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- This little-known World War II battle with Japanese forces on the Alaskan island of Attu includes the accounts of two surviving soldiers. The film tells of the tragic operation that saw ill-prepared American troops take on massive casualties.
- An Autobiography of Michelle Maren is another gripping portrait from the Michel Negroponte, the director of Jupiter's Wife. Once again, Negroponte's subject is a haunted woman whose past will not release her. The film begins with an email from Michelle Maren to the filmmaker because she has seen and admired Jupiter's Wife. A middle-aged former beauty queen, go-go dancer, professional escort, and porn star, Michelle lives on disability checks and struggles with clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders and childhood trauma. Isolated and alone, she is seeking transformation and another chance through film. What unfolds is a cinematic blend of exposure therapy, psychological investigation, and confession. Secrets are revealed and the film builds to a startling conclusion that is as riveting as any fiction.
- In 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' a politically active Kansas megachurch splinters, moves to an amusement park, and when that fails, a Best Western motel. Meanwhile, an idealistic farmer revives Kansas' progressive tradition, taking his message all the way to Washington, D.C.
- This film follows the hunting of a giraffe by four members of the Ju/'hoansi (a !Kung Bushmen tribe) over a 13-day period in the Kalahari desert. The film consists of footage shot in 1952-53 on a Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody expedition.
- The students of England's only free school defend themselves before Parliament, as it attempts to shut down their school.
- A detailed overview of contemporary life in the tiny South Pacific country of Tuvalu, this film documents the earth's first sovereign nation faced with total destruction due to the effects of global warming. With a population of about 11,000 living on a total landmass of only 20 square miles - less than Manhattan - spread over nine low-lying atolls 600 miles to the north of Fiji, Tuvalu has been inhabited for over four millennia. The warm-spirited and highly community-oriented people of this ex-British colony struggle to survive economically while confronting the likelihood of having to evacuate their homeland en masse within the next 50 years. As the industrial world just begins to address the threat and causes of global warming, rising seas and increasingly violent changes in climate have already left their marks on this poor island nation. The government of Tuvalu and other concerned organizations are directing their pleas for solutions to the wealthy countries whose high pollution emissions could be the central human contribution to this phenomenon. Observation, narration, and interviews with Tuvalu citizens from various walks of life flesh out a full portrait of a unique community confronting a dubious future on the front lines of a global environmental assault.
- This film provides a broad overview of !Kung life, both past and present, and an intimate portrait of N!ai, a !Kung woman who in 1978 was in her mid-thirties.
- An examination of biculturalism wrapped in an extraordinary personal odyssey.
- An unvarnished look at the lives of Innu teenagers in a small Canadian village where ancestral ways have collided with modern ones and the result is addiction, suicide, lack of jobs, and hopelessness.
- This film was shot in Cuba in 1994. The opportunity came when Russel Porter, an Australian documentary filmmaker, was invited to teach at the international film and television school (EICTV) located some forty kilometers from Havana.
- Five individuals with disabilities unlock their potential towards employment, live independently and show the value they can bring to society.
- A rare, intimate look at the spiritual and social life of the Yup'ik Eskimo people of Emmonak, Alaska - a culture centered around traditional gift-giving ceremonies featuring dances and drum music.
- Ben Thresher's mill is one of the few water-powered woodworking mills left in the United States. Operating in rural Vermont, he makes water tubs by hand.
- Shangri-La to hell in ten years: How did Nepal, a peaceful landlocked country, become home to the most dramatic Maoist insurgency in modern history? Returned: Child Soldiers of Nepal's Maoist Army tells the personal story of Nepali boys and girls as they attempt to rebuild their lives after fighting a Maoist revolution. Through the voices of former child soldiers, the film examines why these children joined the Maoists and explores the prevention of future recruitment. The children describe their dramatic recruitment and participation in the Maoist People's Liberation Army during the eleven-year civil war between the Maoist insurgents and the Hindu monarch of Nepal. The girls' stories demonstrate how voluntarily joining the violent Maoist struggle became their only option to escape the gender discrimination and sexual violence of traditional Hindu culture in Nepal. With the major conflict ended and the Maoists in control of the government, these children are now discarded by the Maoist leadership and forced to return home to communities and families that want nothing to do with them. For many of the children of Nepal's Maoist Army, the return home can be even more painful than the experience of war.
