Golden Blood: The Frontiers of Greed

Two best friends, Clint and Lenny, set out to pan for gold during the California Gold Rush. They have a stroke of luck and find a significant amount of gold in their pans. As they continue to pan, Clint becomes increasingly fixated on finding more and more gold, to the point where he becomes ruthless and starts to turn on Lenny. Lenny tries to remind Clint of the importance of their friendship and the values they once held, but Clint's greed continues to consume him. Eventually, their friendship is put to the test as Clint's behavior becomes increasingly dangerous and erratic. Will the gold be the end of their friendship, or will Lenny be able to save his friend from the destructive power of greed?

This May Be the Last Time

Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo's Grandfather disappeared mysteriously in 1962. The community searching for him sang songs of encouragement that were passed down for generations. Harjo explores the origins of these songs as well as the violent history of his people.

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness

Follows the behind-the-scenes work of Studio Ghibli, focusing on the notable figures Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki.

The Medicine of Forgiveness

Benito Arévalo is an onaya: a traditional healer in a Shipibo-Konibo community in Peruvian Amazonia. He explains something of the onaya tradition, and how he came to drink the plant medicine ayahuasca under his father's tutelage. Arévalo leads an ayahuasca ceremony for Westerners, and shares with us something of his understanding of the plants and the onaya tradition.

Voices That Heal

Herlinda Augustin is a Shipibo healer who lives with her family in Peruvian Amazonia. Will she and other healers be able to maintain their ancient tradition despite Western encroachment?

Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana

Florida, 1994. Artist Mike Diana is convicted on an obscenity charge in the wake of an undercover police officer purchasing his limited edition zine Boiled Angel. Here is the very unusual story of what led to this First Amendment debacle happening for the first time in the United States.

Your Day Is My Night

Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.

Takeda

Takeda is a film about the universality of the human being seen thru the eyes of a Japanese painter that has adopted the Mexican culture.

Revolution: New Art for a New World

Drawing on the collections of major Russian institutions, contributions from contemporary artists, curators and performers and personal testimony from the descendants of those involved, the film brings the artists of the Russian Avant-Garde to life. It tells the stories of artists like Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich - pioneers who flourished in response to the challenge of building a new art for a new world, only to be broken by implacable authority after 15 short years and silenced by Stalin's Socialist Realism.

The New Modernists: Folds Blobs + Boxes, Architecture in the Digital Era

The New Modernists: Folds, Blobs and Boxes, Architecture in the Digital Era approaches the topic of artistic technological advances, and the modern architects who were educated with this new influx of electronic techniques. In this detailed portrait we visit the exhibition entitled Folds, Blobs + Boxes at the Carnegie Museum of Art where ten architect/designers discuss their approaches to digital architecture with curator of the exhibition, Joseph Rosa. By abandoning the traditional notions of aesthetic beauty, scale and proportion, a new freedom has formed amongst these contemporary creators.

INAATE/SE/

INAATE/SE/ re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.

Recapturing Cuba: An Artist's Journey

After fleeing Cuba with his family when he was 7, Dallas artist Rolando Diaz returns to Havana to revisit his old neighborhood and learn more about the contemporary art scene in the city.

American Interior

Two men. Two quests. Two centuries apart. Four ways to experience the search for a lost tribe. Film. Book. Album. App.

Bozarts

Two Spirits

Fred Martinez was a Navajo youth slain at the age of 16 by a man who bragged to his friends that he 'bug-smashed a fag'. But Fred was part of an honored Navajo tradition - the 'nadleeh', or 'two-spirit', who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits.

