The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism

Taking its lead from French artists like Renoir and Monet, the American impressionist movement followed its own path which over a forty-year period reveals as much about America as a nation as it does about its art as a creative power-house. It’s a story closely tied to a love of gardens and a desire to preserve nature in a rapidly urbanizing nation. Travelling to studios, gardens and iconic locations throughout the United States, UK and France, this mesmerising film is a feast for the eyes. The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism features the sell-out exhibition The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920 that began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and ended at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Koyaanisqatsi

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

Tea War: The Adventures of Robert Fortune

In the 19th century, China held the monopoly on tea, which was dear and fashionable in the West, and the British Empire exchanged poppies, produced in its Indian colonies and transformed into opium, for Chinese tea. Inundated by the drugs, China was forced to open up its market, and the British consolidated their commercial dominance. In 1839, the Middle Empire introduced prohibition. The Opium War was declared… Great Britain emerged as the winner, but the warning was heeded: it could no longer depend on Chinese tea. The only alternative possible was to produce its own tea. The East India Company therefore entrusted one man with finding the secrets of the precious beverage. His mission was to develop the first plantations in Britain’s Indian colonies. This latter-day James Bond was called Robert Fortune – a botanist. After overcoming innumerable ordeals in the heart of imperial China, he brought back the plants and techniques that gave rise to Darjeeling tea.

All In This Tea

During the 1990s, David Lee Hoffman searched throughout China for the finest teas. He's a California importer who, as a youth, lived in Asia for years and took tea with the Dali Lama. Hoffman's mission is to find and bring to the U.S. the best hand picked and hand processed tea. This search takes him directly to farms and engages him with Chinese scientists, business people, and government officials: Hoffman wants tea grown organically without a factory, high-yield mentality. By 2004, Hoffman has seen success: there are farmer's collectives selling tea, ways to export "boutique tea" from China, and a growing Chinese appreciation for organic farming's best friend, the earthworm.

Prairie Women

This film illustrates the struggles of Canadian prairies women to achieve a more just and humane society within the farm movement and at large. During the early 1900s, women on the prairies looked for ways to overcome their isolation. Out of the resulting farm women's organizations grew a group of women possessing remarkable intellectual abilities, social and cultural awareness, and advanced worldviews.

The District Nurse

The diary of a typical non-stop working day of a wartime district nurse.

Horse Wrangler

Nando, a young horse wrangler in a rural Mexican village, has taken his own life following a disagreement with his father. Caballerango shows the boy’s family members and townspeople as they reckon with the new realities borne out of this inexplicable tragedy. Each account of Nando’s story reveals a different aspect of this rural town, which is deeply affected by modernization. The confrontation between the centuries-old ways of life and the modern-day world seems to be creating serious identity crises among the younger generation. The story is told in a patient, observational style with methodical shots of the landscape, ranches, and of the two white horses, whom Nando and his father tended to. Those horses, the last to see Nando alive, connect us to an ethereal sensation of almost otherworldly mystical beings.

Honeyland

When nomadic beekeepers break Honeyland’s basic rule (take half of the honey, but leave half to the bees), the last female beehunter in Europe must save the bees and restore natural balance.

The Bapst Brothers, Carriers

The Bapst Brothers: Romain, Maurice and Jacques – whom we will also meet in The Gruyere Chronicle (produced in 1990) – are peasants and carriers and work with their father. In autumn and winter, they bid for the community’s wood, cut down the pine trees and bring down the logs through the snowy woods by horse-drawn sleigh.

Werner We Love You

When Werner Herzog was still a child, his father was beaten to death before his eyes. His mother was overwhelmed with his upbringing and thereupon shipped him off to one of the toughest youth welfare institutions in Freistatt. This was followed by a career as a bouncer in the city's most notorious music club and an attempt to start a family. Today, the 77-year-old from Bielefeld lives with his dog Lucky in a lonely house in the country. Despite adverse living conditions, he has survived in his own unique and inimitable way.

Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry

A cinematic portrait of farmer and writer Wendell Berry. Through his eyes, we see both the changing landscapes of rural America in the era of industrial agriculture and the redemptive beauty in taking the unworn path.

North by Current

Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Using the audio-visual approaches of essay film, first-person cinema vérité, staged actions, and decades of home movies, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current does not seek to investigate a crime, but creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

Still

The documentary tells the story of Uschi, a farmer living free and recluded in the bavarian alps. Shot in epic black and white pictures, Still follows Uschi's life over a ten year period. From an untroubled summer of making cheese through pregnancy and the uncertain future of the parental farm, Matti Bauer portrays Uschi's struggle to keep alive the dream of a way of life that has become rather untypical in this day and age.

Prime Farmland

This documentary film follows farmers and activists fighting together to stop the Indiana Enterprise Center, a mega-sized industrial park planned west of South Bend, Indiana

Bikes for Africa

Bikes for Africa is an entertaining, insightful and moving documentary following the life adventures of Hap Cameron and Mandy Todd, and their attempt to help implement a self sustainable bike workshop in rural Namibia with a container load secondhand donated bikes from Melbourne. The film investigates how a bicycle can fundamentally change the lives of rural Africans, and brings to focus the great works of two-wheeled charities Bicycles for Humanity and the Bicycling Empowerment Network Namibia.

America's Hate Preachers

Director Hannah Livingston spends 6 months tracking two of America's most radical Christian hate groups - a notorious pastor from Arizona and a network of extremist preachers.

