Sister Aimee

At the peak of her immense popularity in the 1920s, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was drawing larger crowds to her revivals than those of P.T. Barnum or Harry Houdini. This chapter of "American Experience" paints a vivid portrait of the controversial and charismatic religious figure. Credited with mainstreaming religion in American culture, Sister Aimee created one of the country's first Christian radio stations, among other accomplishments.

The Beaches of Agnès

Filmmaking icon Agnès Varda, the award-winning director regarded by many as the grandmother of the French new wave, turns the camera on herself with this unique autobiographical documentary. Composed of film excerpts and elaborate dramatic re-creations, Varda's self-portrait recounts the highs and lows of her professional career, the many friendships that affected her life and her longtime marriage to cinematic giant Jacques Demy.

Promises

Documentarians Justine Shapiro and B.Z. Goldberg traveled to Israel to interview Palestinian and Israeli kids ages 11 to 13, assembling their views on living in a society afflicted with violence, separatism and religious and political extremism. This 2002 Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary culminates in an astonishing day in which two Israeli children meet Palestinian youngsters at a refugee camp.

Vive La France

Kua and Teriki will soon get married. They live on the distant Tureia island in the French Polynesia, Pacific Ocean and have just been told that something is wrong with their son Maokis heart. It is a consequence of living only 100 km away from the island of Moruroa, where France has tested 193 atom bombs for 30 years. Several of their family members are sick and Moruroa can soon collapse, which can lead to a tsunami likely to drown all of them. Vive La France is a personal and intimate story about harvesting the consequences of the French atomic program.

Yulu

The film uses a documentary approach to tell the stories of 12 Chinese pioneers, chosen from the fields of business and the arts. The protagonists reflect upon their life journeys against the backdrop of modern China.

Letter from a Yellow Cherry Blossom

Naomi Kawase's documentary about Nishii Kazuo, a photo critic. He is the last chief editor for the Camera Mainichi magazine, rushing through his time with Araki Nobuyoshi and Moriyama Daido as provocative artists in the photograph world.

Bastards: Outcast in Morocco

At 14 Rabha El Haimer was an illiterate child bride, beaten, raped and then rejected. Ten years later, she is a single mother, fighting to legalise her sham marriage and secure a future for her illegitimate daughter. With unprecedented access to the Moroccan justice system, “Bastards” follows Rabha’s fight from the Casablanca slums to the high courts.

Mabel

Feisty, fiercely independent and firmly rooted in place, 90 year-old Mabel Robinson broke barriers back in the 40s when she became the first woman in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, to launch her own business—a hairdressing salon where she still provides shampoo-n-sets over 70 years later. Weaving animation and archival imagery with intimate and laugh out loud moments in the salon, the film celebrates the power of friendship, doing what you love and staying active. With no desire to retire anytime soon, Mabel gives voice to a generation who are not front and center of cinema or the pop hairstyles of the day, and subtly shifts the lens on our perception of beauty and the elderly.

Nana

Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life & Times of Katrina Gilbert

This is the story of a year in the life of one mother whose daily struggles illuminate the challenges faced by more than 42 million American women and the 28 million children who depend on them.

The Hooping Life

Learn the origins and rise of modern day hula-hooping through eight extraordinary stories of hoop devotees who have embraced it as an art form, a teaching aid, and even an instrument of redemption. From the streets, to intimate clubs, to giant arenas, we alternate between self-filmed video diaries, verité documentary footage, and spectacularly filmed performances in an attempt to celebrate the healing power of movement and the spirit of human inventiveness.

When the Mountains Tremble

A documentary on the war between the Guatemalan military and the Mayan population, with first hand accounts by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú.

We

An urban train link, the RER B, crosses Paris and its outskirts from north to south. A journey within indistinct spaces known as inner cities and suburbs. Several portraits, all individual pieces that form a whole. We.

The Cult Next Door

In 2013, three women emerged from a flat in Brixton. They had been held there for decades by Aravindan Balakrishnan, a revolutionary Maoist who controlled the women with brainwashing techniques and tales of a sinister, world-controlling machine he called 'Jackie'.

