Kudos to Janet Pierson, Jarod Neece and their team on this year's slate. Descriptions below, per usual, supplied by the festival.
CITIZEN ARCHITECT: SAMUEL MOCKBEE AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RURAL STUDIO
In Alabama, Samuel Mockbee’s radical
design/build program brought architecture to the rural poor and a new set of
ethics to architecture. His legacy
has inspired a generation of architects dedicated to design for social good. (World Premiere)
A devoted community of artists, volunteers and patrons
transforms a politically subversive little coffee house and restaurant
into a unique American music institution... a small place where big things
happen.
In the 1970's, Kashmere High School band director Conrad Johnson turned
his band into an international funk sensation. Now thirty years later, his
students return to pay tribute to the man who changed their lives. (World Premiere)
When I Rise is the powerful story of Barbara Smith Conrad, a gifted University of Texas music student who becomes a lightning rod for civil rights and ultimately ascends to the heights of international opera. (World Premiere)
In Ain't In It For My Health Levon Helm
finds himself thrust into the musical spotlight for the first time in a quarter
century, but a Grammy nomination and ever-growing audiences force him to
confront the dark times that have haunted him since The Band's demise:
Throat cancer, bankruptcy, drug addiction and the tragic loss of
bandmates Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. Win or lose, Levon is an artist
who will not go quietly into the night.
A documentary that explores the power and long lasting
influence of gospel music. (World Premiere)
A David Byrne concert film that combines riveting onstage
performances with documentary footage that explores the creative collaborations
that make the music happen. (World Premiere)
Ten years in the making, Strange
Powers is an intimate documentary portrait of songwriter Stephin Merritt
and his band The Magnetic Fields. (World Premiere)
Taqwacore: The Birth
of Punk Islam
follows a group of Muslim Punks as they travel across the U.S. and Pakistan,
challenging Muslims and Non-Muslims with their punchy and provocative anthems.
(U.S. Premiere)
The Weird World of
Blowfly tells the
provocative and revealing story of musician Clarence Reid and his alter ego
Blowfly, the original dirty rapper. The film follows Blowfly as he tours the
world, explores his 50-year career, and celebrates his influential and
incendiary work as a music legend. (World Premiere)
The love between the American burlesque stripper Teri Lee
Geary (aka Kitten DeVille) and her punk rock singer husband Shawn Geary is
strong but rather complicated. They live in their own time bubble, hers from
the 1950's and his from the 1980's. (U.S. Premiere)
Just how much of our personal information is floating around
in government and corporate databases? Filmmaker David Bond decides to find
out, by disappearing for a month and setting two of the world’s top private investigators
the task of tracking him down, using only publicly available data. (North
American Premiere)
How one little pill changed the course of sexual evolution.
(North American Premiere)
IDFA DocLab (Netherlands)
A curated program of new media and web documentary from the
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam's DocLab, bridging
the gap between filmmakers and interactive storytellers.
Against a harsh environment of constant danger and toxic gases, workers here at the world's largest ship breaking yard in Bangladesh, risk their lives to feed their family on barely 2USD per day. (North American Premiere)
LIKE A PASCHA / SOM EN PASCHA (Sweden)
Welcome to the biggest brothel in Europe, a clear blue eleven story high
house in the middle of Cologne, Germany. Around 200 women from all over the
world work here. If you ask them why, they will tell you it’s the way it’s always
been. Svante Tidholm filmed at
Pascha for more than three years, looking for an answer to the eternal
question: why are men so obsessed with sex? (North American Premiere)
The Living Room of the
Nation opens a
portrait-like view into six Finnish living rooms. A collage of everyday events
the film is a story of changes, loneliness, responsibilities and the
unavoidable passing of time.
Being arrested for murder, two brothers exist between modern
township life, gangsterism and ancient African culture. (North American
Premiere)
A documentary about time which explores its physical
quantity as well as its crucial impact on our actions, behavior, perception,
social rituals and our outlook on the world. (North American Premiere)
The heart-wrenching story of a man who happened to be in the
wrong place, at the wrong time. Through his struggle to regain freedom, two
lawyers document the system’s contradictions. (U.S. Premiere)
Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond takes an entertaining and
insightful look at the Hollywood Indian, exploring the portrayal of North
American Natives through a century of cinema. (North American Premiere)
AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE is an
intimate portrait of master monologist Spalding Gray, as described by his most
critical, irreverent and insightful biographer: Spalding Gray. The film pulls
from some 90 hours of material to fashion a new narrative exploring, among
other things, art-making, mental illness and the sometimes thin line between
the two.
In India, the latest form of outsourcing is surrogate
mothers who carry embryos for couples who can’t have a child. Director Zippi
Brand Frank follows an entrepreneur who proposes a new service – baby
production for western customers. (U.S. Premiere)
Seventy Irish women offer moving insights into the relationships between women and men.
HOW TO FOLD A FLAG
Directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein
We were asked to believe that the war was over. We laughed,
for we were the war.
Directed by Tamra Davis
An intimate portrait of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and
the downtown New York scene, as told by his friend filmmaker Tamra Davis.
Getting a train ticket in China proves a towering ordeal as a
migrant worker family embarks on a journey, along with 200 million other
peasants, to reunite with their distant family.
More than an examination of new technology, the film is
foremost an intimate, character-based drama about people whose lives are
dramatically transformed by the virtual world called Second Life.
Directed by Laura Poitras
Filmed in Yemen, The Oath tells the story of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, and Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay Prison who is the first man to face the controversial military tribunals at Guantanamo.
THE RED CHAPEL / DET RØDE KAPEL (Denmark)
Directed by Mads Brügger
A journalist with no scruples, a self-proclaimed spastic,
and a comedian travel to North Korea under the guise of a cultural exchange
visit to challenge one of the world’s most notorious regimes.
Directed by Michel Gondry
Michel Gondry’s newest film, further propels his groundbreaking filmography into the realm of the unvisited with a personal look at the life of Gondry family matriarch, his aunt Suzette Gondry, and her relationship with her son, Jean-Yves. Michel examines Suzette’s years as a schoolteacher and her life in rural France. During the course of filming the documentary, new family stories are unearthed and Michel uses his camera to explore them in a subtle and sensitive way.
Comments