THE REAGAN SHOW[/caption]
Pacho Velez’s and Sierra Pettengill’s THE REAGAN SHOW is an all-archival documentary about the original performer-president’s role of a lifetime: Leader of the Free World. A hit at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, the movie will open in New York at the Metrograph Theater and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Monica Film Center on Friday, June 30, with a national rollout to immediately follow. It will also become available on VOD on July 4.
Teasing apart the spectacle at the heart of finger-on-the-button global diplomacy, THE REAGAN SHOW follows Ronald Reagan’s rivalry with charismatic Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, tracing how the Communicator-in-Chief uses his public relations chops to overcome Soviet mistrust, the objections of a skeptical press corps and the looming threat of WW III. Chock full of wit and political irony, and told solely through 1980s network news and videotapes created by the Reagan administration itself, the film explores Reagan’s made-for-TV approach to politics as he faced down the United States’ greatest rival.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07BHVGm-Y6sDocumentary
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THE REAGAN SHOW, A Doc Look at the First TV President, Opens June 30 in NY & LA | Trailer
[caption id="attachment_22526" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] THE REAGAN SHOW[/caption]
Pacho Velez’s and Sierra Pettengill’s THE REAGAN SHOW is an all-archival documentary about the original performer-president’s role of a lifetime: Leader of the Free World. A hit at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, the movie will open in New York at the Metrograph Theater and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Monica Film Center on Friday, June 30, with a national rollout to immediately follow. It will also become available on VOD on July 4.
Teasing apart the spectacle at the heart of finger-on-the-button global diplomacy, THE REAGAN SHOW follows Ronald Reagan’s rivalry with charismatic Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, tracing how the Communicator-in-Chief uses his public relations chops to overcome Soviet mistrust, the objections of a skeptical press corps and the looming threat of WW III. Chock full of wit and political irony, and told solely through 1980s network news and videotapes created by the Reagan administration itself, the film explores Reagan’s made-for-TV approach to politics as he faced down the United States’ greatest rival.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07BHVGm-Y6s
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Award-winning LGBT Documentary POLITICAL ANIMALS will be Released on DVD and VOD on June 6th | Trailer
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Political Animals[/caption]
The award-winning LGBT documentary Political Animals, directed by Jonah Markowitz (Shelter), and co-directed by Tracy Wares (DP: Bomb It, Gay Republicans), will be released on DVD and VOD on June 6th in the U.S. and Canada via Gravitas Ventures.
Documentary Political Animals is an inspiring portrait of four defiant California politicians – all out women – who bravely fought hatred and homophobia through pioneering legislative efforts in California to make political history, paving the way for success in the fight for Equality, and to create lasting and significant social change.
Political Animals celebrates the legendary civil rights victories of the first four openly gay elected California state politicians – who were all women: Carole Migden, Sheila Kuehl, Jackie Goldberg, and Christine Kehoe. An inspiring portrait of four defiant politicians who refused to let hatred and homophobia stop them from making history and achieving legal recognition for LGBT people throughout California and the United States.
Political Animals documents the tough struggles they endured together, and celebrates their pioneering success in the fight for Equality and the sweet victories these unforgettable women created to pave the way for lasting and significant social change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9jikA5Ip4
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FilmRise to Release Ramona S. Diaz’s Sundance Winning Documentary MOTHERLAND | Trailer
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Motherland[/caption]
Ramona S. Diaz’s documentary Motherland which world premiered earlier this year at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, will be released in the Summer by FilmRise.
Motherland, which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Commanding Vision at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, takes us into the heart of the planet’s busiest maternity hospital in one of the world’s poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. The film’s viewer, like an unseen outsider dropped unobtrusively into the hospital’s stream of activity, passes through hallways, enters rooms and listens in on conversations. At first, the surrounding people are strangers. But as the film continues, it’s absorbingly intimate, rendering the women at the heart of the story increasingly familiar. Three women—Lea, Aira and Lerma—emerge to share their stories with other mothers, their families, doctors and social workers. While each of them faces daunting odds at home, their optimism, honesty and humor suggest a strength that they will certainly have to summon in the years ahead.
Diaz said: “I’m very much looking forward to partnering with FilmRise on the release of our film after successful premieres at festivals both in the U.S. and abroad. We feel strongly that the film will strike a chord with viewers, all the more so in today’s political and cultural climate.”
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Award-winning Documentary, A CAMBODIAN SPRING to US Premiere at Brooklyn Film Festival | Trailer
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A Cambodian Spring[/caption]
The award-winning documentary, A Cambodian Spring, from UK video journalist/filmmaker Chris Kelly, will have its US premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival.
