Icarus Films (Firm)
Description
Master director Patricio Guzman travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, where atop the mountains astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent that it allows them to see right to the boundaries of the universe. The Atacama is also a place where the harsh heat of the sun keeps human remains intact: those of Pre-Columbian mummies; 19th century explorers and miners;...
Description
A 7-foot-tall fundamentalist Baptist minister, Markie Wenzel made the decision at age 46 to come out as a transgender woman and start living as female. It was a decision that ended her 20-year marriage and estranged her from her three children. It also saw her dismissed from her church and exiled to the margins of her community. We meet Markie in 2008 as she is putting the pieces of her life back together, employed as a TSA agent and working toward...
Description
In her debut film, director Qiong Wang builds a riveting portrait of her family reckoning with the lasting impact of China's one-child policy. After giving birth to two daughters, Qiong's parents were desperate for a boy. When they learned that they were pregnant with a third daughter, the couple embarked on a path that would affect their family for generations to come. Filming for more than seven years, Ms. Wang courageously investigates her family's...
4) Time Thieves
Description
TIME THIEVES is an eye-opening investigation into how our time became a currency; why 'time poverty' is on the rise and how the more we try to save time, the less we have. Award-winning director Cosima Dannoritzer blends remarkable archival footage and heart-breaking stories with testimonies from leading experts in a documentary that was filmed on location in Japan, USA, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany.
Description
THE GOOD BREAST blends archival medical films and the history of the mastectomy since William S. Halsted with the surprising journey taken by Dr. Schnaper and her partner to Catania, Sicily, to experience Saint Agatha, the annual festival of the breast and third largest such celebration in the world. Their discoveries reveal surprising connections between contemporary American culture of the mastectomy and this ancient veneration of the breast.
7) Mali Blues
Description
The West African country of Mali is a birthplace of the blues, a musical tradition later carried by the transatlantic slave trade to America's cotton fields. Yet today, the music and musicians of Mali are in grave danger. As fundamentalist Islam and sharia law become more widespread, dance and secular music are prohibited, musical instruments are destroyed, and musicians are forced to flee their homeland. The vibrant documentary MALI BLUES follows...
8) The Apology
Description
THE APOLOGY follows the personal journeys of three former "comfort women" who were among the 200,000 girls and young women kidnapped and forced into military sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Seventy years after their imprisonment in so-called "comfort stations," Grandma Gil in South Korea, Grandma Cao in China, and Grandma Adela in the Philippines are facing their twilight years. After decades of living in silence...
9) The Campaign
Description
Focusing on a mayoral race in Muncie, Indiana, THE CAMPAIGN follows closely the personalities, strategies, and pressures of an American political contest. In particular, it examines the sharply contrasting styles and backgrounds of the Democratic and Republican candidates.
Description
The slogan “Meet the Icons of Modern Art” needs to be scraped off the glass wall of the Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s Museum of Modern Art. Because precisely who these icons of modern art are is very much the question.Who gets to decide? And who loses out? In 2019, as director Sarah Vos started shooting her documentary, more than 90 percent of the art at the Stedelijk was made by white men. That must change, the museum’s director Rein Wolfs believes....
Description
One day, without warning, a revolution exploded. It was the event that master documentarian Patricio Guzmán had been waiting for all his life: a million and a half people in the streets of Santiago, Chile, demanding justice, education, health care, and a new constitution to replace the strident rules imposed on the country during the Pinochet military dictatorship. Urgent and inspired, MY IMAGINARY COUNTRY features harrowing front-line protest footage...
13) No Home Movie
Description
The final film from groundbreaking auteur Chantal Akerman, NO HOME MOVIE is a portrait of her relationship with her mother, Natalia, a Holocaust survivor and familiar presence in many of her daughter's films. At once disarmingly intimate and formally rigorous, NO HOME MOVIE is a singualr exploration of family, memory and history.
14) Our Daily Bread
Description
OUR DAILY BREAD reveals the little-known world of high-tech agriculture. In a series of visually stunning, continuously tracking, wide-screen images that seem right out of a science-fiction movie, we see the places where food is cultivated and processed: surreal landscapes optimized for agricultural machinery, clean rooms in cool industrial buildings designed for maximum efficiency, and elaborate machines that operate on a 'disassembly line' basis....
Description
An intimate conversation between the director and her mother, the dynamic activist and scholar Srbijanka Turajlić, reveals a house and a country haunted by history. What begins as the chronicle of a childhood home grows into an elegant portrait of a charismatic and brilliant woman in times of great political turmoil.
16) Hotel Terminus
Description
A brilliant and epic Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon", HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE weaves together forty years of footage and interviews culled from over 120 hours of discussion with former Nazis, American intelligence officers, South American government officials, victims of Nazi atrocities and witnesses.
Description
Recruited by a Lebanese maid agency, Sabine leaves Cameroon and embarks for Lebanon. After many years of servitude, she escapes to Belgium, but her arrival there is complicated by the fact that she enters illegally, by way of Greece and Syria. She settles in Matonge, the African quarter, where she becomes the manager of the beauty salon CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE. Here, patrons, many of them undocumented immigrants, are not only be made to feel beautiful...
18) Blue Island
Description
Starting with the apparently futile Umbrella Movement in 2014, director Chan Tze Woon has chosen to document this modern era of defiance. Conceived in 2017 and filmed over 5 years, BLUE ISLAND confronts the large-scale 2019 protests in Hong Kong. A new wave of young people took back the streets, as one generation after another has done throughout Hong Kong’s history. Bullets fly across the alleys. Fires ignite. White tear gas and blue water cannons...
19) The Big Game
Description
As Muncie Central and Anderson High prepare to meet for the annual basketball game, a game charged with the spirit of long-established rivalry, THE BIG GAME examines what this competition, and the sport itself, means to the community, the coaches, and most of all to the players themselves.
Description
In HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME, German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, tracing the contours of the major historical uphevals that afflicted Germany in the 20th century. Uncovering journal entries, photographs and contemporary footage, Heise creates a poetic meditation on individual and collective history.