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2008 Films
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New Docs
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An inside look at the Patina V Mannequin Factory, where model women are sculpted with perfect proportions.
Alone in Four Walls
Teenage boys in a Russian prison tell their stories under a sympathetic yet incisive gaze.
At the Death House Door
This film offers an unflinching look at the career of Carroll Pickett, who presided over ninety-five executions during his fifteen-year tenure as death house chaplain to the Walls prison unit in Huntsville, Texas.
Be Like Others
In Iran, gay men and women are encouraged by the state to undergo sex-change operations or risk capital punishment if they remain true to their identity.
Beautiful Son
In their quest for answers to their son's autism, one family offers a comprehensive look at this heartbreaking condition, examining possible causes and seeking alternative treatments.
Beginning Filmmaking
For her fourth birthday, a filmmaker father surprises his daughter with a video camera and the complications inevitable to both parenting and filmmaking ensue.
The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
Exquisitely photographed over twenty-three years, this epic film follows one family of Laotian refugees who escaped the ravages of the Vietnam War to resettle in the United States.
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
An exhilarating synthesis of interviews, archival footage, and striking personal testimony provide an in-depth look at body image in America and the increasing role of performance enhancing drugs in Americans' quixotic search for perfection.
Body & Soul: Diana & Kathy
Buoyed by their profound friendship, two women with disabilities defy all odds to live independently in their own house.
Bomb It
The most comprehensive documentary about graffiti and street art to date, BOMB IT features original interviews from around the world and footage of graffiti writers in action.
Boogie Man
The rollicking, controversial story of Lee Atwater, a blues-playing kingmaker who helped elect three Presidents, reshaped American politics, and rocked the (Grand Old) Party.
Breadmakers
A brief and loving portrait of the Garvald Bakery, where a devoted team of workers with learning disabilities prepare breads for all of Edinburgh.
Bulletproof Salesman
When the United States invaded Iraq, it presented the Perfect War for Fidelis Cloer, supplier of luxury armored vehicles and self-confessed war profiteer.
Calavera Highway
The sweeping story of a family of seven brothers grappling with the meaning of masculinity, fatherhood, and a legacy of rootless beginnings.
City of Cranes
Crane operators offer us an unparalleled view of London as their huge, graceful machines sweep and pluck above the city's skyline.
La Corona (The Crown)
Four inmates compete fiercely for the crown in the annual beauty pageant of a Bogotá women's prison.
Daughters of Wisdom
For the first time, cameras are invited into the Kala Rongo Monastery, home to a vibrant and resilient community of Tibetan Buddhist nuns.
Don't Get Me Wrong
Patients debate the weather, God, and other forces beyond their control in this poignant view of life in a Romanian psychiatric hospital.
Flying On One Engine
The bizarre survival saga of Dr. S. Dicksheet, an eccentric and irreverent humanitarian who has performed more than 140,000 cleft lip surgeries for free in his native India.
Forbidden Lie$
The life and deceptions of a con artist, Norma Khoury, who wrote a "non-fiction" best-seller about an honor killing in Jordan.
Full Battle Rattle
In a fake village secluded deep within the Mojave Desert, the U.S. army enlists thousands of role-players, including over two hundred Iraqi exiles, to help train soldiers soon to be deployed to Iraq.
GLASS: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts
A riveting and intimate profile of the preeminent composer Philip Glass at work and at play, crafted in contrasting tones, from the comical to the profound.
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
A richly entertaining and thoughtful look at the "gonzo" journalist and great American iconoclast.
Good Ol' Charles Schulz
For fifty years, Charles Schulz captivated and comforted millions with his comic strip Peanuts, but worldwide success did not quiet his own Charlie Brown-style doubts.
The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo
Filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson, a gang rape survivor herself, documents the tragic plight of women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo who are raped in the name of war.
Holding Fast
This lyrical observation of a Tibetan refugee center in Darjeeling, India indelibly blends music and image.
The Horseman
This is the story of Stig-Anders, a truly old-fashioned farmer whose epic love for his horses and the remote Swedish village they call home represents the last of a dying breed.
