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- A film following the lives of two inner-city Chicago boys who struggle to become college basketball players on the road to going professional.
- Filmmaker Bing Liu searches for correlations between his skateboarder friends' turbulent upbringings and the complexities of modern masculinity.
- A documentary on the late Vivian Maier, a nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs earned her a posthumous reputation as one of the most accomplished street photographers.
- How could one woman steal $53 million without anyone noticing? All the Queen's Horses tells the story of Rita Crundwell as self, the perpetrator of the largest case of municipal fraud in American history.
- The life and career of the renowned film critic and social commentator, Roger Ebert.
- The incredible story of Manhattan Project scientist Ted Hall, who shared classified nuclear secrets with Russia.
- In 1995, director Steve James (of 'Hoop Dreams') returned to rural Southern Illinois to reconnect with Stevie Fielding, a troubled young boy to whom he had been an "Advocate Big Brother" ten years earlier.
- A year in the life of a city grappling with urban violence.
- A journey through the beloved world of children's picture books, led by three contemporary stars of the new "golden age" of kids' lit, using, archival access, untapped insights, and stop-motion paper animation to explore timely new work.
- Five families struggle with the ups and downs of cancer treatment over the course of six years.
- A small financial institution called Abacus becomes the only company criminally indicted in the wake of the United States' 2008 mortgage crisis.
- Follows students, teachers and administrators in suburban Chicago's Oak Park and River Forest High School over the course of a year.
- In a divided America, Van Jones attempts to pass a landmark criminal justice bill - and finds himself under fire from all sides.
- Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate skeptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe they live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to help Americans recognize, and free themselves from, a logic that is already destroying the Earth.
- After a young Chinese student goes missing on an American university campus, her family travels to the U.S. for the first time, hoping to unravel the mystery of her disappearance.
- A modern, multifaceted look at the city of Chicago.
- In a time when the world needs greater cross-cultural understanding, WUHAN WUHAN is an invaluable depiction of a metropolis joining together to overcome a crisis.
- The legal battles of the great American boxer against being conscripted into the US military during the Vietnam War.
- On Easter Island, the most isolated community in the Pacific uses lessons learned from their past to solve environmental and social challenges brought on by booming tourism and rapid development.
- A life and death story about extreme heat, the politics of "disaster" and survival by zip code.
- Three homeless teenagers brave Chicago winters, the pressures of high school, and life alone on the streets to build a brighter future.
- Explores the work of four women who are shattering myths and lies that women are being told about their sexual desire and their bodies.
- It is America of the 1950s and 1960s, when a woman's most important contribution to society is generally considered to be her ability to raise happy, well-adjusted children. But for the mother whose child is diagnosed with autism, her life's purpose will soon become a twisted nightmare. Looking for help and support, she encounters instead a medical establishment that pins the blame for her child's bizarre behaviors on her supposedly frigid and detached mothering. Along with a heartbreaking label for her child, she receives a devastating label of her own. She is a "refrigerator mother". Refrigerator Mothers paints an intimate portrait of an entire generation of mothers, already laden with the challenge of raising profoundly disordered children, who lived for years under the dehumanizing shadow of professionally promoted "mother blame." Once isolated and unheard, these mothers have emerged with strong, resilient voices to share the details of their personal journeys. Through their poignant stories, Refrigerator Mothers puts a human face on what can happen when authority goes unquestioned and humanity is removed from the search for scientific answers.
- Former indie film "guru" John Pierson takes his family to Fiji for one year to run the world's most remote movie theater.
- Edith and Eddie, ages 96 and 95, are America's oldest interracial newlyweds. Their love story is disrupted by a family feud that threatens to tear the couple apart.
- For two years, filmmaker Maria Finitzo followed five strong young women between the ages of 13 and 17. Unlike the myriad reports, books and "specials" that focus on young women as passive and powerless, 5 Girls explores the ways these girls discover the resources necessary to successfully navigate the rocky waters of adolescence. It focuses on the positive ways girls learn to adapt to challenge in their lives by understanding and exercising choices, by believing in their strength when others do not and by resisting powerful cultural messages, which urge them to be silent.