Tea

Director Scheffer registered a performance of the Tea Opera by Chinese composer Tan Dun (who won an Oscar in 2001 with his score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Scheffer interlaces the images with interviews with Dun, stage director Pierre Audi and librettist Xu Ying, about the opera and the role tea and oriental philosophy play in this work. Using monochrome, sometimes abstract images (in yellow, blue, red and green), close-ups of plants and flowers and images of the Chinese nature and people (sometimes accelerated or decelerated, sometimes in black-and-white), he mirrors the stylised opera performance and Dun's reflective music.

The Mother

The film chronicles everyday struggle of a Russian woman for “ordinary” happiness of her family.

Ayotzinapa

This film is a story, testimony and documentation of the forced disappearance of 43 student teachers, which exposes the criminal complicity between the police and military authorities, between the political and economic elites and criminal organizations in Mexico, which appear to be different forces, but respond to similar interests.

The Dread

The villagers of El Dorado, Argentina, shy away from doctors. Then again, they hardly need one. They have almost as many cures for ailments and illnesses as there are residents in the village. 65 year old Jorge can also cure the most dreaded ailment of them all, the much feared espanto.

Spring

This is a story about a city guy Nikolai, who will have to go instead of his friend on a rural business trip. A series of funny events, meetings and the beauty of the Yakut village encourage Nikolai to make an important decision in his life…

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 4

The fourth instalment in the surreal Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared videos in which the three returning characters enter a sinister digital world through their computer.

Moscow Suburbs Elegy

While people's artist of the USSR Sergey Cherkassky "fights" with the role of king Lear, trying to understand the psychology and actions of Shakespeare's character, his own large family presents him with one riddle after another. His daughter Elena, who broke off her unsuccessful marriage, falls in love with rock musician Dean Makarov. The grandfather does not know that the son of his late daughter - in-law Sonia is gay, who is madly in love with the same Dean. All Sonya's daughter, Lala, "twists" the love with a student Vakhtangov school, the future actor Misha, but dreams of a luxurious life abroad. Son of Sergei Andreevich, father of Vitya and Lyali - Andrey - General, Hero of Russia, serving in Chechnya.

Beyond the Barricade

Family man Poul Berg is tempted by a questionable investement offer and indebts himself to a point where suicide seems like the only way out. His widow struggles to maintain even a simple standard of living for herself and their three children, who are fatally marked by their fathers deed. (stumfilm.dk)

Johan Falk: De 107 patrioterna

It's a beautiful day in Slottsskogen, Gothenburg idyllic city park, when suddenly the unthinkable happens - gunfire amidst all people. Two gangsters shooting game against each other and a large police operation starts. The conflict grows rapidly to involve several gangs from Gothenburg underworld. GSI switched to try to identify a new thread which proves to be both larger and better armed than any other. The only clue is a tattoo on one of the killed gang members.

John

A day in the life of John Lennon, alive and well in modern-day New York City. The former Beatle squabbles with a security guard, commiserates with his best friend over lunch, and upsets a bully.

Retando A La Muerte

Playdate

Two unsuspecting thieves break into the wrong house and must face a sinister home owner.

Roberte

Roberte, 40, resistant during the war, Calvinist and anticlerical, is deputy to the chamber and inspector of Censorship. She married Octave, an old Catholic aesthete, professor of canon law, whom she saves from impeachment for collaboration during the war. He submits his wife to a perverse custom: the laws of hospitality or prostitution of the wife by the husband.

Symptoms

A 17-year-old girl faces a life with an adverse perspective, where her social life, her experiences, her happiness and emotional stability only depend on a thread that is too damaged.

Joy in Moscow

Pretty Joy and her friend come to Moscow to shoot a commercial. A taxi driver, who recruits girls for an underground organization run by a distant descendant of Rasputin, suggests they visit the Rasputin Museum. During the tour, the girls are hypnotized by the evil character, who hypnotizes his victims before using their charms to seduce the rich tourists.

UFC 187: Johnson vs. Cormier

UFC 187: Johnson vs. Cormier was a mixed martial arts event held on May 23, 2015, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Fight Club (Russian version)

The Russian version of the movie "Fight Club" is not just a Russian version of a well-known cult film, it is the result and of the hard work of two young men and their love for cinema, Alexander Kukhar (GOLOBON-TV) and Dmitry Ivanov (GRIZLIK FILM) , who are responsible for this project, from the development of its idea and the selection of the cast, to the organization of filming and financial support. Filming lasted a whole year. Everyday work, constant trips, searching for suitable film sets and an exhausting schedule - all this was not in vain and resulted in an unusually amazing and original project - the film "Fight Club", created in the very heart of southern Russia, in the city of Krasnodar, by two young people

Natural Selection

When a dutiful, albeit barren Christian housewife discovers that her devout husband has suffered a stroke at a sperm bank where he's been secretly donating his seed for the past 25 years, she leaves her sheltered world and starts off on a journey to find his eldest biological son - a mullet-headed, foul-mouthed ex-con with whom she develops an odd but meaningful relationship.

Apart

'Apart' follows several entangled lives in Los Angeles: Mario, a young man who feels rejected by an older man named Saleheddine; John, a jaded hustler and drug dealer who keeps happiness at bay, and who works closely with Christine, the wife of Saleheddine; Dre, Saleheddine's best friend, who is left astonished by the sudden break up with his girlfriend; and Mannu, whose lover, Dre's brother, dies overseas.

Back to Hannibal: The Return of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

This is yet another telling of the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as the two try to clear their friend Jim of murder charges.

D-I-M, Deus in Machina

A world, as spotless, bleak and cold as its uniform design is not a good place for a dreamer like Lutz. With as much courage as desperation, relying only on his skills and imagination, he faces a terrible fate and fights for his personal happy end.

Malvinas: El Legado