Animation: A Palette of Possibilities
Director: Angela Hinton
Documentary 15 minutes USA 2010
This short film is a fascinating collection of stories, anecdotes, and insights from some of the best animators in the world today. Mary Poppins, Petes Dragon, The Black Hole, Sleeping Beauty, Roger Rabbit, Mulan, and The Princess and the Frog, are just some of the animated films they have helped bring to the screen. Academy Award nominee Joe Hale, versatile artist Ron Dias, and others talk about their life work and give advice and encouragement to children thinking about a career in hand drawn animation.
Ask Us Who We Are
Director: Bess O’Brien
Documentary 75 minutes USA 2011
Ask Us Who We Are is a documentary film focused on the challenges and extraordinary lives of youth in foster care. The film is a reflection on loss and the search for belonging and finding family. Although the film highlights the heartbreak that many foster care youth carry with them as they move through their lives, the documentary also reveals the tremendous strength and perseverance that grows out of their determination to survive and thrive.
Challenging Impossibility
Director: Sanjay Rawal
Documentary 28 minutes USA 2011
CHALLENGING IMPOSSIBILITY chronicles the weightlifting odyssey of the late spiritual teacher and peace advocate Sri Chinmoy. Known worldwide for his message of oneness, Sri Chinmoy dedicated his life to inspiring people to go beyond their limits by using the strength developed through meditation. In this spirit, Sri Chinmoy offered hundreds of peace concerts at venues like Lincoln Center and Royal Albert Hall, gave lectures at institutions like Harvard and Oxford, wrote hundreds of books about philosophy and peace and sponsored a number of humanitarian outreach programmes.Surprisingly, at the age of 53, the Indian-born mystic took up weightlifting and focuses on an exhibition he held on 13 November 2004 where he lifted a total of 200,408 pounds. He was 73 years old at the time.
Chasing Water
Director: Peter McBride
Documentary 18 minutes USA 2011
Follow the Colorado River, source to sea, with photographer Pete McBride who takes an intimate look at the watershed as he attempts to follow the irrigation water that sustains his family’s Colorado ranch, down river to the sea. Traversing 1500 miles and draining seven states, the Colorado River supports over 30 million people across the southwest. It is not the longest or largest U.S. river, but it is one of the most loved and litigated in the world. Today, this resource is depleted and stressed. Follow its path with an artistic, aerial view on a personal journey to understand this national treasure. McBride teamed up with his bush-pilot father to capture unique footage and also shadowed the adventure of Jon Waterman who became the first to paddle the entire length of the river.
Civil Indigent
Director: Nicholas Corrao
Documentary 55 minutes USA 2011
As the wheels of redevelopment turn in Gainesville, Florida, the battles lines have been drawn in a heated debate over a meal limit that has been imposed on a homeless shelter downtown. ‘Civil Indigent’ follows Francis ‘Pat’ Fitzpatrick as he leads the charge against the limit from his protests at City Hall to his quixotic campaign for a seat on the city commission. Eccentric, outspoken and unpredictable, Pat tests the boundaries of what it means to be an advocate.
Deception Of Freedom
Director: Charro Wongittilin
Documentary 51 minutes USA 2010
When an intruder tried to run him over, Marc Wisecarver defended himself and his horses by shooting the radiator of the intruders truck on his property. Marc lives on Pine Ridge Reservation. The tribal court found him not guilty by reason of self defense. The federal system had him arrested and tried for assaulting a government official, however, this man did not have any identification on him. He was found not guilty of assault be reason of self defense. Marc has been tried 3 times on the same charges and has been imprisoned over 2 years.
Hot Mud: The Thoughts & Works of Daniel Johnston
Director: Jay Yager
Documentary 60 minutes USA 2010
Daniel Johnston was raised on a farm in Randolph County, North Carolina. In his early teens his family moved to Seagrove, the center of a three-century-old pottery tradition. He left high school at 16, worked for local potteries and later completed a four-year apprenticeship with Mark Hewitt. His desire to make large pots led him to Phon Bok, Thailand where he worked intensively with traditional Thai potters absorbing their unique method of making large storage jars. After returning to the US he built his own shop and kilns where he now produces his highly distinctive works using local stoneware clays and natural glaze materials including clay from the ground outside his studio and ashes from the wood stove that warms him as he works.
