This is the first documentary produced and directed by an African-American female filmmaker from inside North Korea. The film idea began at a conference on Korean Re-unification produced by General Colin L. Powell and the Colin Powell Center, where the Director was a Colin Powell Graduate Fellow. Through verite’ footage from inside North Korea, interviews with North Korean refugees, long time aid workers, scholars, and experts on the topic, this...

Amos Gitai (Rabin, The Last Day; Kadosh; Free Zone) returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary Field Diary with this portrait of the citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers, and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics...

In 1992 Professor Richard Davidson, one of the world's leading neuroscientists, met the Dalai Lama, who encouraged him to apply the same rigorous methods he used to study depression and anxiety to the study of compassion and kindness, those qualities cultivated by Tibetan meditation practice. The results of Davidson's studies at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, are portrayed in FREE THE MIND as they...

Featuring unprecedented access to an influential and multi-faceted institution, The Great Museum reveals the inner-workings of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of the most important art institutions in the world. Widely known as the art palace that houses paintings by Rembrandt, Diego Velasquez, Pieter Brueghel, Peter Paul Rubens and Caravaggio, among many other canonical works, the museum also features a remarkable and magnetic group of dedicated...

The screen is a neutral element in the film-going experience. Or is it? It projects dreams but is also the receptacle of our dreams. It’s the vehicle for delivering the image to an audience—but does it also watch the audience at the same time? Is it a complicitous membrane which audience members can penetrate and which interacts with the spectators, despite its seeming passivity? Maybe—to all of the above…

Martin Kosleck and Hans Heinz von Twardowski, two German actors, fleeing the Nazi regime, come to Hollywood to find work. Most of the time they are asked to play Nazi officers and are reminded all the time what they fled from. But you can never escape your accent. In a sense, they are ground up in the Hollywood system. Although they were stars who worked on the stage and in movies in Germany, in Hollywood they were minor character actors, completely...

It was the swinging 30s. The big bands of the 40s. It was San Francisco night life – Baghdad by the Bay. And the crowds were packing the nation’s premiere all-Chinese nightclub, Forbidden City. Like the Cotton Club of Harlem which featured America’s finest African American entertainers, Forbidden City gained an international reputation with its unique showcase of Chinese American performers in eye-popping all-American extravaganzas.FORBIDDEN...

From acclaimed filmmaker Mark Pellington (The Mothman Prophecies) comes a visceral and powerful feature-length dance film. This cathartic movement piece was created in collaboration with the brilliant choreographer Nina McNeely (Gaspar Noe’s Climax), rising Dutch cinematographer Evelin Van Rei, and editor Sergio Pinheiro. Inspired by the Wim Wenders film Pina, Pellington was interested in expressing feelings and emotions through a ‘narrative of...

Features nine gay and lesbian veterans who recount how they joined the patriotic war against fascism in the 1940s only to find themselves fighting two battles: one for their country and another for their right to serve. They first remember warm and entertaining stories of finding each other in a compulsory heterosexual environment and reminisce over tales of first love and deep friendships. Their good times were short-lived, however, as they became...

During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicenter of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community. From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, BLOODSISTERS immerses the viewer in the San Francisco leather dyke scene, shattering assumptions about gender and lesbian sexuality, while broadening the discussion about personal...