Documentary

 

Frank Simon’s documentary WEEKEND OF A CHAMPION, described as an entertaining vérité look at world champion driver Sir Jackie Stewart as Roman Polanski follows his attempt to win the Monaco Grand Prix will be released in the US by Submarine Deluxe. WEEKEND OF A CHAMPION which had its world premiere at the 2013 Cannes International Film Festival, will be released theatrically across the country beginning November 22nd in NYC, with a nationwide rollout to follow.

In 1971, Motor Racing fan Roman Polanski spent a weekend with world champion driver Sir Jackie Stewart as he attempted to win the Monaco Grand Prix.  Polanski was given intimate access to Stewart’s world for three days, both on the track and off.  The result is an extraordinarily rare glimpse into the life of a gifted athlete at the height of his powers. 

Forty years on, Polanski and Stewart meet once again.  In a remarkable post-script, they discuss the sport, both past and present, with a unique and unmatched perspective.

Presented by Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment’s documentary arm Rat Documentary Films, who first acquired and restored the film, WEEKEND OF A CHAMPION will also be released later on Netflix after its theatrical run. 

http://youtu.be/8DeQcpcV_R8

Read more

IT’S BETTER TO JUMP, a documentary film about the ancient walled city of Akka in northern Israel, inhabited by Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Baha’i, and focuses on the aspirations and concerns of the Palestinian inhabitants who call the Old City home, opens in NYC on November 22, 2013 at The Quad Cinema. The film, directed by Patrick Alexander Stewart, Gina M. Angelone, and Mouna B.Stewart, will also be featured in a number of film festivals including the Boston Palestine Film Festival on October 21st and the Other Israel Film Festival in New York on November 19.

IT’S BETTER TO JUMP is about the ancient walled city of Akka in northern Israel, inhabited by Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Baha’i.  But its history goes all the way back to rule of the Egyptian Pharaohs.  As Akka undergoes harsh economic pressures and vast social change, the present-day situation is causing Arab families to leave the places where they have grown roots for dozens of generations and shaped a rich culture for over a thousand years. This film focuses on the aspirations and concerns of the Palestinian inhabitants who call the Old City home.

Atop a forty-foot, centuries-old seawall in this ancient port city, young people dare to stand along the one-meter thick structure and risk their fate by jumping into the roiling waters below. This perilous tradition has continued for many generations and has become a rite of passage for the children of Akka. Within their current dilemma, jumping from the ancient seawall becomes not only an expression of extreme exhilaration, but also a matter of self-determination. 

 http://youtu.be/zhYiZuRSUxg

Read more

The documentary film MEDORA which premiered at the 2013 SXSW Festival, will open in theaters on November 8 and on VOD on November 12.  MEDORA is directed by Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart, and focuses on the members of the Medora Hornets, a rural Indiana high school basketball team fighting to end their losing streak, as their dwindling town faces the threat of extinction. 

Years ago, Medora was a booming rural community with prosperous farms, an automotive parts factory, a brick plant, and a thriving middle class. The factories have since closed, crippling Medora’s economy and its pride. The population has slowly dwindled to around 500 people. Drug use is common, the school faces consolidation, and as one resident put it, “This town’s on the ropes.”

MEDORA follows the down-but-not-out Medora Hornets varsity basketball team over the course of the 2011 season, capturing the players’ stories both on and off the court. The Hornets were riding a brutal losing streak when we arrived, and the team’s struggle to compete bears eerie resonances with the town’s fight for survival.

MEDORA is an in-depth, deeply personal look at small-town life, a thrilling, underdog basketball story, and an inspiring tale of a community refusing to give up hope despite the brutal odds stacked against them. On a grander scale, it’s a film about America, and the thousands of small towns across the country facing the same fight. As one towns-person told us, “Once we lose these small towns, we can’t get them back.”

MEDORA will open on Friday November 8 at the Village East in New York City and in the Los Angeles area at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena.  In addition, in conjunction with Landmark theaters, Medora will play across the country on November 12 in a series of special screenings at top markets including Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, San Diego, Seattle, Washington DC.