In The Footsteps Of Willie Sutton
Director: Richard Gold
Documentary 54 minutes USA 2010
America’s most famous bank robber of the twentieth century doesn’t fancy prison accommodations. When he gets caught and confined, he escapes … three times! In the Footsteps of Willie Sutton is a documentary film that follow this gentleman bandit’s criminal career that spans over four decades.
Return
Director: Cyd Chartier Cohn
Documentary 32 minutes USA 2010
In 1969, when Fred Sondermann is presented with the opportunity to return to his native Germany, thirty years after he and his parents narrowly escaped to the United States just days before the outbreak of WWII, he said yes. Dr. Sondermann, a Jew and a political science professor at Colorado College, with his wife and three children traveled to Germany for four months. And though the trip is ostensibly professional in purpose, Sondermann is affected most deeply by the return to his childhood hometown, Horn. This first-person narrative, adapted from Sondermann’s memoirs of the trip, walks the viewer through the experience, contemplating victimization, the nature of blame, the appropriate issuance of forgiveness, and the determination to move forward unburdened by ghosts of the past.
Shaft Or Sidney Poitier
Director: Jonathan Gayles
Documentary 56 minutes USA 2010
This documentary critically examines the earliest representations (1965-1977) of Black masculinity in comic books and the troubling influence of race on these representations. Thinking critically about the manner in which Black men were first portrayed in hero serials provides insight into broader societal conceptions of the Black man as character, archetype and symbol. Through interviews with prominent artists, scholars and cultural critics along with images from the comic books themselves, it becomes clear that the Black superheroes that did eventually emerge are generally constrained by stereotypical understandings of Black people and Black men in particular. From the humorous, to the offensive, to the tragic, early Black superheroes never strayed too far from common stereotypes about Black men.
The Car is Born – A Documentary About Carl & Bertha Benz
Director: Ulli Kampelmann
Documentary 19 minutes USA 2011
The automobile was invented 125 years ago by Carl Benz. To do so he had to overcome a broad range of engineering obstacles as well as tremendous resistance laid in his path by the government AND by the church. He himself had doubts about the durability of his machine so never drove far from home. So, his wife Bertha took matters into her own hands. Early one morning in 1888, against all common sense and fully without her husband’s permission, Bertha gathered up her two sons and made off with the automobile. Despite breakdowns and other misadventures, she secured renown for her husband’s automobile as well as a place in the history books for herself: The first-ever long-distance road trip was made by a woman!
The Doughboys Live – Rock N’Raw
Director: Rob Adams
Documentary 1 hour 56 minutes USA 2011
The Doughboys’ 40-year history complete with a LIVE on-stage performance at Arlene’s Grocery in New York City. This film is the perfect blend of story and stage and is bound to get you rockin’!
The Test
Director: Gary Strieker
Documentary 51 minutes USA 2010
The Test Trailer from Vestergaard Frandsen on Vimeo.
An entire Kenyan community of 50,000 participates in an HIV testing and counseling campaign are provided with a CarePack of products to prevent malaria, HIV and diarrheal disease as encouragement to take an HIV test. For the first time, people line up by thousands to take an HIV test–including adult men, a previously hard to reach group for HIV testing. Stigma of testing and knowing HIV status is reduced. Attitudes towards HIV+ people is confronted and overcome. Film shows how lives of five people change over course of one year from when they learn their status.
The Triangle Of Death
Director: Folleh Tamba
Documentary 1 hour 10 minutes USA, Iraq 2010
This is the story of the riflemen of Echo company 3rd platoon; they went through a life changing experience; through the hellishness of war innocence is shattered. Mission accomplishment is the number one goal under all circumstances they endured. Boys are broken and men are made in the mist of war. Join the Marines of 2/24 as they take you on a journey through one of Iraq’s deadliest regions known as The Triangle Of Death.
Unsigned
Director: Edward Payson
Documentary 96 minutes USA 2011
Three unsigned bands struggle to balance their Rock and roll aspirations with the reality of everyday life in a year where everything will change.
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
Director: Peter Joseph
Documentary 2 Hours 40 minutes USA 2011
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which presents a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter works to transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical ‘life ground’ attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a ‘Resource-Based Economy’.
