One woman's campaign against extremism in her West Virginia mosque throws the community into turmoil, raising questions that cut to the heart of American Islam.
Social & External
The people behind it
Asra Q. Nomani
Herself
For several decades, gifted and incredibly prolific forger Mark Landis compulsively created impeccable copies of works by a variety of major artists, donating them to institutions across the country and landing pieces on many of their walls. ART AND CRAFT brings us into the cluttered and insular life of an unforgettable character just as he finds his foil in an equally obsessive art registrar.
Fighting to reunite with their children, 'Tough Love' chronicles the lives of two parents with cases in the United States child welfare system as they attempt to prove to the courts and the system that they deserve a second chance to be a parent and have a family.
War is Hell. Why would anyone want to spend their weekends there? Deep in the Oregon woods, the heat of a reenacted Vietnam battle sheds light on America's complicated relationship with war and its veterans.
Shut Up and Sing is a documentary about the country band from Texas called the Dixie Chicks and how one tiny comment against President Bush dropped their number one hit off the charts and caused fans to hate them, destroy their CD’s, and protest at their concerts. A film about freedom of speech gone out of control and the three girls lives that were forever changed by a small anti-Bush comment
The '40s and '50s were a classic period in New York City nightlife, when the saloonkeeper was king and regular folks could drink with celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason. In this documentary, Kristi Jacobson profiles her grandfather, the king of kings: Toots Shor of the eponymous restaurant and saloon, which was once the place to be seen in Manhattan. Edward R. Murrow called Toots Shor the owner of America’s greatest saloon. He became the unlikely den-mother to the heroes of America's golden age. Politicians and gangsters, sports heroes and movie stars - Sinatra, Gleason, DiMaggio, Ruth, Costello, Eisenhower, Nixon, Warren - for 30 years, they all found their way to Toots' eponymous saloon on New York's West 51st Street.
Iverson is the ultimate legacy of NBA legend Allen Iverson, who rose from a childhood of crushing poverty in Hampton, Virginia, to become an 11-time NBA All-Star and universally recognized icon of his sport. Off the court, his audacious rejection of conservative NBA convention and unapologetic embrace of hip hop culture sent shockwaves throughout the league and influenced an entire generation. Told largely in Iverson's own words, the film charts the career highs and lows of one of the most distinctive and accomplished figures the sport of basketball has ever seen.
Acclaimed Montreal band Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra is one of a growing number of rock groups to have accepted an infant into their touring tribe. Touring with children is both costly and complicated, yet SMZ are determined to combine family life and being on the road with the band's deep political commitment.
Carole Laganière dives deeply into personal territory in this beautifully crafted exploration of absence and loss and its painful effect on daily lives. Inspired by her mother’s steadily advancing Alzheimer’s and the inevitability of her estrangement, Laganière weaves their story with the stories of others wrestling with loss: Ines, an immigrant who returns to her birth country of Croatia to find the mother who abandoned her during the war; Deni, an American author who’s finally able to search for his Quebec roots; and Nathalie, who’s desperately looking for her missing sister. Through their experiences the film ponders how absence is often the catalyst for a quest—a quest for information, understanding and often acceptance. Through its many voices, Absences speaks to us of the immense fragility and resiliency of human emotions.
A comic, biting and revelatory documentary following a small group of prankster activists as they gain worldwide notoriety for impersonating the World Trade Organization (WTO) on television and at business conferences around the world.
As a sci-fi obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realized far before its time. Three decades on, the musician – now Glenn Copeland – began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered.
Lisbon's lost and found items.
THE ARYANS is Mo Asumang's personal journey into the madness of racism during which she meets German neo-Nazis, the US leading racist, the notorious Tom Metzger and Ku Klux Klan members in the alarming twilight of the Midwest. In The ARYANS Mo questions the completely wrong interpretation of "Aryanism" - a phenomenon of the tall, blond and blue-eyed master race.
