What if you could morph your car into a mobile work of art and drive it down the road for all to see? What would it look like? What would the world think of you? How would you be changed? AUTOMORPHOSIS looks into the minds and hearts of a delightful collection of eccentrics, visionaries, and just plain folks who have transformed their autos into artworks. On a humorous and touching journey, we discover what drives the creative process for these unconventional characters. And in the end, we find that an art car has the power to change us and to alter our view of our increasingly homogeneous world.
Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning HARLAN COUNTY USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. Featuring a haunting soundtrack, with legendary country and bluegrass artists Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis, Sarah Gunning, and Florence Reece, the film is a heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line.
The 1976 cinema vérité classic GREY GARDENS, which captured in remarkable close-up the lives of the eccentric East Hampton recluses Big and Little Edie Beale, has spawned everything from a midnight-movie cult following to a Broadway musical, to an upcoming Hollywood adaptation. The filmmakers then went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, THE BEALES OF GREY GARDENS, a tribute both to these indomitable women and to the original landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them American counterculture icons.
Faith Hubley’s abstract animation documents the persecution of women as witches throughout history.
Join noted tea guru and importer David Lee Hoffman as he scours China for the finest teas in the world. Following Hoffman as he travels to local tea farms deep in the Chinese countryside, extols the virtues of organic farming and the fertilizing benefits of the humble earthworm, and talks tea with none other than Werner Herzog, director Les Blank (shooting digitally for the first time) crafts a portrait of a man driven by an all-consuming passion and an ode to the myriad pleasures of an ancient beverage.
A rare glimpse into the mind of one of cinema’s most enigmatic visionaries, DAVID LYNCH: THE ART LIFE offers an absorbing portrait of the artist, as well as an intimate encounter with the man himself. From his secluded home and painting studio in the Hollywood Hills, a candid Lynch conjures people and places from his past, from his boyhood to his experiences at art school to the beginnings of his filmmaking career—in stories that unfold like scenes from his movies. This remarkable documentary by Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, and Olivia Neergaard-Holm travels back to Lynch’s early years as a painter and director drawn to the phantasmagoric, while also illuminating his enduring commitment to what he calls “the art life”: “You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it.”
With the freedom and rigor that were his trademarks, Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira returned to Porto, the city where he had been born ninety-three years before, for this sublimely evocative documentary collage. The Porto of this childhood is a city laden with history, a city of artists and thinkers. As in a spiral, the film moves from the ruins of the house where the filmmaker was born to the streets of the city that, in 1896, saw the birth of cinema in Portugal. PORTO OF MY CHILDHOOD takes the form of a search: fragments of memories, footprints, testimonies, song lyrics, and photographs are all portals to a distant past that echoes into the present.
An engaging, heartfelt look at one man’s battle to preserve his nation’s cinematic heritage, CELLULOID MAN is an intimate portrait of legendary Indian archivist P. K. Nair, who founded the National Film Archive of India to safeguard his country’s rapidly vanishing film history at a time when film restoration was largely disregarded. Tracing Nair’s profound influence on Indian cinema—from rescuing early silent films to mentoring a new generation of directors—filmmaker-archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur crafts both an inspiring tribute to a tireless cinephile warrior and an urgent call to preserve our moving-image legacy before it is too late.
For his documentary on the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad in Athens, Bud Greenspan decided to take a more selective approach, focusing only on five other disciplines and sports apart from the staple track and field: swimming, softball, fencing, cycling, and weight lifting.
Sing along with the common people in this exuberant, appropriately offbeat tribute to the charmingly cheeky Britpop legends. Though culminating with the farewell concert the band played to thousands of adoring fans in their hometown of Sheffield, England, PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH & SUPERMARKETS is by no means a traditional concert film or rock doc. As much a testament to the band as it is to the city and inhabitants of Sheffield, the film weaves exclusive concert footage with man-on-the-street interviews and dreamy staged sequences to paint a picture much larger, funnier, and more life-affirming than any music film of recent memory.
Krzysztof Kieślowski made more than twenty documentaries, including the following short. In TALKING HEADS, Kieślowski poses the questions “What year were you born?” “Who are you?” and “What do you most wish for?” to forty different people, ranging from an infant to a one-hundred-year-old woman.
Agnès Varda’s lifelong interest in still portraiture informs this record of a provocative Munich exhibition by the artist Ydessa Hendeles that contemplates our need for nostalgia and comfort in a violent world through an assemblage of hundreds of antique photographs of people and their teddy bears.
Agnès Varda’s extraordinary late-career renaissance began with this wonderfully idiosyncratic, self-reflexive documentary in which the French cinema icon explores the world of modern-day gleaners: those living on the margins who survive by foraging for what society throws away. Embracing the intimacy and freedom of digital filmmaking, Varda posits herself as a kind of gleaner of images and ideas, one whose generous, expansive vision makes room for ruminations on everything from aging to the birth of cinema to the beauty of heart-shaped potatoes. By turns playful, philosophical, and subtly political, THE GLEANERS AND I is a warmly human reflection on the contradictions of our consumerist world from an artist who, like her subjects, finds unexpected richness where few think to look.
