Legendary rumba musician Alberto Zayas serves as a guide for this vibrant journey through Cuban musical history and culture. The short features interviews, footage of impromptu street performances, and studio recordings.
Alberto Zayas, Isaura Mendoza

Boundary-pushing Russian dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein selects renowned French composer Maurice Ravel to compose the music for her next ballet. Ravel ends up creating his greatest success ever: Boléro.
2024

The film brings us under the skin and into the mind of La Chana, a talented Gypsy flamenco dancer as she returns to the stage to give a final seated performance after a 30-year break. Along the way, La Chana reveals the secret behind her disappearance when she was at the peak of her career.
2016

In 1928, Lady Heath became the first person to fly solo from Cape Town to London. Eighty-five years later, Tracey Curtis-Taylor set out in a vintage biplane to fly that adventure again. Following Tracey as she retraces the journey, The Aviatrix is more than just a film about the rapture of flying – it’s a story about living life on your own terms and having the courage and determination to realise your greatest dreams.
2015

Three women whose paths never cross, yet are bound by the shared experience of losing their mothers during adolescence, exploring each one’s sometimes-complex relationship with her mother.
2014

Iverson is the ultimate legacy of NBA legend Allen Iverson, who rose from a childhood of crushing poverty in Hampton, Virginia, to become an 11-time NBA All-Star and universally recognized icon of his sport. Off the court, his audacious rejection of conservative NBA convention and unapologetic embrace of hip hop culture sent shockwaves throughout the league and influenced an entire generation. Told largely in Iverson's own words, the film charts the career highs and lows of one of the most distinctive and accomplished figures the sport of basketball has ever seen.
2014

Carole Laganière dives deeply into personal territory in this beautifully crafted exploration of absence and loss and its painful effect on daily lives. Inspired by her mother’s steadily advancing Alzheimer’s and the inevitability of her estrangement, Laganière weaves their story with the stories of others wrestling with loss: Ines, an immigrant who returns to her birth country of Croatia to find the mother who abandoned her during the war; Deni, an American author who’s finally able to search for his Quebec roots; and Nathalie, who’s desperately looking for her missing sister. Through their experiences the film ponders how absence is often the catalyst for a quest—a quest for information, understanding and often acceptance. Through its many voices, Absences speaks to us of the immense fragility and resiliency of human emotions.
2014

Acclaimed Montreal band Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra is one of a growing number of rock groups to have accepted an infant into their touring tribe. Touring with children is both costly and complicated, yet SMZ are determined to combine family life and being on the road with the band's deep political commitment.
2013
Why would two New York-based filmmakers dedicate five years of their lives to following three white, Jesus-loving, spandex-clad men from the Bible Belt, particularly when the world of documentary filmmaking has generated its fair share of films concerning sensationalistic religious expression and contact sports in recent years? Because it's not about wrestling, and it's not about Jesus. Against a bizarre and entertaining backdrop, and through a motley cast of characters, we are reminded of what connects us all, lest we forget what it means to be human.
2013
An in-depth documentary about the making of David Cronenberg's feature film, Cosmopolis (2012), an adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel of the same name.
2012

On an island in the Indian Ocean, the Comoros archipelago, unoccupied houses await the arrival of their owners. These places without souls and half built abound across the landscape. The myth of eternal return is repeated in the Comorian diaspora.
2011
Using her husband's struggle with cancer as a case in point, filmmaker Linda Garmon explores the status of the fight against the devastating disease and looks at the lives of the medical professionals dedicated curing it. Interweaving personal testimony with science, this compelling documentary also includes a panel discussion with cancer experts led by broadcast journalist and cancer survivor Linda Ellerbee.
2008

Utilizing the 1920s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, the epic Indian tale of exiled prince Ramayana and his bride Sita is mirrored by a spurned woman's contemporary personal life, and light-hearted but knowledgeable discussion of historical background by a trio of Indian shadow puppets.
2008

The '40s and '50s were a classic period in New York City nightlife, when the saloonkeeper was king and regular folks could drink with celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason. In this documentary, Kristi Jacobson profiles her grandfather, the king of kings: Toots Shor of the eponymous restaurant and saloon, which was once the place to be seen in Manhattan. Edward R. Murrow called Toots Shor the owner of America’s greatest saloon. He became the unlikely den-mother to the heroes of America's golden age. Politicians and gangsters, sports heroes and movie stars - Sinatra, Gleason, DiMaggio, Ruth, Costello, Eisenhower, Nixon, Warren - for 30 years, they all found their way to Toots' eponymous saloon on New York's West 51st Street.
2007

Life and Debt is a 2001 American documentary film that examines the economic and social situation in Jamaica, and specifically how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank's structural adjustment policies have impacted the island.
2001

A group of high school teens steal a van full of music equipment and pretend to be a band called "Truckstop" in order to stay on the road. When the band starts playing gigs, their sound is largely inconsistent and incoherent, however, over time the band becomes increasingly competent in their musicianship.
1994

It is El Salvador, 1989, three years before the end of a brutal civil war that took 75,000 lives. Maria Serrano, wife, mother, and guerrilla leader is on the front lines of the battle for her people and her country. With unprecedented access to FMLN guerrilla camps, the filmmakers dramatically chronicle Maria's daily life in the war.
1991

Broadway style songs are used to tell this interesting story of an ingenious orphan who gets involved in matchmaking and striving for inter-racial understanding in 1956 Alabama.
1990

Earth is visited by a race of aliens, who issue an ultimatum: either peace or complete destruction.
1986

In a time when girls were forbidden to study religious scriptures, a Jewish girl masquerades as a boy to enter religious training and unexpectedly finds love along the way.
1983

The first uncensored documentary about the Soviet Union ever made by an outsider. The film takes viewers to 12 of the 15 states of the former USSR.
1972