Kirsten Johnson
Arctic Summer is a poetic meditation on Tuktoyaktuk, an Indigenous community in the Arctic. The film captures Tuk during one of the last summers before climate change forced Tuk's coastal population to relocate to more habitable land.
With this inventive portrait, director Kirsten Johnson seeks a way to keep her 86-year-old father alive forever. Utilizing moviemaking magic and her family’s dark humor, she celebrates Dr. Dick Johnson’s last years by staging fantasies of death and beyond. Together, dad and daughter confront the great inevitability awaiting us all.
Three extraordinary young people battle to change their lives through the three-month odyssey of the New York Daily News Golden Gloves - the biggest, oldest, most important amateur boxing tournament in the world.
A rural American town suffering economically from factory closures finds an unconventional route to recovery with the help of MASS MoCA.
Khader El-Yateem, an Arab American Pastor from Palestine, and Linda Sarsour, organizer of the Women's March on Washington, come together in the wake of President Trump's anti-Muslim policies. With Sarsour's support, El-Yateem runs for New York City council. Will he be the first Arab American to ever win a seat in the race? The documentary follows the drama of his candidacy.
TRAP (Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers) laws have been passed by conservative state legislatures in the US and clinics have taken their fight to the courts. Follow the struggles of the clinic workers and lawyers who are on the front lines of a battle to keep abortion safe and legal for millions of American women.
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
A WOMAN LIKE ME is a hybrid documentary that interweaves the real story of director Alex Sichel, diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2011, with the fictional story of Anna Seashell, who struggles to find the glass half full when faced with the same diagnosis. The film follows Alex as she uses her craft to explore what is foremost on her mind while confronting a terminal disease: parenting, marriage, faith, life, and death. When we are stuck between a rock and hard place, can our imagination get us out?
For the past 15 years, a group of accomplished New York women, artists and writers in their eighties and nineties, gather at the Westbeth Artists Housing for a monthly salon.
The New Yorker is the benchmark for the single-panel cartoon. This light-hearted and sometimes poignant look at the art and humor of the iconic drawings shows why they have inspired and even baffled us for decades. Very Semi-Serious is a window into the minds of cartooning legends and hopefuls, including editor Bob Mankoff, shedding light onto how their humor evolves.
In June 2013, Laura Poitras and reporter Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with Edward Snowden. She brought her camera with her.
The children of "Happy Valley" were victimized for years, by a key member of the legendary Penn State college football program. But were Jerry Sandusky’s crimes an open secret? With rare access, director Amir Bar-Lev delves beneath the headlines to tell a modern American parable of guilt, redemption, and identity.
What is the real value of a dollar? You think that a dollar bill is money and that banks are where your cash is stored and safeguarded. Well, you’re wrong. Like, really wrong.
Born to Fly pushes the boundaries between action and art, daring us to join choreographer Elizabeth Streb and her dancers in pursuit of human flight.
Forty years before WikiLeaks and the NSA scandal, there was Media, Pennsylvania. In 1971, eight activists plotted an intricate break-in to the local FBI offices to leak stolen documents and expose the illegal surveillance of ordinary Americans in an era of anti-war activism. In this riveting heist story, the perpetrators reveal themselves for the first time, reflecting on their actions and raising broader questions surrounding security leaks in activism today.
Haitian born filmmaker Raoul Peck takes us on a 2-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory and colossal rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti.
Evangelical Christians are calling out for a second sexual revolution: chastity. As a counter-movement of the attitudes and practices of today's culture, one in six girls in the US has vowed to remain 'unsoiled' until marriage. But the seven children of the Wilson family, founders of the Purity Ball, take this concept of purity of body and mind one step further; even their first kiss will be at the altar. For two years, the filmmakers follow the Wilson offspring as they prepare for their fairytale vision of romance and marriage and seek out their own prince and princess spouses. In the process, a broader theme emerges: how the religious right is grooming a young generation of virgins to embody an Evangelically-grounded Utopia in America.
