Albert and David Maysles, pioneers in the cinéma vérité movement of documentary filmmaking, chose for their subjects of this film a mother and daughter with celebrity connections. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edie (or, as they are called by the brothers, Big Edie and Little Edie), are aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In ...
The first feature-length effort by documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Brother's Keeper unfolds a strange-but-true story about a most unorthodox family. 59-year-old Delbert Ward lives with his brothers Bill, Roscoe, and Lyman on a dairy farm near the upstate New York village of Munnville. Barely able to function on an adult ...
In 1972, 18-year-old Mark Moskowitz read a positive review in the New York Times Book Review that inspired him to get a copy of Dow Mossman's novel, The Stones of Summer. An avid reader, Moskowitz found himself unable to get through the book, and set it aside after 20 pages. Twenty-five years later, he finally picked it up again, this time reading ...
Arnold and Elaine Friedman were a seemingly typical couple living in Great Neck, NY, in the 1980s. Arnold was an outgoing and well-liked schoolteacher with an interest in electronics who also ran a private computer school out of their home. Elaine, a reserved but caring woman, helped look after the couple's three sons, Jesse, Seth, and David. All ...
In 1964, England's Granada Television produced a documentary called 7 Up, in which 14 seven-year-old British children from a wide variety of social and economic backgrounds were interviewed about their ideas and opinions on the adult world. In 1971, director Michael Apted tracked down the same youngsters for a follow-up, 7 Plus 7. Since then, ...
An informative and emotionally involving portrait of an important subculture, Sound and Fury allows us a glimpse inside the world of the deaf community, while dealing with a controversial operation that some people in that community are resisting. Cochlear ear implants have allowed many deaf people to hear and learn to speak, but many in the deaf ...
So well-regarded was the documentary Crumb (1994) that the failure of it and of the same year's equally acclaimed Hoop Dreams (1994) to result in Oscar nominations caused a media furor which forced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revamp its documentary nomination process. Robert Crumb is a respected but controversial underground ...
Comedian Eddie Griffin delivers a set of his outrageous standup comedy and introduces his fans to the family who helped inspire his work in this documentary. In DysFunKtional Family, Griffin talks about race, sex, cats, dogs, slavery, terrorism, Michael Jackson, and several of the more eccentric members of his family during a sold-out live show. ...
This award-winning documentary reunites six Jewish friends who grew up in the same Brighton Beach neighborhood. The reunion brings forth nostalgic memories of the friends' carefree childhood days of the 1950s and their festive teen years during the '60s, but often grows dark and grim when talk of Vietnam, drugs, and broken dreams dominates the ...
Susan Tom of Fairfield, CA, is not a typical single mother -- Tom is the head of a family of 11 adopted children, all of whom are physically challenged or living with long-term illnesses. Tom and her special family are the subject of My Flesh and Blood, a documentary which examines the dynamic of this household, as well as the often demanding ...
When documentary filmmaker Doug Block's mother dies unexpectedly and his eighty-three year old father reveals plans to move to Florida with his one-time secretary shortly thereafter, the confused son travels to his childhood time to seek out the secrets of his parent's presumably happy fifty-five year marriage in a film that explores just what ...
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris' debut immediately attracted acclaim for its straight-faced treatment of a subject practically begging for ridicule. When the Foothill Memorial Gardens pet cemetery, located north of San Francisco, closed (its land was sold for a housing project), the 450 animals interred there had to be moved to Bubbling Well ...
One man's lifelong quest for a restful night of sleep is explored as filmmaker Alan Berliner turns the camera on himself to explore the effects that insomnia has on a man who just can't seem to slow his mind down. Berliner is a man who has fallen victim to his own restless conscience. From as far back as he can remember sleep has been an elusive ...
When photographer and commercial director Sam Jones began plans to make I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, he envisioned a long-form rock video about the making of a Wilco album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But right from the start, it seemed that Jones was destined to make a documentary about an extremely tumultuous period in the band's existence. The ...
Filmmaker Michael Apted returns to the director's chair to catch up with the subjects he has been following since the 1963 telefilm 7 Up with this sequel to 1999's 42 Up. In the seventh installment of the long-running documentary series, Apted continues to follow the lives of everyone from aspiring jockey and part-time actor Tony to teacher Bruce ...
In 1969, the Stonewall riots in New York City sounded the opening bell of the Gay Pride movement in America, and for many gay men it offered an opportunity to come out of the closet and live their lives in the open for the first time. As the gay community sought to define itself, it's not surprising that sex, once furtive and approached with no ...
Two survivors of WWII atrocities meet in Fighter, an emotional road-trip documentary from director Amir Bar-Lev. The film follows friends Jan Wiener and Arnost Lustig as they journey from Prague to Italy -- the exact path that Wiener used to escape from a Nazi labor camp. Lustig is an author who seeks to write about his friend Wiener's experiences ...
Follow tennis-playing sister act Venus and Serina Wiliams as they rise from humble beginnings to take the courts of Wimbledon by storm in this inspirational story of that tracks their success from the streets of Compton to the cover of Sports Illustrated. Coached by their father, this hardworking duo went pro at the tender age of fourteen and was ...
An entire century flashes before the eyes of filmmaker Alex Halpern's centenarian grandmother in a standout documentary filmed to trace the remarkable life of Brooklyn-born, Sicilian-American matriarch Mary Mirabito Livornese Cavaliere (aka "Nana"). When Cavaliere was but a mere child, a gypsy once prophesized that she would live to be ninety-six ...
Adapted from stories that appeared in the best selling book series, Chicken Soup for the Soul Live!, Vol. 2: Parenting - Learning and Teaching features a selection of inspiring tales about passing on knowledge to others. The stories, presented by writers Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield, include I Am a Teacher, Will You, Daddy?, If I Had My ...
To say the working relationship between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski was often stormy strains the boundaries of understatement. Kinski's tirades against Herzog are the stuff of legend -- Kinski's scabrous autobiography All I Need is Love features a number of venomous rants against the director far too foul to recount here, while ...
Ramblin' Jack Elliott, a self-styled folk musician, was an important transitional figure between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. This documentary serves as both a chronicle of his colorful life and an attempt by his daughter, director Aiyanna Elliott, to reconnect with her often-absent father. Born Elliott Adnopoz in Brooklyn, Jack ran off as a ...
A man must reconcile his religion with a need for justice and closure in this documentary. Tony Comes was a firefighter living in Toledo, OH, with his wife and children. While Comes was a solid family man and had the respect of his fellow firemen, he was hiding a secret that had been haunting him for almost 20 years -- when he was 14 years old, ...
Sam Cagnina and Steven Margolin first met when they were classmates in college; the two were studying similar fields (Sam was interested in massage therapy while Steven wanted to become a chiropractor), and as their fascination with one another grew, they discovered they were both bisexual. Sam and Steve developed a committed relationship that ...
Film scholar Robb Moss combines home-movie footage from the '70s with current documentary interviews to fashion this intimate memoir of his summer-of-love friends, then and now. The Same River Twice chronicles the lives of Moss and five of his friends, all of whom served as white-water rafting tour guides while in their twenties. In that era, ...
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