Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 88
Language: English
Director: Lorenz Knauer
Plot: Jane’s Journey movie trailer – starring Jane Goodall, Angelina Jolie, Kofi Annan. Directed by Lorenz Knauer. Theatrical Release Date: 9/16/2011
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Not Rated
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 150
Language: English
Director: Michael Parfit
Plot: Set on the rugged western coast of Vancouver Island, THE WHALE describes what happens when Luna, a baby orca, gets separated from his family and unexpectedly starts making contact with people along a scenic fjord called Nootka Sound. Because orcas are highly social creatures who spend their lives traveling with their pods, Luna attempts to find a surrogate family among the area residents, much to their delight. But as word spreads about Luna, people become torn between their love for the lonely young whale and fears that human contact might harm him.
Luna’s saga is seen through the eyes of the colorful characters who live and work along the Sound and who fall in love with the whale — including a cook on an old freighter, a fisheries officer conflicted by what he thinks Luna needs and what he is told to do, a grandmother who is arrested for petting Luna, and a Native American elder whose tribe believes Luna is the reincarnation of a chief.
The film also describes how Parfit and Chisholm themselves, who first went to Nootka Sound on assignment for Smithsonian, grow so concerned about Luna’s fate that they get involved in trying to help him, crossing the traditional line between journalist and subject and becoming characters in the very story they are telling. Their efforts to find ways to safely give Luna the attention he seems so determined to get are a major part of the film’s climax.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 169
Language:
Director: Pamela Yates
Plot: Sometimes a film makes history; it doesn’t just document it. So it is with “Granito: How to Nail a Dictator”, the astonishing new film by Pamela Yates. Part political thriller, part memoir, Yates transports us back in time through a riveting, haunting tale of genocide and returns to the present with a cast of characters joined by destiny and the quest to bring a malevolent dictator to justice.
In 1982 Yates risked her life making the documentary “When the Mountains Tremble” in Guatemala, in order to bring the hidden story of the massacre of the Mayan people to the attention of the world. She filmed combat missions with both guerrillas and the army, and survived a troop transport helicopter crash to tell the tale. The film didn’t stop the killings, but destiny gave Yates another chance. Her old film and its 16mm out-takes may be the only footage of the Guatemalan genocide, so lawyers building the case against former dictator General RÃos Montt recently asked Yates for her footage as evidence to help convict him.
Now, as if a watchful Maya god were weaving back together threads of a story unraveled by the passage of time, forgotten by most, our characters become integral to the overarching narrative of wrongs done and justice sought that they have pieced together, each adding their granito, their tiny grain of sand, to the epic tale.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 149
Language: English
Director: David Weissman
Plot: WE WERE HERE is the first documentary to take a deep and reflective look back at the impact of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco when it was first identified 30 years ago this year. It explores how the City’s inhabitants were affected by, and responded to the calamitous epidemic. Reaching beyond San Francisco and the human toll of AIDS itself, it inspirationally speaks to the human capacity of individuals to rise to the occasion, and to the incredible collective power of a community coming together with love, compassion, and determination.
WE WERE HERE is directed by David Weissman and Bill Weber, whose 2001 acclaimed documentary, THE COCKETTES, chronicled San Francisco’s legendary theater troupe of hippies and drag queens from 1969 – 1972. WE WERE HERE revisits the city a decade later, as its flourishing gay community is hit with an unimaginable disaster.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 136
Language:
Director: Heather Courtney
Plot: From a snowy small town in Northern Michigan to the mountains of Afghanistan and back, WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM follows the four-year journey of childhood
friends, forever changed by a faraway war.
A documentary about growing up, WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM, is an intimate look at the young men who fight our wars and the families and town they come from.
Returning to her hometown, Director Heather Courtney gains extraordinary access following these young men as they grow and change from teenagers stuck in their
town, to 23-year-old veterans facing the struggles of returning home.