In A Dream
Isaiah Zagar, a renowned mosaic artist who has covered over forty thousand square feet of Philadelphia with tile, mirror, paint, and concrete, comes under the scrutiny of his son's camera in this portrait of a complicated marriage.
Infinite Justice
This darkly whimsical short film reconstructs scenes from the Iraq War using action figures and war toys.
Lakshmi and Me
A filmmaker in Bombay grapples with her relationship with her part-time maid, Lakshmi, against a backdrop of old feudal attitudes that still govern relationships between employers and their "servants."
The Last Conquistador
When sculptor John Houser sets out to create an enormous bronze statue of Juan de Oñate for the city of El Paso, his subject's vexed colonial legacy sparks passionate opposition.
Left in Baghdad
The tragicomedy of a soldier who has to pick out a new left arm after losing the original in Baghdad.
Life. Support. Music.
After a devastating brain hemorrhage fells a musician, he and his family mount an enormous and inspiring struggle for rehabilitation.
Lioness
This film presents the untold story of female support soldiers in Iraq who have been sent into direct ground combat in violation of the military's official policy.
Lucio
Lucio, a seventy-five-year-old Spanish anarchist, recounts his exploits as a "good bandit" who swindled twenty-five million dollars from the First National Bank (now CitiBank) in support of radical social movements.
Man on Wire
In 1974, young Frenchman Philippe Petite spent an hour balancing on a high wire suspended between the new Twin Towers of the World Trade Center before being hauled off by police. Through meticulous recreations and intimate interviews with all involved, this moving film unveils the intricate preparations for what was to become the "artistic crime of the century."
The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories
Along the Danube in northern Bulgaria lies the sleepy and mosquito-ridden town of Belene, where the residents hold on to hopes of an atomic future, but are unable to deal with their troubled past.
My Daughter the Terrorist
This rare, inside portrait of two young female Tamil Tigers provides sobering insight into the psychology and motivations of people who are firmly committed to a life of terrorism.
My Olympic Summer
In this somber and visually mesmerizing film, Daniel Robin re-examines8mm home movies of his parents in the context of his own recently failed marriage.
Neither Memory Nor Magic
The fascinating and poignant story of Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, who perished in the Holocaust but was able to preserve his startlingly original writings.
Observando el cielo (Observing the Sky)
An experimental film about the movement of the night sky.
Of Shadows and Men
In this lovely short film, the centuries-old practice of Chinese shadow plays emerges as the forefather of cinema.
The Order of Myths
The secret societies and young kings and queens of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, inhabit a world invested in many traditions, including segregation.
Paradise
This wry and absorbing Swedish film depicts an older married couple as they embark upon an interior decorating project that uncovers their profound differences yet also suggests how relationships stand the test of time.
Paradise - Three Journeys In This World
A lyrical exploration of the fragile hopes and harsh realities of African immigrant journeys to Spain.
Please Vote For Me
When third graders in rural China elect a class monitor, three determined aspirants and their crafty parents plot strategies and devise dirty tricks for victory.
Salim Baba
On the streets of Kolkota, India, Salim Baba runs a "cinema cart" with a one-hundred-year-old hand-cranked projector. Children trail this enchanting relic of an earlier age for a glimpse of a flickering magical world." 145,"In Swaziland, a country ravaged by AIDS, elderly women—or "gogos"(grandmothers)—take care of children
Sally Gross - The Pleasure of Stillness
This film chronicles avant-garde dancer and choreographer Sally Gross's fifty-year career with breathtaking archival performance footage and follows her for eight months as she prepares her newest piece, The Pleasure of Stillness.
The Siamese Connection
Quirky and unpredictable, this film tells the story of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, who lived in Mt. Airy, North Carolina from 1839 to 1874.
Song of a Sperm Donor
This short movie pits the right to know against the need to know and nature against nurture as it brings new meaning to the phrase "Whose your Daddy?"
Stranded: I've come from a plane that crashed on the mountains
The incredible story of the famous 1972 plane crash in the Andes reveals the importance of friendship and solidarity in the face of extreme obstacles.
Summerchild
Eleven-year-old Svetlana lives in a children's home in Karelia, Russia, but she will spend what promises only at first blush to be an idyllic summer in Finland with host parents.