- The feature documentary Searching for Mr. Rugoff is the story of Donald Rugoff, who was the crazy genius behind Cinema 5, the mid-century theater chain and film distribution company. Rugoff was a difficult (some would say impossible) person but was also the man who kicked art films into the mainstream with outrageous marketing schemes and pure bluster. Rugoff's impact on cinema culture in the United States is inestimable, and his influence on the art film business-from the studio classics divisions to the independent film movement to the rise of the Weinsteins-is undeniable. Yet, mysteriously, Rugoff has become a virtually forgotten figure. The story is told through the eyes of former employee Ira Deutchman, who sets out to find the truth about the man who had such a major impact on his life, and to understand how such an important figure could have disappeared so completely.
- Oscar-winning filmmaker Haskell Wexler returns to his hometown of Chicago to document the Occupy Movement's demonstrations against the 2012 NATO Summit.
- The clichés of nature documentaries ignore a key landscape feature: villagers just off-camera, who navigate the dangers and costs of living with wildlife. The Maasai of Kenya and Namibia's Himba - two of Earth's oldest cattle cultures - are in the midst of upheaval. After a century of "white man conservation," which displaced them and fueled resentment towards wildlife, they are vying to share the wildlife-tourism pie. Community-based conservation, which tries to balance the needs of wildlife and people, has been touted as "win-win.' The reality is more complex. Charting the collision of ancient ways with Western expectations, MILKING THE RHINO tells intimate, hopeful and heartbreaking stories of people facing deep cultural change.
- An investigation of the wrongful death of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in Texas on December 7, 1989, after prosecutors ignored evidence inculpating a man, who bragged to friends about committing the crimes of which DeLuna was convicted.
- Usama Alshaibi, an Iraqi-American filmmaker, confronts the issues on identity and perception toward Arab-Americans in today's society. Alshaibi conveys to the audience that Arab-Americans should not be put into one, big, identical group; rather the culture consists of a diverse group of identities and voices.
- Hard Earned, a six-part documentary series for Al Jazeera America, follows five families around the country to find out what it takes to get by on 8, 10, or even 17 dollars an hour.
- Could Basic Income revive the American Dream? The BOOTSTRAPS docuseries shows what happens in the lives of everyday Americans when they receive $1,000 a month, no strings attached. BOOTSTRAPS follows a two-year experimental UBI trial to reveal what basic economic security means to each of the subjects, and what it could mean to all of us.
- Saving Mes Aynak follows Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori as he races against time to save a 5,000-year-old archaeological site in Afghanistan from imminent demolition. A Chinese state-owned mining company is closing in on the ancient site, eager to harvest $100 billion dollars worth of copper buried directly beneath the archaeological ruins. Only 10% of Mes Aynak has been excavated, though, and some believe future discoveries at the site have the potential to redefine the history of Afghanistan and the history of Buddhism itself. Qadir Temori and his fellow Afghan archaeologists face what seems an impossible battle against the Chinese, the Taliban and local politics to save their cultural heritage from likely erasure.
- An elderly "outsider" artist living in at-risk conditions befriends two filmmakers and causes controversy at his first major exhibition.
- During the recession, City of Trees follows three trainees and the directors of a stimulus-funded green job training program designed to put unemployed people back to work by caring for parks in DC.
- Charting the intersection between rural America and contemporary graphic design.
- 63 Boycott chronicles the Chicago School boycott of 1963 when more than 200,000 Chicagoans, mostly CPS students, marched to protest the segregationist policies of CPS Superintendent Benjamin Willis, who placed aluminum mobile school units on vacant lots as a permanent solution to overcrowding in black schools. The Kartemquin film features then and now interviews with organizers and participants of the boycott with never-released 16mm footage of the march and student interviews. 63 Boycott and its companion website will provide a modern perspective on the impact and legacy of this forgotten history 50 years later as it reconnects the participants to each other and the event itself.
- ON BEAUTY follows fashion photographer Rick Guidotti, who left the fashion world when he grew frustrated with having to work within the restrictive parameters of the industry's standard of beauty.
