Scouts Are Cancelled

Director John Scott crafts this look at the curious life of his longtime friend John Stiles — an aspiring writer and former telephone marketer whose midlife meltdown worked wonders for his career. Stiles was down on his luck working as a telemarketer in Toronto when, one day, he threw out his pre-written script and began speaking to customers in curious character voices inspired by his upbringing in Nova Scotia. That month, Stiles made the most sales of any employee and earned a free DVD player for his efforts. In the following years, Stiles threw caution to the wind, venturing out to local open mic nights — where he developed a substantial cult following — and later publishing a pair of books with Insomniac press.

2007-04-25 | en

CodeSwitching

CodeSwitching is a mash-up of personal stories from three generations of African American students who participated in a landmark voluntary desegregation program. Shuttling between their inner-city Boston neighborhoods and predominantly white suburban schools in pursuit of a better education, they find themselves swapping elements of culture, language, and behavior to fit in with their suburban counterparts – Often acting or speaking differently based on their surroundings, called code-switching.

2019-06-24 | en

Marc Okrand on Klingon

Marc Okrand discusses his involvement with the Star Trek franchise and his work on inventing the Klingon and Vulcan languages.

2002-01-01 | en

Talkers

The three speakers represent two of the dialects, with the most common one - the middle dialect spoken in Riga and central parts of Latvia - not featured in the film. In intimate surroundings, a farmer, a schoolteacher, and a herder of ostriches talk about perceived differences between Latvian speakers, and about language policy and their lives.

2016-11-08 | lv

A vouezh uhel

| fr

At a Traffic Light

We all have a dream... Nelson's dream is to learn how to read. He works at a traffic light in Maputo selling car products to people who stop. Every week a teacher joins him and all the others like him to teach them. With the hope of learning, Nelson never misses a class. It is with the hope of better days that Nelson lives.

2024-05-06 | pt

Do I Sound Gay?

What makes a voice “gay”? A breakup with his boyfriend sets journalist David Thorpe on a quest to unravel a linguistic mystery.

2015-07-10 | en

K'anech'oxdekdiigh: I'm Not Going to Teach You

The collaboration between the Tanacross and Northway, Alaska communities and trained linguistic specialists from the Alaska Native Language Center to keep their native language from disappearing. And the continuation of the tangential community effort of preserving their language and culture by teaching and using them at home and in schools and in their lives.

2006-05-15 | en

Running Fields IV

Twenty-four images of a camera running in the woods, a moonlight and a cemetery through improvised gestures, mechanical abstraction and saturated colors

2024-12-13 | en

Yeah You Rite!

This award winning film is a fast paced, humorous look at the colorful way the residents of New Orleans express themselves - why they talk the way they do, where the words come from, and what it means to talk with a New Orleans accent.

1985-01-20 | en

Anton Habovštiak - Oravským chodníčkom...

1995-01-01 | sk

The Grammar of Happiness

The Grammar Of Happiness follows the story of Daniel Everett among the extraordinary 'nonconvertible' Amazonian Pirah tribe, a group of indigenous hunter- gatherers whose culture and outlook on life has taken the world of linguistics by storm. As a young ambitious missionary three decades ago, Dan, a red-bearded towering American, decamped to the Amazon rain forest to save indigenous souls. His assignment was to translate the book of Mark into the tongue of the Pirah, a people whose puzzling speech seemed unrelated to any other on Earth. What he learned during his time with the Pirah led him to question the very foundations of his own deep beliefs. As a 'born again' atheist, Dan divorced his devout Christian wife and became estranged from his children. Having lost faith and family, his new life is dominated by the desire to leave behind his legacy. Everett's most controversial claim is that the Pirah language lacks 'recursion' - the ability to build an infinite number of sentences.

2012-01-25 | en

Project Nim

From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

2011-07-08 | en

Running Fields III

Twenty images of a camera running next to a chemical platform and capturing abstract light throught improvised gestures and asymmetrical motion

2024-11-29 | en

Omegäng

How is our dialect faring in the globalized age? When the "railroad age" began 160 years ago, Switzerland feared that High German would supplant the dialect. The opposite has happened. The dialect persists and continues to blossom.

2024-01-19 | de

Aranzazú, a memory of ruins

The celebration of a city is held every year and nostalgia is the main guest. Around the city there is nothing but ruins and in the distance, four men walk the streets of a city that was once great.

2012-04-05 | es

Running Fields

Three images of a person running in the void through the movement of speed and abstract images

2024-10-30 | en

Running Fields II

Fifteen images of a camera running in a park and in obscurity searching the space of light through distorsion and the sensory of rapid motion.

2024-11-15 | en

Noam Chomsky: Knowledge and Power

An in-depth look at the work and views of the man described as 'one of the greatest minds in human history'. He first emerged through his pioneering work in linguistics in the 1950s but later became a political activist and a critic of US foreign policy in Vietnam, its neo-liberal capitalism, and mainstream media. Consisting primarily of interviews with Chomsky and other writers, academics, philosophers, social commentators and broadcasters, this film explores the breadth, originality and importance of his work; and the alternative narratives he has advanced at some of the most critical periods in recent history.

2015-10-23 | en

If These Knishes Could Talk: The Story of the NY Accent

The story of the New York accent, as told by New Yorkers.

2013-05-16 | en