Enticed by a $20,000 signing bonus and the college tuition support, best friends Dominic and Cole join the National Guard after graduating from their rural high school. After persuading several of their friends to join them, the young men are sent to Afghanistan, where they spend their days sweeping for roadside bombs. By the time their deployment ends, they are no longer the carefree group of friends they
were before enlisting; repeated bombs blowing up around their convoys have led to the new silent signature wound of the Afghan war, Traumatic Brain Injury, and they have all become increasingly disillusioned about their mission. The challenges really begin to surface when they return to their families and communities in Michigan and try to fit back into their daily routines. WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM looks beyond the guns and policies of an ongoing war to examine the war’s effect on parents, loved ones and the whole community when young people go off to fight.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 140
Language:
Director: Goran Hugo Olsson
Plot: THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975 mobilizes a treasure trove of 16mm material shot by Swedish journalists who came to the US drawn by stories of urban unrest and revolution. Gaining access to many of the leaders of the Black Power Movement-Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver among them-the filmmakers captured them in intimate moments and remarkably unguarded interviews. Thirty years later, this lush collection was found languishing in the basement of Swedish Television. Director Göran Olsson and co-producer Danny Glover bring this footage to light in a mosaic of images, music and narration chronicling the evolution one of our nation’s most indelible turning points, the Black Power movement. Music by Questlove and Om’Mas Keith, and commentary from prominent African- American artists and activists who were influenced by the struggle – including Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, Talib Kweli, and Melvin Van Peebles – give the historical footage a fresh, contemporary resonance and makes the film an exhilarating, unprecedented account of an American revolution.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 111
Language: English
Director: Jon Foy
Plot: Strangeness is afoot. Most people don’t notice the hundreds of cryptic tiled messages about resurrecting the dead that have been appearing in city streets over the past three decades. But Justin Duerr does. For years, finding an answer to this long-standing urban mystery has been his obsession. He has been collecting clues that the tiler has embedded in the streets of major cities across the U.S. and South America. But as Justin starts piecing together key events of the past he finds a story that is more surreal than he imagined, and one that hits disturbingly close to home.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 108
Language:
Director: Matthew Bate
Plot: The most important audio recording released in the nineties wasn’t a collection of songs by a self-tortured alternative star. The most important recording released in the grunge era was entitled ShUT Up LiTTLE MAn! It was a covert audio recording of two older drunken men living in a small flat in San francisco, who spent their available free time yelling, screaming, hitting and generally abusing each other.
The phenomenon began in 1987 when Eddie and Mitch (two young punks from the Mid West), moved next door to Peter Haskett (a flamboyant gay man), and Raymond Huffman (a raging homophobe). This ultimate odd- couple hated each other with raging abandon, and through the paper-thin walls their alcohol-fueled rants terrorized Eddie and Mitch. Fearing for their lives they began to tape record evidence of the insane goings on from next door.
In recording pete and ray’s unique dialogue, the boys accidentally created one of the world’s first ‘viral’ pop-culture sensations. Their tapes went on to inspire a cult following, spawning sell-out CD’s, comic artworks by Dan Clowes (Ghostworld), stage-plays, music from the likes of Devo and a hollywood feeding frenzy. For the newly famous Eddie and Mitchell, this would be a life-changing experience that would see them ingested into the belly and fired out the orifice of the pop culture beast.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 148
Language:
Director: Jeff Prosserman
Plot: Chasing Madoff is the compelling story of Harry Markopolos and his team of investigator’s ten-year struggle to expose the harrowing truth behind the infamous Madoff scandal. Throughout the decade long investigation, Markopolos pieced together a chain of white-collar predators consisting of bankers, lieutenants, and henchmen, all linked to the devastating Ponzi scheme. With risk and danger apparent, Markopolos and his loyal team relentlessly continued to pursue the frightening truth. Finding himself trapped in a web of epic deceit, the once unassuming Boston securities analyst turned vigilante investigator now feared for his life and the safety of his family, as he discovered no one would listen.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 157
Language:
Director: Jeff Warrick
Plot: Filmmaker Jeff Warrick leads this journey through the subconscious mind while examining the reported history, scientific research and potential effects of such techniques on society. With eye-opening footage, revealing interviews, humorous anecdotes, and an array of visual effects, the film categorically explores the alleged usage of subliminals in advertising, music, film, television, political propaganda, military psychological operations, and even advanced weapons development. As a result, Warrick makes it his personal mission to determine if these manipulative tactics have succeeded. Or, if subliminal programming belongs in the category of what many consider urban legend.
“PROGRAMMING THE NATION?” brings these haunting revelations to light in the hope that the public will make an effort to “deprogram” themselves, reclaim their independence, and promote change.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 149
Language: English
Director: Asif Kapadia
Plot: Senna’s remarkable story, charting his physical and spiritual achievements on the track and off, his quest for perfection, and the mythical status he has since attained, is the subject of SENNA, a documentary feature that spans the racing legend’s years as an F1 driver, from his opening season in 1984 to his untimely death a decade later. Far more than a film for F1 fans, SENNA unfolds a remarkable story in a remarkable manner, eschewing many standard documentary techniques in favor of a more cinematic approach that makes full use of astounding footage, much of which is drawn from F1 archives and previously unseen.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 144
Language:
Director: Alex Gibney
Plot: In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) and co-director Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 92
Language:
Director: Josh Tickell
Plot: Freedom invites audiences to not just get mad, but to get motivated, offering serious fuel for thought for empowering people with knowledge and inspiring social change. The film explores the role that Ethanol plays as a homegrown alternative that will boost the domestic economy, create jobs and reduce our need to rely on dangerous and unstable parts of the world for our fuel. There is widespread agreement that America needs to wean itself off oil yet Ethanol has become a lightning rod of controversy. An anti Ethanol coalition made up of both big oil and radical environmentalists stokes the fires of that controversy every day. Debate rages on the pros and cons of Ethanol but what is the truth?