- The work and times of American artist, Leon Golubfrom 1985 to his death in 2004, taking us from images of interrogations and torture to the ironies and dark humor of old-age. Over-sized canvasses with screaming mercenaries and rioters urinating on a corpse; photographic fragments used as information and inspiration; the making of one of Golub's death-squad series from start to finish and to its exhibition in Derry, Northern Ireland; news footage from around the world; museum-goers' responses; disturbing music: out of these disparate elements the film creates a dialogue between image and audience that reflects what Golub calls the "disjunctiveness" of modern life. In the aftermath of September 11, and with the photos from Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Golub's ferocious, monumental work of the 70's and 80's (used to this day by human rights groups such as Amnesty International) remain prophetic and essential, even as they give way to the snarling dogs, erotica, and wise-cracking meditations on mortality which began to appear in his paintings in the 1990's. When we revisit Golub in 2001, the aging artist tells us "my work these days is sort of political, sort of metaphysical, and sort of smart-ass. I'm playful and hostile. Let's see if you can keep up with my slipping around." Half empty canvasses are dotted with birds of prey, smoking skulls, neon chorus girls, pierced hearts, and snickering text: "Bite your tongue. Save your ass." The film captures an historic artistic journey, shared with his wife and studio partner of 50 years, the prominent anti-war and feminist artist, Nancy Spero. We see them as each other's most valued critic and most ardent supporter. Golub continued in his later paintings to "report" on what's going on in the world, but he does it with the kind of dissonances and discontinuities that led Theodor Adorno in his essay on Beethoven to proclaim, "In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes."
- Raising Bertie is a longitudinal documentary feature following three young African American boys over the course of six years as they grow into adulthood in Bertie County, a rural African American-led community in Eastern North Carolina. Through the intimate portrayal of these boys, this powerful vérité film offers a rare in-depth look at the issues facing America's rural youth and the complex relationships between generational poverty, educational equity, and race. The evocative result is an experience that encourages us to recognize the value and complexity in lives all too often ignored.
- Now We Live on Clifton follows 10 year old Pam Taylor and her 12 year old brother Scott around their multiracial West Lincoln Park neighborhood. The kids worry that they'll be forced out of the neighborhood they grew up in by the gentrification following the expansion of DePaul University.
- Supper club restaurants were the hot dinning trend in the mid twentieth century. They provided a place for people to spend their evenings enjoying cocktails, home cooked, high quality food and entertainment. The supper club scene slowly faded from the rest of the country, but kept a strong hold in Wisconsin due to a culture that allowed it to thrive. Around for decades, supper clubs in Wisconsin have been able to hold their own style and traditions. While chain restaurants continue to expand and threaten their future, supper clubs are fighting to survive while continuing to offer the same exceptional dinning experience and a personal touch that is not seen in the modern lifestyle of dine and dash. Old Fashioned: The Story of the Wisconsin Supper Club takes you into this uniquely Wisconsin institution.
- In 1864, George Pullman began selling his famous railroad sleeping cars which helped him build a vast industrial empire that was supposed to last forever. In 1981, however, Pullman workers found themselves in the midst of a fight not only for their jobs but the future of the American rail car industry. One hundred years of government, union and corporate policies are traced in this engaging story.
- First General Motors shuts down their century-old plant in Janesville, Wisconsin. The the state blows up in political turmoil over the future of unions. We follow workers and town leaders trying to reinvent their town and lives amid an economic and political crisis that grips their community and the entire nation.
- Suspended between life and death, a Mexican American mother explores uncertainty through dance.
- The last American officials were airlifted out of Vietnam from the embassy roof in Saigon in 1975. Most have never returned. In 1998, World T.E.A.M. (The Exceptional Athlete Matters) Sports organized a 16-day, 1100 mile bicycle expedition through once war-torn Northern and Southern Vietnam. A non-profit organization that focuses on events for the disabled, World T.E.A.M. Sports drew an array of veterans from the U.S. and Vietnam, as well as celebrity riders like Greg La Monde and Senator John Kerry. Those without use of their legs used special hand-powered bikes, while blind riders pedaled from the back of tandem bikes. What is immediately apparent on the veterans' arrival in Vietnam is that their biggest handicaps are the ghosts of their pasts. Past enemies ride as one team in peace across a landscape they once killed to stay alive on. Much more than a race, the ride is an exorcism; the real finish line is the painful emotional confrontation each must make alone along the way.
- In the heart of the American Midwest, three women take on entrenched political systems in their fight to reshape local politics on their own terms.
- Mossadegh & Me is a film about how we remember the 1950s in Iran, and the CIA coup that ousted then Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. In 1979, the Iranian Hostage Crisis shocked the world. The crisis received more non-stop press coverage than any other event since World War II. Americans, for the first time, asked, "Why do they hate us?" As an Iranian-American kid, director Gita Saedi Kiely asked that question, too. That's when her father told her about Mohammed Mossadegh.