Peter Miller
Robert Shaw - Man of Many Voices traces the journey of a small town California boy who planned to be a minister like his father, but instead became the greatest conductor of choral music the world has ever known. At the heart of the film is the mystery of Shaw's genius. With no formal musical training, he achieved a stunning early success in popular music and later became legendary for his interpretations of classical music's great choral masterpieces. An early champion of civil rights, Shaw had a mystical belief in the power of community and could communicate his passion for music with spellbinding intensity. As Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the latter half of the twentieth century, Robert Shaw changed the course of musical history through the many voices he set on fire with an enduring love of music.
Academy Award-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin headed up a secret film unit that sought to redefine America in the eyes of the world during the darkest days of World War II. The filmmakers created powerful short documentaries that showed America's strength not through images of tanks, but in portraits of farmers, school children and window washers. The "Projections of America" films were brilliant, moving portraits of America that were unlike any films ever made before, but seventy years later they are forgotten, hidden away in government archives. Narrated by John Lithgow, PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA tells the dramatic story of Riskin and his team, and the risks they took to project a profoundly democratic vision of the nation that would soon emerge as the most powerful on earth.
Doc Pomus’ dramatic life is one of American music’s great untold stories. Paralyzed with polio as a child, Brooklyn-born Jerome Felder reinvented himself as a blues singer, renaming himself Doc Pomus, then emerged as one of the most brilliant songwriters of the early rock and roll era, writing “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “This Magic Moment,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Viva Las Vegas,” and dozens of other hits. Spearheaded and co-produced by his daughter, Sharyn Felder, and packed with incomparable music and rare archival imagery, this documentary features interviews with collaborators and friends including Dr. John, Ben E. King, Joan Osborne, Shawn Colvin, Dion, Leiber and Stoller, and B.B. King, as well as passages from Doc’s private journals read by his close friend Lou Reed.
Actor Dustin Hoffman narrates this decade-spanning documentary that highlights the contributions of Jewish Americans to the most American sport of them all: baseball. Highlights include a rare interview with legendary pitcher Sandy Koufax.
Built around the landmark 1954 legal case Hernandez v. Texas, the film interweaves the stories of its central characters with a broader story of the civil rights movement. It also brings to life the heroic post-World War II struggle of Mexican Americans fighting to dismantle the discrimination targeted against them.
SACCO AND VANZETTI is an 80-minute-long documentary that tells the story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists who were accused of a murder in 1920, and executed in Boston in 1927 after a notoriously prejudiced trial. It is the first major documentary film about this landmark story.
Examines the troubling case of Black Panther leader Dhoruba Bin Wahad (Richard Moore), released after 19 years in prison, when his conviction for allegedly shooting two New York City police officers was overturned on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct.
