Choenzey is a 47-year-old monk living in a Tibetan refugee monastery in South India. His spiritual master, Khensur Rinpoche, a revered high lama, has been dead for four years. According to Tibetan belief, he will soon be reincarnated. It is Choenzey's responsibility, as his closest disciple, to find the reincarnation and to look after him. The film follows Choenzey's search and his eventual discovery of an impish but gentle 4-year-old boy who is recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan State Oracle to be the reincarnation. Without sentimentality, the film captures the moving relationship that develops between the erstwhile disciple and his young master. (columbia.edu)
1992-04-01
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7.5Before compiling your next grocery list, you might want to watch filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia's eye-opening documentary, which sheds light on a shadowy relationship between agriculture, big business and government. By examining the effects of biotechnology on the nation's smallest farmers, the film reveals the unappetizing truth about genetically modified foods: You could unknowingly be serving them for dinner.
0.0A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?
7.8A documentary about the life and activism of Jaha Dukureh, a Gambian anti-female genital mutilation campaigner who returns to her country of birth to confront the harmful tradition that she and 200 million women and girls have undergone globally.
10.0The documentary focuses on the annual Mani Rimdu festival of Tibet and Nepal, an event which encapsulates the Himalayan Buddhist experience.
They're clean, educated, articulate and rarely receive public assistance. But following a divorce, job loss or a long illness, a growing number of middle-class women are forced to live out of their cars. Directed by Michèle Ohayon (Colors Straight Up) and narrated by Jodie Foster, It Was a Wonderful Life chronicles the hardships and triumphs of six "hidden homeless" women as they struggle to survive, one day at a time.
A young artist, born as Nicole, but renamed Nova, sets out on a healing journey on an indigenous Taino sanctuary in upstate New York. Accompanied by the Wild Darlings, a black + queer, healing arts collective, she transmutes the trauma of her past by performing in white-face as the male teacher that sexually abused her as a child.
6.4The modern criminal justice system is hindered by the fact that countless rape kits remain untested in police evidence storage facilities across the United States. Only eight states currently have laws requiring mandatory testing of rape kits.
7.5Jimi Hendrix's debut American set at 1967's Monterey Pop Festival is generally considered one of the most radical and legendary live shows ever. Virtually unknown to American audiences at the time, even though he was already an established entity in the UK, Hendrix and his two-piece Experience explode on stage, ripping through blues classics "Rock Me Baby" and Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor," interpreting and electrifying Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," debuting songs from his yet-to-be-released first album and closing with the now historic sacrificing/burning of his guitar during an unhinged version of "Wild Thing" that even its writer Chip Taylor would never have imagined. Hendrix uses feedback and distortion to enhance the songs in whisper-to-scream intensity, blazing territory that had not been previously explored with as much soul-frazzled power.
5.4A chronological look at films by, for, or about gays and lesbians in the United States, from 1947 to 2005, Kenneth Anger's "Fireworks" to "Brokeback Mountain". Talking heads, anchored by critic and scholar B. Ruby Rich, are interspersed with an advancing timeline and with clips from two dozen films. The narrative groups the pictures around various firsts, movements, and triumphs: experimental films, indie films, sex on screen, outlaw culture and bad guys, lesbian lovers, films about AIDS and dying, emergence of romantic comedy, transgender films, films about diversity and various cultures, documentaries and then mainstream Hollywood drama. What might come next?
6.7Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.
7.1For decades, American touring ice shows dominated family entertainment with their dazzling production and variety acts. This documentary honors them through interviews and archival footage, and depicts one skater's quest to keep this history alive.
6.8Six blind Tibetan teenagers climb the Lhakpa-Ri peak of Mount Everest, led by seven-summit blind mountain-climber Erik Weihenmayer.
7.2Russian Poet Boris Ryzhy was handsome, talented and famous. So why did he end his own life at the age of 26? A quest to find the answer takes the filmmaker to the notorious neighbourhood in the cold industrial city of Yekaterinenburg where Boris grew up...
8.0London 1976: Between economic crises and the Silver Jubilee, something is brewing in the squats and basement clubs of West London: Punk. A promise, a new beginning. Punk meant self-empowerment, especially for the women in the scene. For the first time, women picked up guitar, bass and drums, formed bands and wrote their own songs.
6.1Both an activist and a documentarian, Valentina Pedicini also brings her background in anthropology to this impressively captured, claustrophobic nonfiction feature. Venturing beneath sea level, From the Depths profiles the lone woman at work in the last coal mine in Sardinia, Italy.