FilmBuff will release MEDORA across all leading Video On Demand platforms in the U.S. and Canada on November 12 including iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, Xbox Video, Sony Playstation and Vudu.

The film will also be available to rent or download directly from the filmmakers at www.medorafilm.com

http://youtu.be/4g3WQ2Nss80

Read more

The first trailer is released for Alex Gibney’s documentary THE ARMSTRONG LIE, which World Premiered at 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and scheduled to be released in limited theaters on November 8th, 2013 by Sony Classics. In THE ARMSTRONG LIE Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney masterfully explores the fall of  disgraced cycling champion Lance Armstrong, following the 2009 Tour de France, making use of his extraordinary access to attain rare interviews with former teammates, alleged doping mastermind Dr. Michele Ferrari, and Armstrong himself.

http://youtu.be/vx3KJn8r8y0

Read more

Maureen Judge’s provocative documentary LIVING DOLLS about individuals obsession with dolls, will have its U.S. Broadcast Premiere on November 4, 2013 on LOGO TV channel.

On a sunny day on a Pennsylvania Interstate, a pleasant middle-aged gentleman named David drives towards Hershey, Pa., with his beautiful travel partner, Bianca.  An unremarkable outing, except that Bianca isn’t real. She’s a life-size, anatomically-correct “living doll,” made of skin-textured latex.

And David? He’s en route to the 5th Annual Doll Lovers Meet to tell all with 20 or so other literal “doll lovers.”  A married man, whose camera-shy wife apparently has come to terms with the “other woman,” David is one of four compelling and unforgettable individuals profiled in Maureen Judge’s documentary Living Dolls.

Their motivations run the gamut from lasciviousness, to loneliness, to devotion to a bizarre esthetic vision. But they share a compulsion to live out a fantasy with representations of the human form collectively known as “dolls” – from Barbies, to sex toys, to sexually-active old-school robots.

“From my previous documentaries that focus on women and their families, I noticed many of my subjects collected dolls and that dolls played an important role in their lives,” says award-winning filmmaker Maureen Judge. “In Living Dolls we see a deep and passionate connection between the collectors and their dolls, and how this relationship offers an outlet for the hidden side of their emotional lives.”

Living Dolls introduces us to individuals whose obsession with dolls mirrors their lives. For Mike – who is gay and lives with his life-partner and parents – his fascination with Barbie dolls is an outgrowth of his sexual identity. Both were forbidden secrets in his childhood, and both were later accepted by Mike’s mother (though not his father).

Debbie is a young British mom who finds herself alone, with children at school and a husband who’d come home from work and immediately dive into X-Box Live with online friends. She began to live a fantasy life with collectible Ellowyne fashion dolls that mirrored her moods and strained the family budget.  “Whatever it was she wishes were different about her life, I wish she had it,” says her frustrated husband Colin.

And disheveled “robot collector” Michael, whose work has been featured in the NYC Museum of Sex and the Smithsonian, is perhaps the hardest to categorize. A quirky artist with a sink, both in disrepair and unreachable, he spends his time buying dolls, taking them apart and reassembling them as retro visions of robots. His aim: to complete a stop-motion film about the sex lives of robots.

http://youtu.be/WIaq5g3jXjs

via press release

Read more

Deborah Koons Garcia’s award-winning film SYMPHONY OF THE SOIL, described as a compelling new documentary that explores the complexity and mystery of soil, will open at Quad Cinemas in NYC on October 11, 2013, and at the Laemmle Music Hall in LA on November 8, 2013.

Filmed on four continents and sharing the voices of some of the world’s most highly esteemed soil scientists, farmers, and activists, the film portrays soil as a protagonist of our planetary story. In a skillful mix of art and science, soil is revealed to be a living organism, the foundation of life on earth. Most people are soil-blind and “treat soil like dirt.” With the knowledge and wisdom revealed in this film, we can come to respect, even revere, this miraculous substance. The film inspires the understanding that treating the soil right can help solve some of our most pressing environmental problems including climate change, dead zones, water scarcity and world hunger.