The Mona Lisa Curse

The Mona Lisa Curse is a Grierson award-winning polemic documentary by art critic Robert Hughes that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. With his trademark style, Hughes explores how museums, the production of art and the way we experience it have radically changed in the last 50 years, telling the story of the rise of contemporary art and looking back over a life spent talking and writing about the art he loves, and loathes. In these postmodern days it has been said that there is no more passé a vocation than that of the professional art critic. Perceived as the gate keeper for opinions regarding art and culture, the art critic has supposedly been rendered obsolete by an ever expanding pluralism in the art world, where all practices and disciplines are purported to be equal and valid. Robert Hughes, however, is one art critic who has delivered a message that must not be ignored.

Madeleine

A stop motion/collaged based independent short film plays with the recontextualisation of memories and how time distorts them.

Marion ou la métamorphose

Marion is an artist with FSH, an incurable muscular myopathy. She guides us on the path she has taken to no longer identify with her illness.

The Hole’s Journey

A worn-out floor, the hole underneath, a political activist, and the Ouled Sbita tribe are the protagonists in this political satire. For 23 years, the director’s chair at an international art institute scratched the wooden floor. This 102cm x 120cm floor section is cut out and sent to an expropriated piece of land in Morocco. In The Hole’s Journey, Ghita Skali uses sharp wit, personal stories and playful editing to touch on specific power dynamics and freedom of choice.

Kinetics

Art in glorious motion. Bright, colourful and often intensely dynamic, the 1970 'Kinetics' show at London's Hayward Gallery was a major international showcase of the new active sculptural art. Works by Jean Tinguely, Nam June Paik, Peter Logan, Takis, Jesus Raphael Soto and many others dazzled a wide-eyed public. This priceless film record of the show captures a kaleidoscope of neon lights, rotating metal, squirting water and stroboscopic projections. Director Lutz Becker, of the Slade School of Art Film Unit - who would go on to direct Double-Headed Eagle (1973), a documentary account of Hitler's rise to power - uses a variety of textural, electronic sounds (courtesy of Peter Sahla) to evoke the unusual experience. The show was enormously popular, with visitors filling out the gallery day after day.

Baraka

A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life.

Girl Rising

Nine filmmakers each profile a young girl from a different part of the world to weave a global tapestry of youth in the 21st century.

Naqoyqatsi

A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.

Ex Libris: The New York Public Library

A documentary about how a dominant cultural and demographic institution both sustains their traditional activities and adapts to the digital revolution.

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction

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.

Powaqqatsi

An exploration of technologically developing nations and the effect the transition to Western-style modernization has had on them.

High School

Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman takes us inside Northeast High School as a fly on the wall to observe the teachers and how they interact with the students.

Love, Marilyn

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.

David Byrne's American Utopia

A filmed version of David Byrne's Broadway show, a unifying musical celebration that inspires audiences to connect to each other and to the global community.

Cameraperson

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.

Elstree 1976

A documentary about ten very different lives connected by having appeared onscreen wearing masks or helmets in Star Wars.

Above Majestic

A look at the origins, history and conspiracies behind the "Majestic 12", a clandestine group of military and corporate figureheads charged with reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.

I Am Heath Ledger

The life and career of an actor, artist, and icon. His own journey through his own camera.

Heart of a Dog

Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon

A documentary on the life of John Lennon, with a focus on the time in his life when he transformed from a musician into an antiwar activist.

Live Aid

Live Aid was held on 13 July 1985, simultaneously in Wembley Stadium in London, England, and the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, United States. It was one of the largest scale satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time: watched live by an estimated global audience of 1.9 billion, across 150 nations. "It's twelve noon in London, seven AM in Philadelphia, and around the world it's time for Live Aid...!"

A Plastic Ocean

A documentary focused on plastic pollution in the world's oceans.

Nothing Like a Dame

BBC Arena's documentary on the Dames of British Theatre and film featuring Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Joan Plowright on screen together for the first time as they reminisce over a long summer weekend in a house Joan once shared with Sir Laurence Olivier.

My Mom Jayne

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.

Wormwood

In this genre-bending tale, Errol Morris explores the mysterious death of a U.S. scientist entangled in a secret Cold War program known as MK-Ultra.