The film won the Special Jury Prize earlier this year at 2017 Hot Docs in Toronto.
A Cambodian Spring is an intimate and unique portrait of three people caught up in the chaotic and often violent development that is shaping modern-day Cambodia. Spending 9 years on the film (shooting for 6 of those years) the film charts the growing wave of land-rights protests that led to the ‘Cambodian Spring’ and the tragic events that followed. This film is about the complexities – both political and personal, of fighting for what you believe in.
“A Cambodian Spring is for me a deeply personal film, which took 9 years to complete,” says director Chris Kelly. “It is an exploration of what motivates us, what gives our lives meaning, and what happens when our personal desires colour and shape our actions. It is an unapologetically subjective portrait of my time in Cambodia, of the people who shared their lives with me and of the shifting landscapes, both physical and emotional, that I found there.”
The film also includes a riveting original soundtrack by the UK’s best known electronic music artist James Holden.
2017 Brooklyn Film Festival Screening Time and Location
showtime: 7:30 pm | Wednesday June 7 | Wythe Hotel
showtime: 8:30 pm | Sunday June 11 | Wythe Hotel
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Bill Morrison Unearths a Treasure Trove of Silent-Era Cinema in DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME | Trailer
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First Avenue in Dawson City, 1898. – DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME[/caption]
Bill Morrison’s mesmerizing new film, Dawson City: Frozen Time will open in New York on Friday, June 9 at the IFC Center with a national rollout to follow.
Dawson City: Frozen Time pieces together the bizarre true history of a collection of over 500 nitrate film prints from the 1910s and 1920s, which were lost for decades until being discovered buried under a hockey rink in a former Klondike gold rush town. Using these rare silent movies and a rich sampling of newsreels and historical photographs, fused with an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers (Captain Fantastic), this haunting cinematic mosaic depicts the unique history of Dawson City by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation. In telling this story of “one of the most astonishing and unexpected bonanzas in cinematic history” (Lawrence Weschler, Vanity Fair), director Bill Morrison conjures the forgotten ties between the fledgling movie industry and Manifest Destiny in North America.
The films of Bill Morrison combine a documentarian’s thirst for uncovering hidden histories with an archivist’s obsession for recovering lost cinematic treasures. Morrison’s Decasia (2002) was heralded by Errol Morris as “the best film ever made” and critic J. Hoberman called it “the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin de siècle.” His other notable films include The Miners’ Hymns (2011), a document of the early 20th-century coal mines of northern England, and The Great Flood (2013), a collaboration with Bill Frisell inspired by the Mississippi River Flood of 1927.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxrwpvQZIs
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Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Drops First Official Trailer for CANT’T STOP WON’T STOP: A BAD BOY STORY
Last night Sean “Diddy” Combs took the stage at the Billboard Music Awards to drop the first official trailer for the highly anticipated documentary Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story, that world premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story, produced by Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Heather Parry, alongside executive producers Michael Rapino, Andre Harrell and Alex Avant, explores the passion and personalities of Bad Boy and will be available on Apple Music on June 25.
Directed by Daniel Kaufman, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story is an exclusive look behind the scenes at the history of Bad Boy through a complex portrait of the label’s mastermind, Sean “Diddy” Combs, as he tries to reunite his Bad Boy Family in the course of a frantic three week rehearsal period. As they prepare to celebrate the label’s 20th anniversary, the film traces Bad Boy’s emergence in Harlem and Brooklyn, follows it’s meteoric rise, explores the tragic killing of Biggie Smalls, and celebrates Bad Boy’s influence in reshaping music, fashion, marketing and culture.
“I knew this was a story that should be shared with the world. Heather Parry and Live Nation Productions, and Director Daniel Kaufman, helped create this very special documentary,” says Sean Combs on the making of the film. “Now I’m blessed to also be working with Apple Music to showcase the film and share Bad Boy’s history and impact with fans. The support Live Nation, Apple Music and everyone on the team has given to this project is a true testament to the Bad Boy legacy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtqIL4L8HmE
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ON A KNIFE EDGE Coming of Age and Activism Doc on American Indian Young Man to World Premiere at SF DocFest
On A Knife Edge, from director Jeremy Williams, a documentary film five years in the making, follows Guy Dull Knife and his son, George, as George comes of age on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. The film will world premiere June 10 and June 15 at the 16th annual San Francisco Documentary Film Festival.
