Social & External
Berlin is changing. The film maker interviewed and accompanied real estate agents and investors and filmed tenants struggling to cope with the situation.
Facing eviction the oldest black-owned gay bar in Brooklyn relies on a passionate community in its fight for survival.
In an historically Black neighborhood of Cincinnati, a family closes shop as new residents roll in on their Segways and craft beer carts.
Clarissa Uprooted depicts the Third Ward as a microcosm of Rochester’s—and many northern US cities’—history. From neighborhood camaraderie, international jazz music, and thriving black-owned businesses, to redlining, urban renewal, and other racist policies. The film features some of the elders who lived this history and the youth who are living with the consequences today.
San Francisco has long enjoyed a reputation as the counterculture capital of America, attracting bohemians, mavericks, progressives and activists. With the onset of the digital gold rush, young members of the tech elite are flocking to the West Coast to make their fortunes, and this new wealth is forcing San Francisco to reinvent itself. But as tech innovations lead America into the golden age of digital supremacy, is it changing the heart and soul of their adopted city?
The working-class Tuindorp Nieuwendam neighborhood in Amsterdam-Noord is like a village within the city. Many natives of the Northern Netherlands still live in the characteristically built houses, a unique variation on the Amsterdam School. With humor and Amsterdam directness, they share their stories about what's happening in their lives and in the neighborhood. Recently, a new generation of residents has also discovered the Noord district. How do residents view these changes and the neighborhood's transformation? Was everything better in the past, or are new connections emerging between residents, old and new?
A short documentary on the gentrification of Hackney.
In 1980s Brooklyn, a resilient family, evicted from public housing, refuses to succumb to homelessness or welfare. Instead, they construct their own home-one scrap of discarded wood at a time.
A long-term resident of Pacific Beach explores the gradual gentrification of his once sleepy neighborhood in San Diego, California.
A prescient portrait of late-1970s Washington, D.C., that chronicles the city's creeping gentrification, the systematic expulsion of poor Black residents, and the community response in the form of the Seaton Street Project, in which tenants banded together to purchase buildings.
The first in-depth analysis of the unspoken ethnic component behind the most devastating socio-economic movement in America today.
Evanston, a suburb just north of Chicago, touts its progressivism and inclusion. It was the first city in the U.S. to offer reparations for Black residents and every street corner boasts Black Lives Matter signs, but Evanston’s Black residents have a different story to tell. If you travel to the other side of Evanston, the historically Black ward, ‘For Rent’ signs are indicators of the thousands of Black residents leaving, gentrification encroaching, and streets becoming quiet. It wasn't always this way. There used to be a vibrant, thriving hub for the Black community at the Emerson YMCA. One in every five Black boys in Evanston were members, Nat King Cole played at the Y's prom, and for many residents, it became a second home. That was until the building was burned down in 1980. The destruction happened in the name of progress, despite the Black community's protests.
Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer profiles the young people of Villaways Park, a housing project on brink of historic change.
The Fall of the I-Hotel brings to life the battle for housing in San Francisco. The brutal eviction of the International Hotel's tenants culminated a decade of spirited resistance to the razing of Manilatown. The Fall of the I-Hotel works on several levels. It not only documents the struggle to save the I-Hotel, but also gives an overview of Filipino American history.
Rua de Santa Catarina, a street that was formerly home to dozens of local businesses and hundreds of Porto residents, now sees a crowd of tourists attracted by the cheap, disposable amenities that are popping up everywhere at once. Gentrification has decontextualized Portuguese culture, rendering the landscape uncanny. The Basin Woman, a symbol of the female workers of the historic Bolhão Market, is chased down by seagulls in the midst of this transcendent chaos.
Following a newspaper ad, ordinary women tell part of their life stories to director Eduardo Coutinho, which are then re-enacted by actresses, blurring the barriers between truth, fiction and interpretation.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
A look at the work and surprising success of a four-year-old girl whose paintings have been compared to the likes of Picasso and has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Re-Existence” is a documentary about migration stories of individuals from the Brazilian queer community.
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.
Over seven decades, actor and activist George Takei journeyed from a World War II internment camp to the helm of the Starship Enterprise, and then to the daily news feeds of five million Facebook fans. Join George and his husband, Brad, on a wacky and profound trek for life, liberty, and love.
Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.
Diaries, audiotapes, videotapes and testimonials from friends and colleagues offer insight into the life and career of Gilda Radner -- the beloved comic and actress who became an icon on Saturday Night Live.
Jonas Mekas weaves an elegiac diary film from his 1971–72 return to Lithuania, chronicling a visit to his birthplace of Semeniškiai after decades in exile. Blending personal memory with documentary observation, the film becomes both a portrait of homecoming and a meditation on displacement, family, and the passage of time.
If you ever find yourself traveling down Interstate 49 through Missouri, try not to blink—you may miss Rich Hill, population 1,396. Rich Hill is easy to overlook, but its inhabitants are as woven into the fabric of America as those living in any small town in the country. This movie intimately chronicles the turbulent lives of three boys living in said Midwestern town and the fragile family bonds that sustain them.
The daily lives and routine of 37 families living in a huge 12-story building in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro: their drama, aspirations, intimate revelations, loneliness, dreams...
A depiction of the Wrangelkiez neighbourhood in Berlin. The people portrayed tell their life stories. One woman came to the neighbourhood a decade ago to work in Berlin’s still unfinished Brandenburger Airport, one man reminisces his childhood on a Tobacco farm in Kentucky, another speaks of an exceptional day in an otherwise monotonous workplace. These portraits are interwoven with the story of Elpi, a Greek woman who is waiting for the long overdue visit of an old important friend. The outcome of this mixture is a film which captures the lives and perspectives of some of Wrangelkiez’s most commanding citizens, while at the same time evoking the loss that change and time passing means for places and for people.
A look behind the curtain of Washington politics following three "renegade" Republican Congressmen as they bring libertarian and conservative zeal to champion the President’s call to “drain the swamp.”
One Life captures unprecedented and beautiful sequences of animal behaviour guaranteed to bring you closer to nature than ever before, as well as a second disc packed full of never before seen extras including an exclusive making of featurette narrated by Daniel Craig.
This real-life look at FBI counterterrorism operations features access to both sides of a sting: the government informant and the radicalized target.
Follow the evolution of the 'Halloween' movies over the past twenty-five years. It examines why the films are so popular and revisits many of the original locations used in the films - seeing the effects on the local community. For the first time, cast, crew, critics and fans join together in the ultimate 'Halloween' retrospective.
This character-driven film considers the evolving sex trafficking landscape as seen by the main players: the exploited, the pimps, the johns that fuel the business, and the cops who fight to stop it.
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.
From New York City to the farmlands of the Midwest, there are 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., yet one dish in particular has conquered the American culinary landscape with a force befitting its military moniker—“General Tso’s Chicken.” But who was General Tso and how did this dish become so ubiquitous? Ian Cheney’s delightfully insightful documentary charts the history of Chinese Americans through the surprising origins of this sticky, sweet, just-spicy-enough dish that we’ve adopted as our own.
This documentary by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky details the murder trial of Delbert Ward. Delbert was a member of a family of four elderly brothers, working as semi-literate farmers and living together in isolation from the rest of society until William's death.
