Documentary

His supportive wife couldn’t bet on his talent for him, Chef G had to bet on himself…

Ling teaches Mandarin at a Singapore secondary school, where her subject is regarded as low priority. Her marriage is also falling apart, as she and her husband has been struggling to conceive a child for years. But, an unlikely friendship with a student helps her reaffirm her identity as a woman.

At the foot of the French Alps, students at the renowned Lesdiguières Hotel School are on track to become chefs, headwaiters and housekeepers for the world’s most prestigious hotels and restaurants. These young men and women, most from modest backgrounds, have come to this school to learn how to prepare food, serve and tidy what eventually becomes a carefully crafted choreography. In this film at the crossroads of documentary film and musical, these hopefuls dance and sing their way through the demanding training program; but will their rigorous preparation be enough to impress the famous institutions they dream of working for?

Behind the gates of a palm tree-lined fantasyland, four residents of America’s largest retirement community, The Villages, FL, strive to find happiness and meaning.

For 30 years, legendary filmmaker Terry Gilliam struggled to make a screen adaptation of Don Quixote, including an abandoned attempt chronicled in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. Gilliam never gave up and neither did the documentarians. HE DREAMS OF GIANTS is an epic and stunning culmination of all their efforts, and one of the most intense meditations on the nature and horror of making art ever seen on screen.

In the spring of 2017, four older women and men started the monumental task of choreographing dances with a diverse group of New York seniors, most of whom had never danced on a stage before. Over a few intense months, these choreographers, including the first black artist to have won a Tony for choreography and a 92-year old former dance partner of pioneer Martha Graham, brought to life their ideas and sparked immense joy in the senior dancers. The film documents this unlikely event and, in the process, reveals the heroic dedication and determination of the choreographers and dancers, for whom age does not impede but molds.

An exploration of fear and its effects, this documentary chronicles the events surrounding a 2010 police shooting at UF. Potential racial profiling, an apparent lack of understanding regarding mental health, and fear of the unknown seem to contribute to Kofi, a black student from Ghana, being shot repeatedly in his own apartment.

Cookbook author and environmental activist Diana Kennedy reflects on an unconventional life spent mastering Mexican cuisine.

45 years after the untimely death of martial arts legend and film star Bruce Lee, his story remains more of a myth than of a man whose life was full of complexity and struggle. Combining rare film footage and audio recordings with his own writings and interviews with his closest loved ones, BE WATER is a layered and intimate portrait of an underdog who was able to transcend racism, colonialism, and xenophobia to become of one of the most influential cultural figures of our time.

Pier Kids is a verité documentary that’s inspired by Marlon Riggs’s Black is Black Ain’t and the Maysles brothers Gray Gardens, and Field Niggas by Khalik Allah. The film was made in the moment run and gun guerilla style. The interviews are often on the go to reflect the transience experienced by the characters. Like the work of Marlon Riggs, Elegance the film’s director is character on and off screen. The viewer is offered a type of access that’s rare in documentary films. It’s goal is to shrink the distance between the concepts of racial/gender marginalization by making the experience personal and specific. The film asserts that the individual experience of black queer life is not complete without engaging the community at large. The film is also an act of resistance to traditional storytelling forms. The director wanted to make a film in a visual language that mimics the way the people on screen speak and share knowledge with each other. People appear in this film, form a meaningful connection, and disappear without any explanation. It means so much that the audience experience the sense of loss in a way as similar as possible to what the Pier Kids experience. This is the only way to make their plight palpable so that viewers can no longer play innocent. The film is also about the value of public space for brown and black queer bodies to become their most realized versions of themselves. The film is mostly shot outdoors on purpose. It sees the presence of these bodies in this space as natural and necessary. Pier Kids is directed by the truth of the experience of coming of age outside.

This empathy-inducing documentary brings together three sets of individuals. They each have profoundly personal reasons for existing on different sides of the ideological aisles of three hot-button issues: guns, abortion, and immigration. They aren’t brought together to change one another’s minds though, but rather… to listen.

