Rory Kennedy
Many of us take for granted that commercial air travel is safe. In 2018, with some 10,000 aircraft in service in more than 150 countries, industry leader Boeing had built its reputation on a dogged commitment to safety. But after 346 passengers are killed when two Boeing 737 MAX jets crash less than five months apart, dedicated journalists, surviving family members, and the United States Congress fight to reveal a culture of concealment and deceit within the venerated company.
A close examination of the Whakaari / White Island volcanic eruption of 2019 in which 22 lives were lost, the film viscerally recounts a day when ordinary people were called upon to do extraordinary things, placing this tragic event within the larger context of nature, resilience, and the power of our shared humanity.
This is the remarkable story of an American icon who changed the sport of big wave surfing forever. Transcending the surf genre, this in-depth portrait of a hard-charging athlete explores the fear, courage and ambition that push a man to greatness—and the cost that comes with it.
Examine the remarkable role NASA plays both in our country and for our planet. Covering sixty years and beyond, the film celebrates past accomplishments, investigates current initiatives, and surveys future plans. Follows NASA to the moon, to the surface of Mars, to the outer reaches of our solar system and, above all, back to our home base: Earth.
Many of us assume that the world, or at least the country, is now fully connected, but throughout American classrooms there exists a digital divide. In a shockingly large number of schools, access to technology, connectivity, and teacher-training is nonexistent. Many of those underserved schools are located just a few miles from fully equipped schools with technologically adept teachers in better funded districts. This new film from Rory Kennedy, in which we see the situation through the eyes of students, educators, policy experts, and advocates across the country, clearly lays out the steps we must take a to bring our public education system into the 21st century.
During the chaotic final weeks of the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese Army closes in on Saigon as the panicked South Vietnamese people desperately attempt to escape. On the ground, American soldiers and diplomats confront a moral quandary: whether to obey White House orders to evacuate only U.S. citizens.
In Oct. 2006, the U.S. government decided to build a 700-mile fence along its troubled 2000-mile-plus border with Mexico. Three years, 19 construction companies, 350 engineers, thousands of construction workers, tens of thousands of tons of metal and $3 billion later, was it all worth it? When Arizona recently enacted one of the most extreme immigration laws in the country, the Obama administration responded by filing a lawsuit against the state. This dispute was merely the latest symptom of a greater national problem: the lack of a comprehensive, workable U.S. immigration policy. In its place, lawmakers have resorted to a series of half-measures, the most expensive of which — the U.S.-Mexico border fence — extends through the desert 150 miles south of the Arizona state capital.
This documentary profiles iconic journalist Helen Thomas who has held a front-row seat at White House press conferences for more than 60 years.
An examination of the prisoner abuse scandal involving U.S. soldiers and detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in the fall of 2003.
Xiara Trujillo is a precocious seven-year-old who moved from the Bronx to Maryland with her mom, Aracelli Guzman, four years ago. Though she seems happy hanging out and playing with her pal Melissa, Xiara becomes defensive and emotional when talking about her father, Harold Linares. As we see and learn, Harold is in jail serving a ten-year sentence for weapons possession; Xiara seems to blame his incarceration on her mother, whom she says "kept calling the police." Xiara, who has always been extremely close to her father, acts out with her mother.
Follows a Mississippi family's attempts to deal with an increasingly violent and erratic child.
Covers the key aspects of the world AIDS epidemic through powerful documentary stories about five victims and their communities, on five continents.
This film tells the tale of a close-knit Appalachian family that has changed little in the last 100 years.