“On a Knife Edge” is a father-son story about Guy and George Dull Knife that unfolds over the course of George’s coming-of-age journey. Under his father’s guidance, George becomes an activist and organizer, and begins identifying with the role of traditional Lakota warrior, which he views as his family legacy. He commits himself to the fight for social justice, but struggles with adapting the old ways and his father’s expectations to the modern-day realities of growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Told largely through George’s eyes, the film offers a privileged glimpse into the youngest generation of the American Indian Movement, as well as George’s own evolving notions of Native identity, manhood, and duty.
His story is interwoven with animated sequences that depict five generations of family history, narrated by his father and based on paintings he has created to explore the continuum of their fight through the generations.
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Margaret Byrne’s Award-Winning Documentary RAISING BERTIE Opens June 9
RAISING BERTIE is a six-year portrait of three young African American men coming-of-age in North Carolina’s rural Bertie County. Like MOONLIGHT and BOYHOOD before it, the intimate portrayal of these young men interconnects narratives of family, youthful innocence, and isolation with the will to succeed in the face of formidable odds.
The feature-length documentary RAISING BERTIE, winner of Best Documentary Feature at Atlanta Docufest, is produced by Kartemquin Films and executive produced by Jermaine Cole aka rapper J. Cole.
This powerful vérité film delivers an authentic and tender portrait of the lives of three young boys – Reginald “Junior” Askew, David “Bud” Perry, and Davonte “Dada” Harrell – as they face a precarious coming of age in Bertie County, North Carolina.
Director Margaret Byrne brings audiences deep into the emotional lives of these young men as they try to find room for themselves in a place where life is dictated by a slow pace, opportunities are limited and tenuous family ties simultaneously offer comfort and heartache. Shot over the course of six years, RAISING BERTIE is an experience that asks us to see this world through their eyes: boys navigating between finishing high school and an elusive first job, as millions of young Americans similarly take their next step into an inherited idea of adulthood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1iNY7Fh3PA
Set in Bertie County, a rural African American-led community in Eastern North Carolina, Raising Bertie offers viewers an authentic and tender portrait of the lives of three young boys – Reginald “Junior” Askew, David “Bud” Perry, and Davonte “Dada” Harrell – as they face a precarious coming of age.
Rural minorities like the youth in Bertie represent some of the nation’s most vulnerable and least visible. Like many rural areas, Bertie County struggles with a dwindling economy, a declining population and a high school graduation rate below the state average. The Perdue chicken processing plant is Bertie’s last major employer, and the 27 prisons that lay within a 100 miles of Bertie cast a long shadow. Bertie County is predominately African American – its challenges compounded by generations of economic and educational discrimination and exclusion.
Bertie also is the home of Junior, Bud, and Dada, three engaging young men with difficult pasts attending high school at The Hive, an alternative school for at-risk boys. There, we meet Vivian Saunders, a passionate community activist from Bertie County. At The Hive a combination of respect, socio-emotional learning, and mentorship helps to put these young men’s lives on track. The Hive is a beautiful model of effective, supportive, and innovative interventions that help to improve opportunities and the quality of life for African-American boys and young men in Bertie.
But, when budget shorgalls lead the Board of Education to close The Hive, Junior, Bud, and Dada must return to Bertie High School and a system that once failed them.
This raw and starkly poetic Kartemquin vérité documentary weaves the young men’s stories together as they navigate school, unemployment, violence, first love, fatherhood, and estrangement from family members and mentors, all while trying to define their identities.
Intimate access depicts an honest portrayal of the boys’ perspectives and the caring adults in the community who understand what it means to take care of their own. The film is an in-depth look at issues facing many of rural America’s youth of color and what happens in the everyday lives of young people caught in the complex interplay of generational poverty, economic isolation, and educational inequity. Raising Bertie is an experience that asks us to see this world through their eyes and incites recognition and understanding of lives and communities too often ignored.
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Civil Rights Doc THE FREEDOM TO MARRY will be Released Digitally on June 6th
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THE FREEDOM TO MARRY[/caption]
THE FREEDOM TO MARRY, the untold story of how same-sex marriage became law of the land, will be released digitally on June 6th via Ro*Co Films in the U.S. and Canada.
THE FREEDOM TO MARRY follows Evan Wolfson, the architect of the marriage movement, attorney Mary Bonauto, and their team through their decades long battle, culminating in a dramatic fight at the United States Supreme Court. More than the saga of one of the most importnant civil rights stories of our time, this is an inspiring tale of how a real change occurs, even against the biggest odds.
