The Wren

In the summer of 1977, NASA sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on an epic journey into interstellar space. Together and alone, they will travel until the end of the universe. Each spacecraft carries a golden record album, a massive compilation of images and sounds embodying the best of Planet Earth. According to Carl Sagan, “[t]he spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” While working on the golden record, Sagan met and fell madly in love with his future wife Annie Druyan. The record became their love letter to humankind and to each other. In the summer of 2010, I began my own hopeful voyage into the unknown. This film is a love letter to my fellow traveler. - Penny Lane

Director Penny Lane’s decision to become a “good Samaritan” by giving one of her kidneys to a stranger turns into a funny and moving personal quest to understand the nature of altruism. “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” is a provocative inquiry into the science, history, and ethics of organ transplantation, asking an ancient question in a whole new way: Who is your neighbor, and what do you owe them?

The Abortion Diaries is a documentary featuring 12 women who speak candidly about their experiences with abortion. The women are doctors, subway workers, artists, activists, military personnel, teachers and students; they are Black, Latina, Jewish and White; they are mothers or child-free; they range in age from 19 to 54. Their stories weave together with the filmmaker’s diary entries to present a compelling, moving and at times surprisingly funny “dinner party” where the audience is invited to hear what women say behind closed doors about motherhood, medical technology, sex, spirituality, love, work and their own bodies.

The Story of the Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys is the colourful and surprising true story of a man named Harold von Braunhut; a man who could look at the humblest of creatures – the brine shrimp – and imagine an empire built upon it. Breezy, colourful short about a half-century of marketing directly to children, the force of nostalgia in pop culture, and an unlikely meeting of flimflam and hard science.

Such encounters are extremely rare and can last for perhaps a few seconds. The resulting light and heat, however, can exist in a residual state for eons. This produces in the seeker a kind of agitated euphoria similar to that of the stargazer.

This video will teach you how to write your own autobiography, with examples from the narrator’s life.

Explore the changing role of American womanhood through the Mrs. America Beauty Pageant’s half-century history.

We Are The Littletons presents a tangled web of found objects, intercepted correspondences, reenactments and total fabrications centered around Eve Littleton, an artist with "movie star good looks" who was mysteriously banished from her postcard-perfect American family.

This short documentary suggests a direct connection between two of Nixon’s greatest triumphs as president: his landmark 1969 "Silent Majority" speech (in which he argued that street protesters did not represent the views of most Americans, despite their increasing visibility) and his historic landslide re-election in 1972 (in which George S. McGovern won only one state and the District of Columbia, losing even his home state of South Dakota).

The sometimes-true story of Mame Faye, who ran a world famous house of prostitution in Troy, New York for almost forty years (c. 1906 to 1941). Despite being snubbed by official historians, everyone past the age of retirement has a story – funny, sordid, unbelievable – about Troy's most famous madam.

JoAnn Elam was an experimental filmmaker, postal worker, and social activist. She is most known for her films Rape and Lie Back and Enjoy it. This film remixes JoAnn's footage as a way of introducing viewers to her life and work. Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archives with music by Tim Kinsella.

Drawing on the filmmaker's own experiences of insomnia, this nocturnal transmission looks at outer space through the X-ray specs of (un)consciousness. The night sky and the mind's eye have more in common than you'd ever dream—friction points and connecting dots that form constellations of avian images, clusters of Ambien text, galaxies of work worry and sleep debt.

Combining archival footage of earth processes with interviews describing mysterious physical experiences and emotional attachments, this film turns to the earth to explore how everything we bury deep inside eventually speaks through the geology of the body.

A film about shoplifting, depression, and Winona Ryder, made of stolen materials.

Goodbye Thelma synthesizes footage from the 1991 film Thelma & Louise and footage of the author's own making to create a mysterious, and at times disturbing, auto-fictional exploration of the joys and terrors of traveling as a woman alone.

In 1890, one man had the idea to collect every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare and release them into Central Park. The only bird to survive in the New World was the European starling, which became one of the most common birds in North America. Its introduction is now widely considered a major environmental disaster.