Surfwise
Trading in a budding medical career for surfing in the 1950s, Dr. Dorian"Doc" Paskowitz built his own way of life, traveling the continent in a 24-foot-long camper with his wife and nine kids in tow.
The Tailor
Simultaneously comic and unsettling, this film casually observes the tense business transactions— replete with thinly veiled hostilities—that unfold inside Mohamed's tiny shop in Barcelona.
Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai
This film pays tribute to the determination and courage of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement to empower rural women in Kenya and ended up sparking a national political crusade to protect the environment, human rights, and democracy.
Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!
Fusing hypnotic visual aesthetics with satirical humor, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates embraces the documentary tradition of the city symphony for a wry look at Tehran's cultural and political history.
To See If I'm Smiling
Female Israeli soldiers recall their mandatory military service in the Occupied Territories and reveal the real horror of war: it corrupts and destroys everyone it touches.
Today The Hawk Takes One Chick
In Swaziland, a country ravaged by AIDS, elderly women—or "gogos" (grandmothers)—take care of children, many of them orphans. But what will happen when the gogo is gone?
Trouble the Water
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Roberts turns on her video camera and so begins an inspiring story of heroism and resilience.
Up the Yangtze
This film takes the viewer on a poignant farewell tour of the Yangtze River, meeting some of the two million inhabitants of shoreline villages who will lose their homes when the Three Gorges Dam is completed.
What Do We Want, When Do We Want It
Ideas of activism, urgency, and religious faith (captured in a letter between Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz) flow in counterpoint to the casual soundtrack and visual pacing of this thought-provoking rumination on American protests of military activity in Iraq.
Special Programming
American Teen
An intimate look at the lives, hopes, and dreams of four high school seniors living in a small Indiana town.
The Axe in the Attic
Filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small embark on a cross-country road trip to interview evacuees displaced by Hurricane Katrina and in the process reveal a great deal about themselves.
CENTER FRAME: The Black List
In this film directed by famed portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Elvis Mitchell conducts riveting interviews with twenty prominent African American artists, CEOs, politicians, and activists. Chris Rock, Vernon Jordan, Toni Morrison, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and others reflect, often humorously, on what it means to be on the "blacklist."
Blindsight
Inspired by renowned blind mountain climber Erik Weihenmayer's miraculous ascent to the top of Mount Everest, a group of teenagers from Braille Without Borders in Tibet join him on a physically and emotionally demanding adventure to one of the mountain's highest peaks.
CENTER FRAME: Body of War
Body of War chronicles the physical and mental struggles of soldier Thomas Young after he returns home from Iraq paralyzed by a bullet to his spine. Now in a wheelchair, he painfully and courageously transforms himself into an anti-war activist, traversing the country to speak out for peace.
Diaries (1971-1976)
In this intensely personal memoir, pioneering documentary filmmaker Ed Pincus shows us how he embodied the utopian hopes, fears, and neuroses of the sixties generation when he set out to create an enlightened, unconventional life through his filmmaking practice.
Encounters at the End of the World
In his first documentary since Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog travels to the farthest point of Antarctica to film a group of over a thousand unwavering individuals who battle unimaginable conditions in search of scientific discovery.
Flow: For Love of Water
This timely film offers a terrifying portrait of the growing scarcity and misuses of the world's most essential resource: water.
Garrett Scott Grant Program
This program will feature excerpts from the 2008 Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant recipients' works-in-progress.
Marcela
Helena Trestikova spent twenty-six years chronicling the often tragic life of Marcela—whom we first meet in Czechoslovakia as a young bashful bride stealing puffs on a cigarette and looking for all the world like a refugee from American Bandstand circa 1965—and the result is a striking example of the raw power of documentation.
A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman
Based in part on his own memoir "Heading South, Looking North,"this film explores the extraordinary experiences of renowned Chilean-American novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman, who barely escaped with his life when Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.
Sex: The Revolution
An excerpt from VH1's epic series on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s, which takes us from the groundbreaking research of Alfred Kinsey through the impeachment of President Clinton and beyond by intercutting rare footage, classic clips, iconic music, and an extraordinary range of provocative interviews.