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 147
Language:
Director: Steve James
Plot: An epic tale of courage and hope, “The Interrupters” is a new film from acclaimed director Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) and award-winning author Alex Kotlowitz (“There Are No Children Here”). The film tells the moving and surprising story of three Violence Interrupters in Chicago who with bravado, humility and even humor try to protect their communities from the violence they once employed.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 107
Language: English
Director: Kevin Macdonald
Plot: From Academy Award-winning director Kevin Macdonald (State of Play, Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) comes Life In A Day, a cinematic experiment to capture life around the world in a single day. Drawing from 4,500 hours of footage sent in from 192 countries.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 135
Language:
Director: U. Roberto Romano
Plot: Every year there are more than 400,000 American children who are torn away from their friends, schools and homes to pick the food we all eat. Zulema, Perla and Victor labor as migrant farm workers, sacrificing their own childhoods to help their families survive. THE HARVEST/LA COSECHA profiles these three as they journey from the scorching heat of Texas’ onion fields to the winter snows of the Michigan apple orchards and back south to the humidity of Florida’s tomato fields to follow the harvest.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 134
Language: English
Director: Errol Morris
Plot: Academy Award-winner Errol Morris’ TABLOID follows the much stranger-than-fiction adventures of Joyce McKinney, a former “beauty queen” whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams leads her across the globe and directly onto the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers. Joyce’s crusade for love and personal vindication, as illustrated by Morris, takes her through a surreal world of gunpoint abduction, manacled Mormons, oddball accomplices, bondage modeling, magic underwear and dreams of celestial unions. This notorious affair is barking mad.
Equal parts love story, film noir, brainy B-movie and demented fairy tale, TABLOID is a delirious meditation on hysteria – both public and personal – from a filmmaker who continues to break down and blow open the documentary genre with his penetrating portraits of eccentric and profoundly complex characters. In TABLOID, Morris concocts another jaw-dropping portrayal, this time of a phenomenally driven woman whose romantic obsessions and delusions catapult her over the edge into scandal-sheet notoriety and an unimaginable life. Long before the days of Lindsay, Britney and the 24-hour news cycle, Joyce McKinney reigned as the ensnaring Femme Fatale accused of sexual defiance. In TABLOID, she is back, and Morris offers up his best guilty treasure.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 140
Language: English
Director: Joseph Dorman
Plot: Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness-A riveting portrait of the great writer whose stories became the basis of the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness tells the tale of the rebellious genius who created an entirely new literature. Plumbing the depths of a Jewish world locked in crisis and on the cusp of profound change, he captured that world with brilliant humor. Sholem Aleichem was not just a witness to the creation of a new modern Jewish identity, but one of the very men who forged it.
This poignant film offers audiences the chance to explore the great author’s universe: the world of our grandparents and great grandparents whose immigration to the United States forged the present day American Jewish community. It’s a story with many parallels in the other great American immigration sagas, the Irish and the Italian, to name just two, but a story with its own peculiar flavors both sweet and bitter.
Far from the folksy grandfather many people mistake him to be, Sholem Aleichem was a sophisticated modern writer and cosmopolitan intellectual, an artist the equal of Chekhov or Gogol or Isaac Babel. His work left lasting legacies in Israel and the Soviet Union, as well as in America to which Sholem Aleichem immigrated twice, and where he died in 1916. His funeral was attended by some 200,000 people. It was the largest public funeral the city had ever witnessed and announced the arrival of the American Jewish community as a force to be reckoned with. In the following decades, Sholem Aleichem’s work, especially his Teyve stories, would be interpreted time and again by an American Jewish community whose own identity was evolving over time.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 149
Language:
Director: James Marsh
Plot: From the Academy Award winning team behind MAN ON WIRE comes the story of Nim, a chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. What was learned about his true nature – and indeed our own – is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.
Genre: Documentary
Release Year: 2011
Runtime: 141
Language:
Director: Jill Andresevic
Plot: Filmed over the course of a year, LOVE ETC. is actually five different relationship stories – all of them real – combined in a single film. With characters ranging in age from 18 to 89, the youthful end of the spectrum is represented by high school sweethearts Gabriel and Danielle, whose first-love romance is tested as graduation nears. On the other end of the spectrum are Albert and Marion, octogenarian lovebirds whose chance meeting turned into a 50 year marriage, and who remain as enamored of one another today as they were when they first married. In between, are two men: Ethan, who is straight and the divorced father of two teenagers, and Scott, who is gay and single, and the soon-to-be father of twins. Despite their complicated lives, both are on a quest to find new partners and believe that love is only one blind date away. The final couple, Chitra and Mahendra, are engaged when we meet them their big, traditional Indian wedding is the centerpiece of the filmbut, once the honeymoon is over, the realities of marriage change and challenge their life together. A love letter to love itself, Andresevic’s film celebrates the diversity of these couples, as well as the vast and varied city they inhabit.