- "I don't want to be Japanese!" filmmaker Matthew Hashiguchi recalls yelling at his father. Growing up Japanese-American in a predominantly white Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, Matthew wondered what made him different, why he stood out. Years later he set out to document his family's experiences of being Japanese in America before, during, and after World War II. GOOD LUCK SOUP explores several generations assimilating into a new culture while preserving their own.
- A loving daughter documents her reunion with her mentally-unstable mother in this heartfelt and decidedly personal documentary from filmmaker Tara Wray. When Wray was just a child, her mother was her entire life. A young girl with no father figure to speak of, Wray and her mother became so close that it was nearly impossible to distinguish where daughter ended and mother began. It was during those years, as the pair did their best to elude demons both real and imagined, that Wray first began to see signs of the powerful psychosis that would gradually cloud her mother's mind to the point of total insanity. After loving and protecting her increasingly unstable mother to the best of her abilities, Wray left home at the age of nineteen - when her mother threatened to kill her. Now, five years after that fateful threat, Wray returns to Manhattan, Kansas to re-establish her bond with her mentally disturbed mother, and perhaps help the ailing abstract artist locate the geographic center of the United States - a curious location that just may hold the secret to establishing world peace.
- This documentary made with an all native American crew by an indigenous Hopi director examines the representation of so called Indians in our films and in other media.
- Monir explores the life and practice of Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, one of the most innovative and influential artists working in the Middle East today.
- This film, shot in 1955, focuses on a small band of /Gwi San living in the arid landscape of the central Kalahari Desert in present-day Botswana.
- Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Jr. explores the complex relationships between humans, plants, animals, and ceremonies and the cycles of the earth, sun and moon within the universe from a Hopi, Maya, and Nahua perspective.
- This is one of the few ethnographic films in which the anthropologist appears as one of the subjects, and as such it is a lively introduction to the nature of fieldwork. Napoleon Chagnon, who lived among the Yanomamö for 36 months over a period of eight years, is shown in various roles as "fieldworker": entering a village armed with arrows and adorned with feathers; sharing coffee with the shaman Dedeheiwa who recounts the myth of fire; dispensing eyedrops to a baby and accepting in turn a shaman's cure for his own illness; collecting voluminous genealogies; making tapes, maps, Polaroid photos; and attempting to analyze such patterns as village fission, migration, and aggression. The commentary touches on the problems of the fieldworker (all the genealogies compiled in the first year were based on false data, and had to be discarded). Between the image and the commentary we also glimpse some of the ambiguities of the anthropologist's role and his relation to the subjects of his study, for example in the tension between mutual exploitation and reciprocity. The film complements Chagnon's book on his fieldwork, Studying the Yanomamö.
- The hopes, fears, and aspirations of adolescence are expressed in the close friendship of two Afghan boys, Naim and Jabar, in the Balkh Province in northern Afghanistan.
- For generations, Patua (Chitrakar) communities of West Bengal, India have been painters and singers of stories depicted in scrolls. In the past they used to receive food or money for their recital of Muslim and Hindu stories and folk myths. Unfortunately, competition from other media significantly eroded this way of life. In response to this cultural crisis and as a way to make extra money, a group of women from Naya formed a scroll painters' collaborative. They candidly discuss issues of Islam and birth control, victimization of women, female education, poverty and work, religious tolerance and intolerance, and depict some of these ideas in the scrolls. Their stories attest to what it means to be a woman in Bengal and India today, demonstrating how a small group of determined women can empower themselves by adapting an ancient art to new conditions.