SYMPHONY OF THE SOIL premiered at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital in 2012.  The film has received an award from The Life Sciences Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic, the Merit Award for Scientific Information from the Montana CINE International Film Festival, and the Cinema Verde Film Festival Food Award. In January 2013, Deborah Koons Garcia received the John de Graaf Environmental Filmmaking Award at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival. 

Deborah Koons Garcia is best known for her film, THE FUTURE OF FOOD, which had a US theatrical release in 2005. It continues to screen all over the world in theaters and film festivals, at food and farming conferences and community screenings. THE FUTURE OF FOOD brought the issues of genetically engineered crops and the corporate control of our food supply to the world stage and helped jumpstart the organic/local food movement.

http://youtu.be/K5QYZ-LRXW4

 

Read more

Director Liz Marshall’s “progressive, consciousness raising” documentary film THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE will open in New York on November 8 at Village East Cinema, followed by Los Angeles on November 15 at Laemmle Music Hall. THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE, which tackles the subject of animals used for food, clothing, entertainment and biomedical research, had its world premiere earlier this year at Hot Docs where it was voted a Top 10 Audience Favorite.

Award-winning filmmaker Marshall directs THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE through the heart and lens of acclaimed animal photographer Jo-Anne McArthur. Haunting and heart-warming, audiences experience a diverse cast of animal subjects rescued from and living within the machine of our modern world. Over the course of a year, Marshall shadows McArthur as she photographs several animal stories in parts of the U.S., Canada and Europe, with each photograph and story serving as a window into global animal industries. This visually arresting one-of-a-kind documentary shines a cinematic light on the animals we don’t easily acknowledge, the “ghosts” who are the animals trapped within the cogs of our voracious consumer world. McArthur’s epic photo project We Animals is comprised of thousands of photographs taken around the world, documenting animals with heart-breaking empathic vividness. THE GHOSTS IN OUR MACHINE charts McArthur’s efforts to bring wider attention to a topic most of humankind strives hard to avoid.

The film has attracted the attention of progressives and celebrities alike, with kudos from Woody Harrelson, Bill Maher, James Cromwell, Bob Barker, and international animal and environmental advocates. Radiohead agreed to have their iconic song, “Give Up The Ghost,” in the film.

http://youtu.be/-sTQpZxqHKU

Read more

LINSANITY, the documentary film about the rise of Asian American basketball player Jeremy Lin, will have its Florida premiere screening on Thursday, October 3rd, and in theaters the following day October 4th 2013.  Directed by Evan Jackson Leong, the film premiered earlier this year at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

LINSANITY traces Lin’s life from his childhood in Palo Alto, California to his rise to prominence in 2012 with the New York Knicks in the NBA.  It shows him overcoming discouragement and racism and achieving success through his faith and desire.

Jeremy Lin came from a humble background to make an unbelievable run in the NBA. State high school champion, all-Ivy League at Harvard, undrafted by the NBA and unwanted there: his story started long before he landed on Broadway.

http://youtu.be/q14ooGPJZBs

Read more

THE PRIME MINISTERS, a documentary film by Richard Trank,that looks at six decades of Israel’s history—from its founding until the early 21st century, will open at the Quad Cinema in NYC on Friday, October 18, and at The Royal in Los Angeles and Town Center in Encino on Wednesday, November 6. A national release will follow.

THE PRIME MINISTERS, the thirteenth production of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s two-time Academy Award^®-winning Moriah Films, is an epic film that looks at six decades of Israel’s history—from its founding until the early 21st century.

Based on the bestselling book by Ambassador Yehuda Avner, the documentary takes the audience inside the offices of Israel’s Prime Ministers, bringing to life never before revealed stories about Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, and Shimon Peres.