SNEAK PEEK
With revealing court footage and probing interviews, this film masterfully presents the trial of Slobodan Milosevic before the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague.
SNEAK PREVIEW
For the past ten years Billy Pappas has been painstakingly working a single portrait. Now that the piece is finally finished, there is just one more step: show the piece to David Hockney.
Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story
The life and work of schlockmeister William Castle, who ballyhooed his cheapie horror movies into immortality, are celebrated in this delightful tour through the maestro's shoddy masterpieces.
The Tingler
This 1959 genre classic pits megalomaniacal, LSD-dropping scientist Vincent Price against the underwhelming eponymous monster, a parasitic(rubber) worm that lies dormant in everyone's spine until paralyzing fear awakens it.
OPENING NIGHT FILM: Trumbo
Legendary blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is perhaps best known for his work on Spartacus and Roman Holiday. This eloquent film, based on the play by his son Christopher Trumbo, brings together a remarkable group of actors to read from the screenwriter's famously candid letters, thus revealing a man of great courage, integrity, and wit.
Career Award: William Greaves
The Fight
This extraordinary fight movie, starring Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, tracks Ali's first effort to reclaim his heavyweight title from Joe Frazier after it was stripped from him because of his radical politics.
The First World Festival of Negro Arts
A document of the First World Festival of Negro Arts - where two thousand dancers, artists, and writers from Africa and the African Diaspora came together in Dakar, Senegalin 1966.
Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey
A superb chronicle of the life and times of world-renowned African American Nobel Peace Prize Winner and United Nations statesman Ralph Bunche, who not only pioneered the organization's peacekeeping and conflict resolution strategies, but was also one of the leading advocates of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making. This wildly innovative landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2
Greaves brings together two actors and one particularly outspoken member of his crew from Take One to make another film about making a film, this time about two reunited, but still bickering, middle-aged actors.
Curated Series: Migrations
El cielo gira (The Sky Turns)
The filmmaker travels to the village in Northern Spain where she was born to produce this breathtakingly beautiful meditation on place. Just as she thinks the village is on the brink of extinction, she finds it renewed by a wave of new migrants.
Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
The migration portrayed in this stirring film is from independent living to a nursing home, as filmmaker Deborah Hoffman diligently documents the cruel progression of her mother's Alzheimer's disease and her own process of coming to terms with the illness.
DeNADIE
This film follows Central American immigrants who take a long and perilous illegal train journey north to the United States in search of a better life, falling prey along the way to immigration police, gangs, and the dangers of the train itself.
The New Americans
Shot in the cinéma-vérité style, this epic mini-series depicts the heartbreaking struggles and hard-fought triumphs of five families as they migrate from India, the West Bank, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico to the United States.
Sewing Woman
Based in part on the life story of the filmmaker's mother, Zem Ping Dong, Sewing Woman interweaves rare footage shot in rural villages of China and in factories in San Francisco's Chinatown, treasured home movies, and intimate family photographs to paint a bittersweet portrait of early-twentieth-century migration.
The Sugar Curtain
Camila Guzmán Urzúa offers a moving portrait of a generation of Cuban exiles who grew up during the golden years of the revolution and were raised on the heady promises of Cuban socialism: “You are the builders of the future!” The film collects the exiles’ shared memories of an idyllic childhood and the subsequent economic crisis and disillusionment brought on by the fall of the Soviet Union.
Sidebar: Inhabiting Space
The 3 Rooms of Melancholia
The melancholy world of Chechnya, divided into three rooms, each an elegiac portrayal of a land without spirit. The elegant score and powerful imagery draw you into these spaces that few would want to inhabit.
Sud (South)
The French filmmaker takes us under the skin of Jasper, Texas, the scene of the brutal slaying of James Byrd Jr. Well before Two Towns of Jasper examined its political realities, this beautiful, languid observational film makes us feel what it is like in live in Jasper, and to breathe its air.
La Tropical
Reminiscent of La Buena Vista Social Club, but even more sensuous.The rhythm of Cuba refracted through the sights and sounds of a nightclub, and the world of that club captured in the provocative compositions of a world-class photographer.