A moving film about the passage from life to death, End Game is a portrait of the last days of those in palliative care in two San Francisco Bay Area medical facilities pioneering new paradigms for end-of-life decisions. Courtesy of Netflix.
Carl grew up a sharecropper on 22 acres in rural Iowa, which he now calls The Promised Land. A philosopher, inventor, and farmer, he shares with us the deeply intricate workings of his projects, (including a full span bridge he built with his hands), how they are connected to the land which was given to […]
NYC PREMIERE A casualty of the digital revolution, Polaroid instant film and cameras were meant to fade quietly into oblivion when the company stopped production in 2008. Following three enthusiasts bent on keeping the instant dream alive, director Willem Baptist takes viewers on a hallucinatory quest to discover the secret chemical formula for Polaroid film. […]
WORLD PREMIERE The Mauritania Railway is a 704-kilometer line linking the iron-mining center of Zouerat with the port of Nouadhibou. Atop a hopper car, we journey through vast Saharan landscapes with the people who rely on the train for their survival.
NYC PREMIERE Winner of the Grand Jury Award at the SXSW Film Festival, People’s Republic of Desire explores the phenomenon of China’s live-streaming showrooms, where ordinary people can find legions of fans and financial rewards. Hao Wu profiles two unlikely stars of this online world—a karaoke singer and a rags-to-riches comedian—as they seek fame, fortune […]
NYC PREMIERE A short documentary following Tim, an Asian-American 18-year-old, who has 3 million followers on Instagram and spends most of his time online. Although Tim usually shares funny memes on his massively popular page, he occasionally posts about mental health. As the film explores his reason for these posts, we discover that he has […]
NYC PREMIERE An experiment in virtual education, the School in the Cloud learning lab is a high-tech, self-directed education center built in an Indian village accessible only by boat and rickshaw. The brainchild of 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra, the lab connects children in remote areas who have never encountered the Internet before with […]
Unexpected moments and unusual discoveries. The story of a fake news writer in a Macedonian town is a Fake News Fairytale (UK, 14 min., Kate Stonehill) for the post-truth era. The Traffic Separating Device (Sweden, 15 min., Johan Palmgren) is installed in downtown Stockholm to keep cars out of the path of buses. Tungrus (India, […]
History is made, for better or worse. The Happiness Machine (USA, 24 min., Rebecca B. Blumhagen) profiles philosopher, inventor and farmer, Carl, who grew up a sharecropper on 22 acres in rural Iowa which he now hopes to pass on to his children as a gift of place. Using entirely archival footage, In the Absence […]
NYC PREMIERE Filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin (Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, Our New President) takes a provocative look at how new technology makes robots more human and humans more robotic. His film’s title comes from three recent incidents where robots have caused the death of humans. But Pozdorovkin also examines how robots are job killers, replacing […]