6.8Advanced Style examines the lives of seven unique New Yorkers whose eclectic personal style and vital spirit have guided their approach to aging. Based on Ari Seth Cohen’s famed blog of the same name, this film paints intimate and colorful portraits of independent, stylish women aged 62 to 95 who are challenging conventional ideas about beauty, aging, and Western’s culture’s increasing obsession with youth.
0.0This short documentary is the portrait of an 88-year-old woman who lives alone in a log cabin without running water or electricity in the Williams Lake area of British Columbia. The daughter of a Shuswap chief, Augusta lost her Indian status as the result of a marriage to a white man. She recalls past times, but lives very much in the present. Self-sufficient, dedicated to her people, she spreads warmth wherever she moves, with her songs and her harmonica.
Documentary that highlights 18 women and covers a period of time from the 50's to the 90's. The women chosen were selected because they represent the real diversity within both feminism and independent film and video. They range in age from 65 to 25. They are black, white, Puerto Rican, Yugoslavian, Asian American, biracial. They are straight, gay and bisexual. What they share is a need to express their own interpretations of what American culture is and could be and a belief that this work is made particularly powerful through the media.
0.0The story of the Northern Ireland Troubles through the unflinching testimony of two men who played key roles on opposite sides of that bloody conflict. Nearly ten years ago the two paramilitary leaders told their stories on condition that they could never be revealed while they were still alive. The stories told by the Irish Republican Army's Brendan Hughes and Ulster Volunteer Force's David Ervine tell us of the motivations of the participants, the planning of campaigns of violence, the misery of a hunger strike, the tracking and killing of informers and the duplicity that ended a conflict that had lasted too long. It is also a narrative of the fate of combatants when their wars are over.
6.5Lyrical 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.
5.8Narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, Walk With Me is a cinematic journey into the world of a monastic community who practice the art of mindfulness with Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh.
7.1Filmed and edited in intimate vérité style, this movie follows visionary medical practitioners who are working on the cutting edge of life and death and are dedicated to changing our thinking about both.
7.2Going beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker, Anders Østergaard, brings us close to the video journalists who deliver the footage. Though risking torture and life in jail, courageous young citizens of Burma live the essence of journalism as they insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country.
6.4A documentary directed by Winding Refn's wife, Liv Corfixen, and it follows the Danish-born filmmaker during the making of his 2013 film Only God Forgives.
8.1Life Is But a Dream is a HBO documentary about the life of US singer Beyoncé Knowles during the years 2011 and 2012 and on the recording of her fifth album. The film was directed by Beyoncé herself. The film shows Beyoncé from intimate moments of her pregnancy to behind the scenes and rehearsals of the main concerts of that time.
6.9An 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.
7.6A 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.
7.2In 1992, teenager Sandi Tan shot Singapore's first indie road movie with her enigmatic American mentor Georges – who then vanished with all the footage. Twenty years later, the 16mm film is recovered, sending Tan, now a novelist in Los Angeles, on a personal odyssey in search of Georges' vanishing footprints.
7.1In 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.
6.9An epic cinematic and musical collaboration between SHERPA filmmaker Jennifer Peedom and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, that explores humankind's fascination with high places.
7.1A profoundly personal voyage into the complexity, fragility and wonder of the human brain, after Lotje Sodderland miraculously survives a hemorrhagic stroke and finds herself starting again in an alien world, bereft of language and logic. This feature documentary takes us on a genre-twisting tale that is by turns excruciating and exquisite - from the devastating consequences of a first-time neurological experiment, through to the extraordinary revelations of her altered sensory perception.
7.2Diaries, 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.
6.8In 1999, Internet entrepreneur Josh Harris recruits dozens of young men and women who agree to live in underground apartments for weeks at a time while their every movement is broadcast online. Soon, Harris and his girlfriend embark on their own subterranean adventure, with cameras streaming live footage of their meals, arguments, bedroom activities, and bathroom habits. This documentary explores the role of technology in our lives, as it charts the fragile nature of dot-com economy.
8.2A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life.
7.5In 2013, the world's media reported on a shocking mountain-high brawl as European climbers fled a mob of angry Sherpas. Director Jennifer Peedom and her team set out to uncover the cause of this altercation, intending to film the 2014 climbing season from the Sherpa's point-of-view. Instead, they captured Everest's greatest tragedy, when a huge block of ice crashed down onto the climbing route...
7.3The 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.
7.3An exploration of technologically developing nations and the effect the transition to Western-style modernization has had on them.
8.2A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.
7.1The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.