When confronted with their lingerie factory (Starissima) going bankrupt, the employees attempt to take it over by forming a cooperative. Soon questions about fundamental economic and social issues pop up amidst the bras and panties. Through this adventure together they discover a new freedom.
Year after year, just after the monsoon season has finished, thousands of families travel to a bleak desert in Gujerat, India, where they will stay for an endless eight months and extract salt from the earth, using the same painstaking, manual techniques as generations before them. Director Farida Pacha spent a season with one of these families, observing the very particular rhythms of their lives.
Through previously undiscovered private letters, photos and diaries that were found in the Himmler family house in 1945, the "The Decent One" exposes a unique and at times uncomfortable access to the life and mind of the merciless "Architect of the Final Solution" Heinrich Himmler.
The first uncensored documentary about the Soviet Union ever made by an outsider. The film takes viewers to 12 of the 15 states of the former USSR.
A child who just loved to skate from the age of eight, Poppy Starr Olsen became the number one female bowl skater in Australia at 14 and went on to take out bronze at the XGames at 17 - the ultimate competition in the world of skateboarding. The same year, skateboarding was announced as an official additional sport category at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Now faced with the opportunity to represent Australia on the world stage Poppy grapples with the transition from skater to athlete and the pressure of competition mounts in a way it has never done before.
Six blind Tibetan teenagers climb the Lhakpa-Ri peak of Mount Everest, led by seven-summit blind mountain-climber Erik Weihenmayer.
A research-based essay film, but also a very personal perspective on the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its dramatic end, and its recent transformation into a few democratic nation states.
On the evening of April 30, 1971, a standing room only audience of local literati and feminists packed New York City’s Town Hall to watch Norman Mailer, who had just written “The Prisoner of Sex,” grapple with a panel of passionate feminists. The subject was Women’s Liberation, an issue on which Mailer seemed like the devil’s own advocate.
Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother and her beloved dog.
An impressionistic portrait of the iconic actor Harry Dean Stanton comprised of intimate moments, film clips from some of his 250 films and his renditions of American folk songs.
In 1977, a book of photographs captured an awakening - women shedding the cultural restrictions of their childhoods and embracing their full humanity. This documentary revisits those photos, those women and those times and takes aim at our culture today that alarmingly shows the need for continued change.
Using the book 'Fragments', which collects Marilyn Monroe's poems, notes and letters, and with participation from the Arthur Miller and Truman Capote estates who have contributed more material, each of the actresses will embody the legend at various stages in her life.
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.
Life Is But a Dream is a HBO documentary about the life of US singer Beyoncé Knowles during the years 2011 and 2012 and on the recording of her fifth album. The film was directed by Beyoncé herself. The film shows Beyoncé from intimate moments of her pregnancy to behind the scenes and rehearsals of the main concerts of that time.
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
Unprecedented access to Muhammad Ali's personal archive of "audio journals" as well as interviews and testimonials from his inner circle of family and friends are used to tell the legend's life story.
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.
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.
Ranjit, a farmer in India, takes on the fight of his life when he demands justice for his 13-year-old daughter, the victim of a brutal gang rape. His decision to support his daughter is virtually unheard of, and his journey unprecedented.
An intimate portrait of Hollywood royalty featuring Debbie Reynolds, Todd Fisher, and Carrie Fisher.
Alex Gibney explores the charged issue of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, following a trail from the first known protest against clerical sexual abuse in the United States and all way to the Vatican.
Girl next door, activist, so-called traitor, fitness tycoon, Oscar winner: Jane Fonda has lived a life of controversy, tragedy and transformation – and she’s done it all in the public eye. An intimate look at one woman’s singular journey.
A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.
A documentary about the life and films of director John Ford.
A documentary on seniors at a high school in a small Indiana town and their various cliques.
A documentary that resurrects the buried history of the outrageous, often brilliant women who founded the modern women's movement from 1966 to 1971.
A 1993 documentary film about Bruce Lee. The film includes interviews from some of his fellow students and opponents who worked alongside him in his movies.
An inside look at one of the most anticipated movie sequels ever with James Cameron and cast.