Directed by veteran doc filmmaker Eddie Rosenstein, produced by Jenni Olson & Amie Segal. After a successful national theatrical run this spring, THE FREEDOM TO MARRY will now be available digitally in June, timed to national LGBT pride celebrations this summer.
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THE SKYJACKER’S TALE, Documentary Opens in NY on June 30
THE SKYJACKER’S TALE from award-winning Canadian filmmaker Jamie Kastner gives unprecedented access to one of the top five most wanted US fugitives in Cuba. The documentary film, an official selection of 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, will open in New York on Friday, June 30th at the Village East with a national release to follow.
Ishmael Muslim Ali (formerly LaBeet) is the American convicted of murdering eight people on a Rockefeller-owned golf course in the US Virgin Islands. After years of trying to get his conviction overturned, he took matters into his own hands and hijacked an American Airlines plane full of passengers to Cuba on New Years Eve 1984, and got away with it. Until now.
Thirty years on the FBI’s most wanted list and against the backdrop of his looming extradition to serve eight consecutive life sentences in the US, the film recounts the hijacking that got him here, re-examines his original trial and reveals a gross miscarriage of justice. In a story that is more relevant than ever with racially charged police brutality and injustice constantly in the headlines, THE SKYJACKER’S TALE captures LaBeet / Ali’s first interview since the hijacking and includes never before seen footage.
Is he a heartless criminal or a victim? The audience must decide. But what emerges is a picture of American government and law enforcement attitudes and actions toward their own population that are shockingly similar to the headlines of today.
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Watch Trailer for Documentary ‘Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS’
Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS chronicle Syria’s descent into the unbridled chaos that allowed the rise of the Islamic State, better known as ISIS. Pulling from nearly 1,000 hours of stunningly visceral footage – from that of a family living under ISIS control that finally fled to Turkey, to Kurdish fighters in Sinjar and Shia militias in Iraq and even to al-Qaidaaffiliated fighters in and around Aleppo and Raqqa – Junger and Quested cover the ISIS catastrophe from multiple angles and feature interviews with top experts from around the world. Consequently, the filmmakers, who previously collaborated on a trio of films about the war in Afghanistan (“Restrepo,” “The Last Patrol” and “Which Way is the Front Line From Here”), capture the Syrian war’s harrowing carnage, political and social consequences, and, most important, its human toll, while painting an alarming picture of the west’s role in the creation of ISIS.
Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS from Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and best-selling author Sebastian Junger and his Emmy-winning filmmaking partner, Nick Quested, will be released theatrically in NY and LA, and air globally on National Geographic in 171 countries and 45 languages on Sunday, June 11 at 9/8c.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7XzmDaIIDY
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Albert Maysles’s Final Film IN TRANSIT to Open on June 23 | Trailer
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In Transit, Albert Maysles[/caption]
After a world premiere at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, Albert Maysles’s final film In Transit will receive its first theatrical engagement this June 23 to 29 in New York City at the Maysles Cinema and Metrograph simultaneously.
In Transit is directed by legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter) in collaboration with co-directors Lynn True, Nelson Walker, Ben Wu and David Usui. The culmination of Maysles’s lifelong passion for capturing the stories of train passengers, and styled in the tradition of Direct Cinema, the film unfolds as a series of interconnected vignettes.
Ranging from overheard conversations to moments of deep intimacy, in which travellers share their fears, hopes and dreams, In Transit takes place entirely aboard Amtrak’s Empire Builder, the country’s busiest long-distance route. A journey into the hearts and minds of these everyday Americans, the directors explore the essence of what it is to be a citizen of America today.
In the space between stations, where ‘real life’ is suspended, we are swept into a fleeting community that transcends normal barriers. To some passengers, the train is flight and salvation, to others it is reckoning and loss. But for all, it is a place for personal reflection and connecting with others they may otherwise never know.
“We are thrilled to bring Albert’s long gestating, final masterwork to New York audiences in this special weeklong engagement,” said Erika Dilday, Executive Director of Maysles Documentary Center. “This is a wonderful opportunity to see this acclaimed film in the uptown cinema he created specifically for celebrating documentary filmmaking.”
“We are honored to have produced this moving portrait of modern American life that could not be more essential viewing for a nation that is struggling with its contemporary identity.”
The documentary was produced by Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem—the uptown independent film house and a filmmaking education hub that was founded by Albert Maysles in 2005. The center is now run by the Maysles family and a cooperative of artists and educators who continue to coordinate the cinematic programming and educational workshops he envisioned.