Birth: it's a miracle. A rite of passage. A natural part of life. But more than anything, birth is a business. Compelled to find answers after a disappointing birth experience with her first child, actress Ricki Lake recruits filmmaker Abby Epstein to explore the maternity care system in America
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In the Realms of the Unreal (2004)
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.
How to Cook Your Life (2007)
A Zen priest in San Francisco and cookbook author use Zen Buddhism and cooking to relate to everyday life.
The Collector (2006)
Director/producer Olympia Stone explores the 46-year career of her father, Allan Stone, a famed New York gallery owner and art collector, while examining Stone's obsession with art and his compulsive collecting genius.
A Mere Breath (2016)
Romania. Seven years in the life of a family of believers, struck by the illness of a little girl suffering from spina bifida pass before the camera, with a polluted town scarred by unemployment serving as a background.
Looking Like My Mother (2016)
LOOKING LIKE MY MOTHER is a film about family relationships and personal destiny, about realizing one's own potential and one's limitations. It traces the individual experience, showing the emptiness one can feel as well as the discovery of a sense of meaning in life. It is a very personal and courageous film that doesn’t search for scientific explanations but instead uses documentary and fictional material to weave an intimate biography. This combination of perception and memory suggests a deep reconciliation and allows tender feelings of a mother’s love to emerge.
Beyond Boobs (2018)
A hilarious and at times provocative film about a middle-aged American single-mother living in Switzerland and her quest to find out if she'll be invisible when she's no longer the woman with the biggest breasts in the room.
No Address (1988)
This feature-length documentary by Alanis Obomsawin examines the plight of Native people who come to Montreal searching for jobs and a better life. Often arriving without money, friends or jobs, a number of them quickly become part of the homeless population. Both dislocated from their traditional values and alienated from the rest of the population, they are torn between staying and returning home.
Searching Eva (2019)
This is the tale of a young woman, growing up in the age of the internet and turning the search for oneself into a public spectacle, allowing kids from all over the world to live their life through hers. Through her fragmented personalities you see the emergence of a new generation, in which the concept of a fixed identity has grown old.
A Portrait of Ga (1952)
Another early experiment in portraiture from Tait. In filming her mother she asks the wider question of how much the camera can reveal of the person.
The Market (2011)
In a slum in Chennai, India, a young mother of two, wants to sell her kidney so she can pay off the crippling debts of her family. If she sells Hema will be the fifth member of her family to sell a kidney for an amount that represents several years' wages. Across the world in Nanaimo, Canada, forty year old single mom Sandra's kidneys are failing and she has been on a waiting list for 5 years now. Two different people. Two journeys.
Peter Handke: In the Woods, Might Be Late (2016)
In the sixties, Peter Handke was one of the first to show how the business works: the writer as angry young man and pop star of the literary scene. As soon as he was on the bestseller lists, he turned his back on the hype. For many years, he has lived and worked in his house in a Parisian suburb, more quietly and more hospitably. Peter Handke's precise, free gaze becomes perceptible in his texts, his conversations, the cosmos of his notebooks.
American Teen (2008)
A documentary on seniors at a high school in a small Indiana town and their various cliques.
Germany in Autumn (1978)
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
Mother Europe (2012)
Road trip through the periphery of the EU shows present-day Europe through the eyes of a much-travelled six-year-old, wise beyond his years. A fresh look at this old continent: shooting from the hip and free from sentimentality, young Terra questions the usefulness and purpose of borders.
Sexy Money (2014)
A Europe film entirely shot in Africa? Listen to the tragic stories of unwilling sex workers who wanted to or had to leave the coldness of Europe. Warm and colourful as only Africa (in this case Nigeria) can be. A sound, committed documentary. As it should be.
A Long Journey (2011)
"A Long Journey" tells the story of three siblings who reach adolescence in the late 1960's. The documentary's storyline follows the youngest brother's travels around the world. Worried that he would enter the struggle for freedom against the Brazilian dictatorship, his family sent Heitor to London. There however, he dives head on into the "Swinging London" and, just like the European and American youth of the time period, he experiments with drugs and the mystic allure of India. In the nine years he has traveled around the world, from 1969 to 1978, he has regularly written to his family. The documentary features interviews with Heitor today, his letters and off-screen comments of Heitor's sister, Lúcia Murat, the director of the movie.
Monday's Girls (1993)
"Monday's Girls" explores the conflict between modern individualism and traditional communities in today's Africa through the eyes of two young Waikiriki women from the Niger delta. Although both come from leading families in the same large island town, Florence looks at the iria women's initiation ceremony as an honor, while Azikiwe, who has lived in the city for ten years, sees it as an indignity.
Outlaw (1994)
A video-verité manifesto made with self-identified gender outlaw, author and activist, Leslie Feinberg (1949-2014). Raw and confrontational, this videotape asks its audience to examine their assumptions about the "nature" of gender, challenging any nead certainties and calling for more sensitivity and awareness of the human rights and dignity of trans people.