10 + 4 (Dah be alaveh chahar)

After casting painter and video artist Mania Akbari as the central figure of his groundbreaking Ten (2002), and then witnessing her outstanding debut as a feature film director in 20 Fingers (2004), Abbas Kiarostami urged her to direct a sequel to the film. In Dah be alaveh Chahar (10 + 4), though, circumstances are different: Mania is fighting cancer. She has undergone surgery; she has lost her hair following chemotherapy and no longer wears the compulsory headscarf; and sometimes she is too weak to drive. So the camera follows her to record conversations with friends and family in different spaces, from the gondola she had famously used in her first feature to a hospital bed.

Crimes of Honour

Throughout the Islamic world, each year hundreds of women are shot, stabbed, strangled or burned to death by male relatives because they are thought to have “dishonoured” their families. They may have lost their virginity, refused an arranged marriage or left an abusive husband. Even if a woman is raped or merely the victim of gossip, she must pay the price. Crimes of Honour documents the terrible reality of femicide – the belief that a girl’s body is the property of the family, and any suggestion of sexual impropriety must be cleansed with her blood. We meet women in hiding from their families, a brother who describes his reasons for killing the sister he loved, and a handful of women who have committed themselves to the protection of young women in danger of losing their lives.

Bachiranun

On Yonaguni Island, the westernmost island of Japan, there is a language in danger of disappearing. How far can we take the language, culture and history that are being quietly forgotten at the edge of Japan? A semi-documentary fantasy full of life force.

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations

Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.

Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business

A biography of the Portuguese-born Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda, whose most distinctive feature was her tutti-frutti hat. From her arrival in the US as the "Brazilian Bombshell" to her Broadway career and Hollywood stardom in the 1940s.

Pennhurst

Segregation, abandonment, and the meaning of home are discussed by the people that lived in, worked at, and crusaded for one of the largest and oldest Intellectual and Developmental Disability Institutions in the United States. The facility, in its closing, challenged society's perception of those with intellectual disabilities and ultimately fought for better rights.

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.

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.

To Be Takei

Over seven decades, actor and activist George Takei journeyed from a World War II internment camp to the helm of the Starship Enterprise, and then to the daily news feeds of five million Facebook fans. Join George and his husband, Brad, on a wacky and profound trek for life, liberty, and love.

Fuck

A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.

The Crash Reel

The Crash Reel tells the story of a sport and the risks that athletes face in reaching the pinnacle of their profession. This is Kevin Pearce’s story, a celebrated snowboarder who sustained a brain injury in a trick gone wrong and who now aims, against all the odds, to get back on the snow.

Love, Gilda

Diaries, audiotapes, videotapes and testimonials from friends and colleagues offer insight into the life and career of Gilda Radner -- the beloved comic and actress who became an icon on Saturday Night Live.

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.

In the Realms of the Unreal

In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing

Documentary about the art of film editing. Clips are shown from many groundbreaking films with innovative editing styles.

Feminists: What Were They Thinking?

In 1977, a book of photographs captured an awakening - women shedding the cultural restrictions of their childhoods and embracing their full humanity. This documentary revisits those photos, those women and those times and takes aim at our culture today that alarmingly shows the need for continued change.

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.

Deliver Us from Evil

Documentary filmmaker Amy Berg investigates the life of 30-year pedophile Father Oliver O'Grady and exposes the corruption inside the Catholic Church that allowed him to abuse countless children. Victims' stories and a disturbing interview with O'Grady offer a view into the troubled mind of the spiritual leader who moved from parish to parish gaining trust ... all the while betraying so many.

Halftime

Global superstar Jennifer Lopez reflects on her multifaceted career and the pressure of life in the spotlight in this intimate documentary.

I Am Ali

Unprecedented access to Muhammad Ali's personal archive of "audio journals" as well as interviews and testimonials from his inner circle of family and friends are used to tell the legend's life story.

Naqoyqatsi

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

Sidney

This revealing documentary honors the legendary Sidney Poitier—iconic actor, filmmaker, and civil rights activist. Featuring interviews with Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, Halle Berry, and more.

The Curious Birth of Benjamin Button

A documentary about the making of David Fincher's 2008 film THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. Virtually every element in the evolution of the Fincher's film is documented here, from the project's attachment to numerous other directors during the 1990s, to its shoot in 2006 and 2007 in New Orleans, to its complex, CGI-intensive postproduction process.

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me

From the heights of her modeling fame to her tragic death, this documentary reveals Anna Nicole Smith through the eyes of the people closest to her.

The Walking Dead: The Return

Stars of "The Walking Dead," Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira, walk down memory lane and visit iconic locations where pivotal moments between their characters, Rick and Michonne, were filmed.