An investigative and powerfully emotional documentary about the epidemic of rape of soldiers within the US military, the institutions that perpetuate and cover up its existence, and its profound personal and social consequences.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans' personal data.
When filmmaker Kathy Leichter moved back into her childhood home after her mother's suicide, she discovered a hidden box of audiotapes. Sixteen years passed before she had the courage to delve into this trove, unearthing details that her mother had recorded about every aspect of her life from the challenges of her marriage to a State Senator, to her son’s estrangement, to her struggles with bipolar disorder. HERE ONE DAY is a visually arresting, emotionally candid film about a woman coping with mental illness, her relationships with her family, and the ripple effects of her suicide on those she loved.
Sixteen women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in Foca, Bosnia, testify in an international court of law.
By exploring the life of political activist Marie Runyon, we encounter a woman motivated not only to fight against injustice, but to also inspire victims of injustice to fight for themselves.
This documentary tells the story of an FBI sting that took place in Albany in 2004. The idea was to entrap Yassin Aref, 37 and Mohammed Hossain, 51. In 2006, the two men were sentenced to 15 years in prison. The documentary asks; was this sting a set-up to criminalize two innocent Muslim men and if it was, what was the purpose?
A film crew follows the well-known banjo player Bela Fleck on his travels to Africa, where he learns about the instrument's origins.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell chronicles the remarkable story of the Liberian women who came together to end a bloody civil war and bring peace to their shattered country.
Through a unique, “mom-and-pop” style film festival, a small town in south Dakota celebrates its most famous native son, Oscar Micheaux, a pioneering African American filmmaker of the early 1900’s.
This acclaimed documentary follows the story of six people who are determined to end the sufferings in Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur. The six - an American activist, an international prosecutor, a Sudanese rebel, a sheikh, a leader of the World Food Program and an internationally known actor - demonstrate the power of how one individual can create extraordinary changes.
Michael Moore visits colleges in swing states during the 2004 election with a goal to encourage 18–29 year old to vote.
This film follows students, staff and parents through the first four years of the High School for Contemporary Arts, an experimental "small school" housed within one of the most dangerous schools in the Bronx.
During the 2004 presidential election, Michael Moore set off on a 60 city tour (mostly colleges), making stops in the 20 battleground states, to help raise voting awareness.
Kirby Dick's provocative documentary investigates the secretive and inconsistent process by which the Motion Picture Association of America rates films, revealing the organization's underhanded efforts to control culture. Dick questions whether certain studios get preferential treatment and exposes the discrepancies in how the MPAA views sex and violence.
A film that chronicles a young mans return to the streets where he grew up and the events that unfold after he reunites with a childhood friend.
An innovative project in South Florida is raising academic achievement in public grammar schools by partnering teachers with artists to work together in the classroom.
Michael Moore's view on what happened to the United States after September 11; and how the Bush Administration allegedly used the tragic event to push forward its agenda for unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Documentary about the life and career of Rokia Traoré, a musician from Mali, an African country, who is one of the few women in her country, perhaps the only one, who manages to have a career in music. She's recorded with Kronos Quartet, and lives between France and Mali.
It’s a medical breakthrough that might never have happened - if not for the persistence of one man. A woman is fighting cancer - with the help of a deadly poison. This is the story of a life-saving connection between ancient wisdom and modern science: arsenic, one of the most exciting new developments in the international war on cancer.
Using two separate filmmaking teams (an all-white crew filming white residents and an all-black camera crew filming black residents), TWO TOWNS OF JASPER captures very different racial views by townsfolk in Jasper, Texas, the location for a racially motivated murder of an African American man in 1998.
Journey To The West is a contemporary exploration of the ways in which Chinese medicine - including acupuncture and herbal remedies - is being practiced today.
A "fictional documentary" concerning the volatile topic of female excision, Bintou In Paris tells the story of a young Malinese mother faced with the critical decision of whether or not to excise her baby daughter.