With Sandra Bullock as the voice of Golda Meir, Michael Douglas as the voice of Yitzhak Rabin, Christoph Waltz as the voice of Menachem Begin, and Leonard Nimoy as the voice of Levi Eshkol, THE PRIME MINISTERS brings some of the most important events of the 20th and 21st centuries to life.

http://youtu.be/BhSO8N-kuwo 

Read more

DISLECKSIA: THE MOVIE, a documentary that seeks to counter popular misconceptions about Dyslexia, opens in NYC on October 4, 2013 and in LA on October 11, 2013, during National Dyslexia Awareness Month – October.  Directed by Harvey Hubbell V, the film features interviews with prominent Dyslexic celebrities including Billy Bob Thorton, Richard Branson and Joe Pantoliano and business leaders such as real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran prolific television producer Stephen J. Cannell and Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson.

What do Billy Bob Thornton, Stephen J. Cannell and Joe Pantoliano have in common with 1.4 billion children and adults worldwide?  Dyslexia. They are also featured in DISLECKSIA: THE MOVIE, a powerfully touching and entertaining documentary that mixes humor and perspective with insight and analysis.  The film educates and illuminates many misconceptions about dyslexia, while underlining the need for raised awareness, early identification and social change.

Director Harvey Hubbell V explores issues surrounding dyslexia through a very human, personal lens, weaving his own lifelong experience, the research of scientists and the practice of educators, with the life experiences of celebrities, politicians, and adults and children living with dyslexia.

Intergenerational, multicultural and socio-economically diverse, DISLECKSIA: THE MOVIE presents a complete picture and the most current information on dyslexia, promotes positive messaging, explores the power of family and community and is the first film to offer an alternative perspective of dyslexia as a learning difference, rather than a disability. It is a movie that literally changes lives.  Please come see why at one of our anticipated press screenings. 

You and/or someone you know, is affected directly or indirectly by the phenomenon of dyslexia.  The release of DISLECKSIA: THE MOVIE coincides with National Dyslexia Awareness month in October.  The film opens in New York on October 4th, LA on October 11th, a nationwide one night only screening event on October 17th, followed by a city by city theatrical tour with Director Harvey Hubbell V through early 2014.

http://youtu.be/scf7Rpvloh0

Read more

A new trailer has been released for the upcoming documentary INFORMANT, winner of the DOC NYC 2012 Grand Jury Prize, and described as a fascinating portrait of Brandon Darby, a radical left-wing activist who famously became an FBI informant and is now a darling of the tea-party. Directed by Jamie Meltzer and starring Brandon Darby and Scott Crow , INFORMANT will be released in select theaters and VOD on September 13, 2013.

How does a tea party darling become an FBI informant?

INFORMANT is a fascinating portrait of Brandon Darby, a radical left-wing activist turned FBI informant. In 2005, Darby became an overnight hero when he traveled to Katrina-devastated New Orleans and braved toxic floodwaters to rescue a stranded friend. Soon after, he co-founded Common Ground, a successful grassroots relief organization. But over the next few years, he began hiding a shocking secret. After two young protestors were arrested at the 2008 Republican National Convention for suspected terrorism activities, Darby revealed he had been instrumental in their indictment as an FBI informant. Today, having renounced his left-wing past, he is a tea-party darling who writes regularly for the right-leaning web site Breitbart.com.

The only film with access to Darby since his public confession, INFORMANT meticulously constructs a picture of Brandon’s life – before and after the many death threats he has received – through interviews and tense reenactments starring Brandon himself. Darby’s version of events is accompanied – and often contradicted – by evidence from acquaintances and expert commentators, posing complicated questions about trust and the nature of reality. As David Hanners of St. Paul Pioneer Press suggests, “When you interview people about Brandon Darby, you realize that everyone has a different idea of who he is.”

In addition to trying to unlock the mystery of Darby, INFORMANT offers an powerful insider look at the hidden use of informants in contemporary America – an especially timely issue in light of the recent leaks about government surveillance.

http://youtu.be/sTlnlam8ZYM

Read more