Appalachian Journey

Appalachian Journey is one of five films made from footage that Alan Lomax shot between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS American Patchwork series (1991). It offers songs, dances, stories, and religious rituals of the Southern Appalachians. Preachers, singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, cloggers, and square dancers recount the good times and the hard times of rural life there. Performers include Tommy Jarrell, Janette Carter, Ray and Stanley Hicks, Frank Proffitt Jr., Sheila Kay Adams, Nimrod Workman and Phyllis Boyens, Raymond Fairchild, and others, with a bonus of a few African-Americans from the North Carolina Piedmont.

1991-07-19 | en

It's A Mean Old World

By the time "It's A Mean Old World" was filmed, Reverend Pearly Brown had been struggling to survive singing gospel music for nearly 40 years. While the rough sound of his bottleneck playing has the feel of a life spent scuffling on the street, the poignancy of his voice is a better measure of the gentle spirit and inner strength of the man.

1977-01-01 | en

Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison

Pete and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966 and produced this rare document of of work songs by inmates of the Ellis Unit. Worksongs helped African American prisoners survive the grueling work demanded of them. With mechanization and integration, worksongs like these died out shortly after this film was made.

1966-03-01 | en

One Ticket Please

A documentary about a 78-year-old Indian woman in New York who is the world's most passionate theatergoer. Nicki Cochrane has been seeing a play every day for more than 25 years, acquiring free tickets using a variety of ingenious means.

2017-03-13 | en

Psycho Path

Documentary on the making of Gus Van Sant's "Psycho."

2000-02-10 | en

You've Been Trumped Too

A timely film exploring the confrontation between a feisty 92-year-old Scottish widow and her family and a billionaire trying to become the most powerful man in the world.

2016-10-28 | en

Wanda Gosciminska – A Textile Worker

The life of a female weaver is thrown onto the socio-political canvas of pre-war and post-war communist Poland through the use of expressive allegorical and symbolic imagery in this imaginative take on the documentary form.

1975-06-16 | pl

In the Interstices of Reality or The Cinema of António de Macedo

He was the most prolific within the New Portuguese Cinema generation. He would try western spaghetti, esoteric allegory, supernatural, and science-fiction. Without state subsidies, he would quit filmmaking in the 1990s. Who remembers António de Macedo?

2016-10-29 | pt

Tiermythen - Im Auge des Löwen

| de

I against ME

2010-07-31 | de

Wicker Kittens

Every January, the country's largest jigsaw puzzle contest is held in St. Paul, Minnesota. Choose your favorite team and watch them try to put the pieces back together.

2014-03-08 | en

Barbarossa: Hitler Turns East

Hitler's invasion of Russia was one of the landmark events of World War II. This documentary reveals the lead-up to the offensive, its impact on the war and the brinksmanship that resulted from the battle for Moscow. Rare footage from both German and Russian archives and detailed maps illustrate the conflict, while award-winning historian and author John Erickson provides insight into the pivotal maneuvers on the eastern front.

2007-08-06 | hu

Blue Room

Incarcerated participants in a mental health experiment watch videos of sunset-soaked beaches, wildflowers and forests on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and wilderness. Equal parts meditation and provocation, Blue Room identifies the damage done by withholding access to the outdoors and how we are all prisoners when the essential human need for communion with nature is denied.

2022-05-01 | en

Baobab Play

Children and teenagers throw sticks, berries, and leaves at each other from perches in a large baobab tree.

1974-01-01 | en

Dief!

This documentary short is a portrait of Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and 13th prime minister of Canada, John George Diefenbaker (1895-1979). Diefenbaker's political career spanned 6 decades. When he died in 1979, his state funeral and final train trip west became more a celebration of life than a victory for death.

1981-01-01 | en

The British & Irish Lions 2013: Lions Raw

A behind the scenes documentary chronicling the British and Irish Lions' tour of Australia 2013.

2013-10-28 | en

Hidden Universe

An extraordinary journey deep into space offering fresh insight into the origins and evolution of the universe.

2013-06-29 | en

Guys 'N Divas: Battle of the High School Musicals

This fascinating documentary chronicles the intense rivalry between high schools in Southern Indiana to win a prestigious festival performance with lavish student musical productions that often cost in the tens of thousands of dollars to produce.

2009-01-01 | en

Visions of Abolition: From Critical Resistance to a New Way of Life

Weaving together the voices of women entangled in the criminal justice system, along with leading scholars on prison abolition, this film provides a critical analysis of the disfunctionality and violence of the prison system.

2011-01-03 | en

The Condemned

With unprecedented access, this documentary looks into the hidden world of one of Russia's most impenetrable and remote institutions - a maximum security prison exclusively for murderers. Deep inside the land of the gulags, this is the end of the line for some of Russia's most dangerous criminals - 260 men who have collectively killed nearly 800 people. The film delves deep into the mind and soul of some of these prisoners. In brutally frank and uncensored interviews the inmates speak of their crimes, life and death, redemption and remorselessness, insanity and hope. The film tracks them though their unrelenting days over several months, lifting the veil on one of Russia's most secretive subcultures to reveal what happens when a man is locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours every day, for life. A startling insight into inscrutable minds and the forbidding world they have been condemned to. (Storyville)

2013-06-27 | en