Brenda Way, founder and artistic director of ODC, is a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation Community Awards "for creating a community hub through dance. She built the largest, most comprehensive contemporary dance center in the nation, and through it she inspires dancers and audiences, cultivates artists, and engages the community. Brenda is a choreographer, writer, and community activist who strengthens our region's cultural connections." - San Francisco Foundation

2024
The siren call of the ivory-billed woodpecker lures a New York based tantra and sex educator into the swamps of the American South on a 17-year journey to prove the iconic bird still exists. Along the way, he finds a tendril of hope in the face of climate change.
2024

2024

The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life poetically narrates the story of a community of Iranian Americans who have made the San Francisco Bay Area their home over the past five decades. The film explores Iranian immigration through turbulent histories of dissent, revolution, war, and separation, and the reinvention of identity in a new land and culture. The Dawn is Too Far highlights how Iranian students, activists, and artists have navigated displacement while drawing on and influencing Bay Area culture. This community offers a more nuanced story of the Iranian diaspora—the ways that this community enriches the region where they live, work, and build families. The Dawn is Too Far undermines the tired and overplayed news headlines that are dominated by narratives of enmity and mistrust between the government of Iran and the U.S., to offer a more humane understanding of the how people's lives and the sacrifices they make are part of the larger story of immigration.
2024

A year has passed since the attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines, and it is still unclear what actually happened at the bottom of the Baltic Sea at that time. ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and DIE ZEIT have joined forces for a large-scale investigation and set out to find the alleged perpetrators. An investigation into one of the most spectacular criminal cases of our time, an attack of historic proportions.
2023

A documentary short that uses fish to explore identity and belonging in a metropolis.
2023

Narrated by Uncle Jack Charles and seen through the eyes of Indigenous prisoners at Victoria’s Fulham Correctional Centre, this documentary explores how art and culture can empower Australia's First Nations people to transcend their unjust cycles of imprisonment.
2021

Seemayer Studios presents a new documentary about the American Hotel in downtown Los Angeles and the Arts District that surrounds it. Since 1979, the American Hotel has been the beating heart of a rich community of artists who began moving into the deserted factory buildings between Alameda and the Los Angeles River.
2017

A love story, portraying the dilemmas and inevitable consequences of ambition. It is a film about a woman's fight for independence, a woman trying to succeed with her own art in the extremely competitive world of dance.
2017

2017

'Consumed' is a cinematic journey through the landscapes, mines, factories, and shipyards of Chinese production. Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, a single worker narrates his story to the rhythm of industrial machinery. The film reveals the hidden world behind our everyday objects, re-framing complex supply chains that feed global desires as a narrative performance played out at a global scale, and investigating the place of the individual within this context.
2016

Documentary film about the controversial movement of women seeking ordination in the Roman Catholic Church. More and more women are answering a spiritual calling to take on the vestments of priesthood and seek equality in the religion they love. These daring women have risked banishment, loss of livelihood, and even excommunication to take part in what the Church calls illicit ordinations. The Vatican has vowed to end this threat to the male hierarchy, even forbidding the mere discussion of female priests. The papacy has reached a time of crisis and the controversy over women's role, and their place in the Church, must be addressed if the Vatican is to have any relevance in the 21st century.
2011

MAQUETTE is an excursion into the world of dance and other cultural activities in Toulon: “There is a film that I didn’t complete. I shot it in Châteauvallon with a dance group called Artefact. A rough cut of it exists entitled MAQUETTE, but that’s all I did with it.”
1990

In interviews, various actors and directors discuss their careers and their involvement in the making of what has come to be known as "cult" films. Included are such well-known genre figures as Russ Meyer, Curtis Harrington, Cameron Mitchell and James Karen.
1989

Hunting Season deals with the wave of homosexual murders that plagued São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s. With street statements and cultural and artistic figures such, such as Zé Celso, Jorge Mautner, Roberto Piva and others.
1988
In 1986, Billy Joel released the album titled The Bridge on July 29th on Columbia Records. Go behind the scenes with Billy and learn about the songwriting and recording process behind the album.
1986

A group of filmmakers shadow some glamour photographers in order to discover the skill involved in getting 'magic' to appear on the photos.
1963

1939
In the vastness of the Iranian desert, young artists strive for freedom, community, and the preservation of their cultural heritage in the ancient caravanserai of Deyr-e Gachin, while facing the harsh conditions of their surroundings.
How does a dying working class town end up betting its future on art? With 80% of its downtown buildings closed, North Adams, Massachusetts united blue-collar locals with art world luminaries to transform economic failure into America's largest center for contemporary art, MASS MoCA. A film by North Adams native Nancy Kelly, DOWNSIDE UP is about the tentative, dangerous notion of hope in a city widely viewed as hopeless.