Using Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial call to arms “The Wretched of the Earth” as a launching point, director Göran Olsson (THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967–1975) constructs a revelatory assemblage of archival newsreel footage documenting decades of African uprisings, from the Angolan War of Independence to a 1960s miners’ strike in Liberia to the Mozambique Liberation Front and beyond. Set against Fanon’s scorching words, as narrated by Lauryn Hill, the result is a bold and fresh reframing of history.
Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974, was one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, but he left behind an illegitimate son, Nathaniel, and a personal life of secrets and broken promises. MY ARCHITECT takes us on a heartbreaking yet humorous journey as Nathaniel attempts to reconnect with his deceased father. The riveting narrative takes us from the men’s room in Penn Station, where Kahn died bankrupt and alone, to the bustling streets of Bangladesh, the inner sanctums of Jerusalem politics, and unforgettable encounters with the world’s most celebrated architects. In a documentary with all the emotional impact of a dramatic feature film, Nathaniel’s journey becomes a universal investigation of identity—and a celebration of art and, ultimately, life itself.
Agnès Varda’s charming follow-up to her acclaimed documentary THE GLEANERS AND I is a deceptively unassuming grace note that takes us deeper into the world of those who find purpose and beauty in the refuse of society. Revisiting many of the original film’s subjects to explore the often unexpected effects that their participation in the project has had on their lives, this wonderfully warm and human epilogue once again takes gleaning as the starting point from which to explore what most interests Varda: the richness, complexity, and poignancy of life outside the mainstream. What emerges is a crazy-quilt tapestry of the personal, the political, and the esoteric that celebrates the spirit and creativity of those who forge their own path.
With his documentary on XIX Olympic Winter Games Salt Lake City 2002, Bud Greenspan shows that the Olympic Games set the bar to such a near-mythical level that winning or losing a medal can arouse emotions far beyond those in other competitions.
The singular poet and modern-day philosopher Timothy “Speed” Levitch ruminates on life in post-9/11 New York City.
Bud Greenspan's film on the Games of the XXVII Olympiad in Sydney profiles Cathy Freeman, who surged to glory before her home crowd in the 400 meters, as well as Leontien van Moorsel, the Dutch cyclist who had suffered from anorexia and won the gold medal in both the women's cycling individual road race and individual time trial.
SOMETHING LIKE A WAR is a chilling examination of India’s family-planning program from the point of view of the women who are its primary targets. It traces the history of the family-planning program and exposes the cynicism, corruption, and brutality of its implementation. As the women themselves discuss their status, sexuality, fertility control, and health, it is clear that their perceptions are in conflict with those of the program.
The Nazi persecution of homosexuals may be one of the least-told stories of the Third Reich. Directed by Oscar winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, PARAGRAPH 175 fills a crucial gap in the historical record, and reveals the lasting consequences of this hidden chapter of twentieth-century history. These are stories of survivors—sometimes bitter, but just as often filled with irony and humor; tortured by their memories, yet infused with a powerful will to endure. Their moving testimonies, rendered with evocative images of their lives and times, tell a haunting, compelling story of human resistance. Intimate in its portrayals, sweeping in its implications, PARAGRAPH 175 raises provocative questions about memory, history, and identity.
Filmed over the course of more than ten years, from 1987 to 1998, INSTRUMENT is director Jem Cohen’s visceral, fittingly unconventional portrait of legendary DC punk band Fugazi from their origins through their electrifying prime. Capturing the blistering intensity of their live shows, intimate moments backstage and in the studio, and interviews with members including frontmen Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto, the film sheds light on an often enigmatic band whose unwavering commitment to their independent, anticorporate ideals—forgoing money and mainstream fame in favor of accessibility and activism—continues to inspire the DIY underground.
In 2000, Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS. Working outside of Iran and shooting on digital video for the first time, he returned with this disarmingly hopeful look at a country where death hovers ever-present, yet life—embodied by the playful spirit of the kids who peer curiously into his camera’s searching, humane lens—flows on undiminished. Part idiosyncratic travelogue, part ode to childhood wonder, ABC AFRICA is quintessential Kiarostami in its movingly philosophical reflection on human resilience in the face of adversity.
Far from a standard music documentary, Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen’s loving portrait of underground musician Benjamin Smoke—speed freak, drag queen, and a true outsider artist in every sense of the word—captures his singular personality (described by Cohen as a kind of “Deep South, dirt-poor Oscar Wilde”), mesmerizing performances, and the unique world of his Cabbagetown neighborhood in Atlanta. Filmed in evocative black and white, BENJAMIN SMOKE is a poignant tribute to a life lived totally and uncompromisingly on the margins.