Janine and Sandy are a lesbian couple who decide to have a baby, but after a few years Sandy dies. This tragedy is exploited by Sandy's parents to snatch the girl from Janine's care. But then, and despite having the laws against her, Janine decides to fight in order to regain custody of her daughter.
Moving between two extremes - the intimate verite drama of the Miss India pageant's rigorous beauty "bootcamp" and the intense regime of a militant Hindu fundamentalist camp for young girls. The World Before Her delivers a provocative portrait of India and its current cultural conflicts during a key transitional era in the country's modern history.
The Real MASH traces the original stories and people that inspired the fictional feature film and TV series about Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals in the Korean War. Both pushed buttons on cultural and social frontiers but real life MASH units were actually more like renegade units onto themselves and early indicators of the social turmoil and tensions that were to unfold later in the USA. Interviews with MASH actors, including Jamie Farr, Loretta Swit and Gary Burghoff, co-creator Gene Reynolds, surgeons, doctors, nurses, pilots and enlisted men who served in the war blend with dramatic recreations, archival film and rare photographs to tell the true stories behind the MASH entertainment franchise.
So you think you know Sherlock Holmes? Well, hold on to your deerstalker hats because this new fast-paced documentary directed by Gary Lang, provides compelling evidence that the famous fictional sleuth has influenced the 21st century in ways that few could possibly imagine.
The truth is way stranger than fiction,” muses one interviewee in this unbelievable true account of an incredible war time saga. As the Second World War was coming to a close, the US Office of Strategic Services trained and parachuted two Jewish refugees and a German deserter deep into Nazi occupied Austria. Through vivid first-person accounts, re-enactments, archival footage and learned commentary, the film reveals how their efforts disrupted a vital supply route between Germany and the Italian front to bring about the surrender of Innsbruck to Allied Forces. Their unbelievable adventure has a finale that beats any Hollywood movie hands down — but a story so powerful that it became the basis for Quentin Tarantino’s mega hit.
As well as providing the subject for Luc Besson’s The Big Blue, Jacques Mayol did more than anyone to establish the sport of free diving to enormous depths without an oxygen supply. Using breathing techniques derived from yoga, he went to 50, 60, and even 100 meters—depths no one had considered to be within the bounds of human possibility. Mayol was a sportsman, a mystic, a vagabond, but above all, a man who believed in testing the limits of experience. This visually stunning tribute shows a man’s quest to be at one with the vastness of the ocean and to have no fear of the abyss within, where lurks serenity, freedom and finally, death.
Korea is a divided nation. Filmmaker Min Sook Lee sets out on a revelatory, emotion-charged journey into Korea’s broken heart, exploring the rhetoric and realism of reunification through the extraordinary stories of ordinary people.
"The Face of Anonymous" by Gary Lang, which profiles Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X, who has hidden from the FBI in Toronto and Mexico.
League of Exotique Dancers explores vintage Burlesque's world of fun, frolic, and feathers, yet also turns the spotlight on the poverty, racism, and sexism that were rampant under all that glitter.
'What kind of house does a man who has been imprisoned in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?' This film captures the remarkable creative journey and friendship of Herman Wallace, one of the Angola 3, and artist Jackie Sumell while examining the injustice of prolonged solitary confinement.
With honesty, intelligence and humour, Nancy, Simone and Gloria reflect on their experiences of balancing single parenthood, working life, relationships and the fulfillment of their own goals in the context of society.
Filmmaker Oren Siedler's personal exploration into her troubled and unusual relationship with her brilliant, charming, con-artist, white-collar criminal father takes us around the world, from Australia to Cuba and the USA.
TAKE LIGHT is a look at the tangled wires of Nigeria's electricity crisis, told through the everyday trials and tribulations of a charismatic electrician.
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.
Anna Van der Wee lost her twin brother in a tragic accident at age 20. She takes us on a journey to four continents and revisits key relationships to understand how the death of her brother affected her life and loves.
In a moving first-person documentary, a Chilean filmmaker confronts her impending blindness by chronicling her struggles and her return home, where she reunites with family and befriends a group of street vendors who teach her how to be blind.
As visually mesmerizing as it is compelling, Shipbreakers takes the viewer into the heart of Alang, India, a vibrant shantytown where 40,000 people live and work in the most primitive conditions. Since the early '80s the rusting hulks of thousands of the world's largest ships have been driven onto the remote beaches of Alang, off the Arabian Sea, to be dismantled, piece by piece. Selling their ships for scrap, the owners rarely bother to abide by the UN Basel Convention, which bans shipments of transboundary waste. One worker a day, on average, dies on the job, some from explosions or falls, but many will contract cancers caused by asbestos, PCBs and other toxic substances. Shipbreakers vividly captures both the haunting beauty of the ships and the deplorable conditions of the workers - in an unforgettable portrayal where Third World ingenuity meets 21 st century global economics.
Documentary filmmaker Lynch tries to find the origin of a whale bone found buried in Toronto's waterfront.