An amateur photographer, who works as a skycap at Salt Lake City Airport, documents for the last 15 years the disappearing way of life of Cuba’s Campesino farmers, forging friendships and capturing dignity and sacrifice while introducing us to an unforgettable cast of characters.

For years on Saturday night, white authorities in Enfield, N.C. blew a siren, warning Blacks to clear the downtown streets. This curfew was one of many demeaning practices used to keep the Black population separate and unequal. One fateful night, three days after the March on Washington, hundreds of Blacks on the streets of downtown Enfield refused to heed the blowing of the nine o’clock whistle.

The Nine O’clock Whistle tells the story of a dramatic cultural shift that rocked the segregated town of Enfield from 1963 to 1965 through the narratives of Willa Cofield, her former students, and current residents of the town. The video documents the racial indignities, segregation practices, and labor exploitation of the time.

The story offers a supreme example of how the civil rights grapevine grew from one small act of resistance in Enfield to envelope an entire region. The documentary brings hope, spirit and encouragement to those struggling to overcome entrenched, powerful, and oppressive forces.

This probing profile reveals how “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” were targeted/infiltrated by their government.

After losing last year’s championship, equipped with heart, hustle, and hope, the “Boston Renegades” (a women’s tackle football team with players ranging in age from 19-49) are on the path to redemption. These unpaid athletes from a vast spectrum of backgrounds dedicate both their time and their bodies to pursue their passion, all while maintaining full-time careers.

Filmed over 15 years in locations throughout the US, A LIFE’S WORK is a documentary about people engaged with projects they will not complete in their lifetime, projects that could have a positive, profound global effect. It is a meditation on deep time and long-term thinking, something us humans have never been good at but need to embrace now more than ever.

SHTETLERS tells the secret story of small Jewish towns in the former Soviet Union where traditional Jewish life continued for decades after disappearing everywhere else. The film offers the last glimpse into the lives of shtetlers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, scattered all around the world.

When Wuhan went on lockdown, it was nearly impossible to get a clear sense of what was happening. This documentary captures life at the epicenter, including portraits of a couple expecting a baby, quarantined families in a byzantine shelter, medical workers, and a psychologist. In a time when the world needs greater cross-cultural understanding, WUHAN WUHAN is an invaluable depiction of a metropolis joining together to overcome a crisis.

Filmed for over 3 years across countless cities, LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD is the unlikely American tale of a quiet adopted Chinese girl who transforms into a global artistic force. It follows 20-year-old sensation Lily Hevesh (the world’s greatest domino toppler and the only girl in her field) as she rises as an artist, role model, and young woman, proving that passion and artistry really can make dreams come true.

THE DILEMMA OF DESIRE is an exploration of “cliteracy,” and the clash between the power of gender politics and the imperatives of female sexual desire.

Narrated and starring Michelle Rodriguez (Lost, Avatar, The Fast and Furious), THE REVOLUTION GENERATION is a manifesto for today’s youth on the societal forces that have shaped and held back their generation, and how they can deploy their unique strengths to save the climate.

A film about water photographers and the dangers and challenges they face to get the shot seen in magazines and covers all over the world.

With many of its scenes filmed in Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theater, DANGEROUS LADIES utilizes historical photos, dramatic monologues, and even song to look back on the suffragists and their precursors, whose courage ultimately led to women being given the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th amendment.

Emmy nominated filmmaker Craig Foster forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, learning as the animal shares the mysteries of her world in this Academy Award nominated documentary.

LIGO tells the thrilling inside story of the discovery of gravitational waves from deep space (which earned this film’s principal subjects an immediate 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics). The documentary begins with its filmmaker’s innocent arrival at the LIGO Louisiana observatory in September of 2015, and it is then almost immediately swept up in one of the greatest scientific sagas in recent history.