of bodies across the frame begins to carry the weight of exile, mourning, dispossession.

Balkan Inventory

Comprised of images shot by amateur photographers and German soldiers in the Balkans from the twenties through the forties, BALKAN INVENTORY was begun by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi in response to the tragedy unfolding in the former Yugoslavia.

Ghiro ghiro tondo

Inspired by their beloved Dolomite area in Northeast Italy, a battle theater in World Wars I and II, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi continue to explore issues of war and peace in their most recent production. The film uses shots of ordinary toys found in the area, many missing limbs and other pieces, to represent, in both direct and oblique ways, the historical period between Fascism, Nazism, and the postwar era.

Criminal Animals

In this filmic comment on Fascist ideology - which uses footage from the recently discovered archives of Luca Comerio - invisible hands push captive animals to fight among themselves.