Browse Movies : 2012 : Documentary

A first-ever big-screen look at the international superstar’s life both on and off stage.

Acclaimed photographer Gregory Crewdson’s 10-year quest to create a series of haunting, surreal, and stunningly elaborate portraits of small-town American life — filmed with unprecedented access as he makes perfect renderings of a disturbing, imperfect world.

Puts a very human face on the debate around health care by taking us behind the doors of Oakland's Highland Hospital, a safety-net hospital fighting for survival while weathering the storm of a persistent economic downturn. The film, employing a composite day-in-the-life structure offers a raw, intimate, and often uplifting look at how patients, staff and caregivers cope with disease, bureaucracy, frustration, hope and hard choices.

Chronicles the 90-year-old icon - both onstage and off...past and present. The film is both an intimate love story and a rarefied journey inside Broadway's most glamorous era.

A feature documentary that will follow seven people from around the world as they travel to Comic-Con in San Diego.

Exposes the abuse of power in the Catholic Church and a cover-up that winds its way from the row houses of Milwaukee Wisconsin, through the bare ruined choirs of Ireland's churches all the way to the highest office of the Vatican.

In 1968, two producers went to a downtown Detroit bar to see an unknown recording artist – a charismatic Mexican-American singer/songwriter named Rodriguez who had attracted a local following with his mysterious presence, soulful melodies and prophetic lyrics. They were immediately bewitched by the singer, and thought they had found a musical folk hero in the purest sense – an artist who reminded them of a Chicano Bob Dylan, perhaps even greater. They had worked with the likes of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, but they believed the album they subsequently produced with Rodriguez – Cold Fact – was the masterpiece of their producing careers.

A Whisper to a Roar tells the heroic stories of courageous democracy activists in five countries around the world – Egypt, Malaysia, Ukraine, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. From student leaders to prime ministers and heads of state, these activists share their compelling personal stories of struggle, past and present, with their countries’ oppressive regimes.

July 4, 1976, Entebbe, Uganda - Led by Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, crack Israeli commandos burst inside a non-descript airline terminal, killing stunned terrorists and evacuating 103 hostages. A lone shot sounds in the night, and Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, lay dead. Follow Me is an intimate story that penetrates the tough exterior of the only soldier killed in Entebbe. Using Yonatan's own poetry, letters and prose, the film delves into the mind of this reluctant young hero, where duty to family and country, love, turmoil, and doubt over the core value of war raged.

The legacy of the American Beats in Paris during the heady years between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsberg’s poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel they had heard about at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the freedom that the Latin Quarter of Paris might provide.

After leading the USSR to a gold medal (and victory over the U.S.A.) at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Sarunas Marciulionis and Arvydas Sabonis were poster boys for their oppressor's sports machine. Four years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, they emerged as symbols of democracy, helping their country break free from the shackles of Communism, and willing newly independent Lithuania to the medal stand at the Barcelona Olympics. "The Other Dream Team" documents the Lithuanians' experiences behind the Iron Curtain for 50 years, where elite athletes were subjected to brutalities of Communist rule. As they hid from KGB agents and feared for their lives, Lithuania's basketball stars always shared a common goal--to utilize their athletic gifts to help free their country.

A journey into the lives of a mother polar bear and her two seven-month- old cubs as they navigate the changing Arctic wilderness they call home.

A Palestinian farmer's chronicle of his nonviolent resistance to the actions of the Israeli army.

Featuring Tony Hawk and directed by Stacy Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys), Bones Brigade: An Autobiography is a very personal story of a group of young, dorky, strait-laced American kids who did the impossible through a combination of work, skill, passion, and the belief that anything is possible: they succeeded in turning skateboarding from a fringe pastime to a thrilling action sport filled with extraordinary gravity-defying feats, and generated a billion dollar industry. The Bones Brigade was the team they formed that revolutionized not only their lives, but international popular culture as well.

Nobody noticed when thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent died in her apartment above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. When her skeleton was discovered three years later, her television was still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of Joyce's life- not even a photograph. Who was Joyce Vincent? And how could this happen to someone in our day and age--the so-called age of communication? Dreams of a Life is Carol Morley's quest to discover who Joyce was and how she came to be so forgotten.

Despite a lack of obvious similarities between Siberia and Tokyo, a thriving model industry connects these distant regions. Girl Model follows two protagonists involved in this industry: Ashley, a deeply ambivalent model scout who scours the Siberian countryside looking for fresh faces to send to the Japanese market, and one of her discoveries, Nadya, a 13-year-old plucked from her rustic home in Russia and dropped into the center of bustling Tokyo with promises of a profitable career. After Ashley's initial discovery of Nadya, they rarely meet again, but their stories are inextricably bound. As Nadya's optimism about rescuing her family from financial hardship grows, her dreams contrast against Ashley's more jaded outlook about the industry's corrosive influence.

Eleven veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan join an expedition to climb the 20,000 foot Himalayan giant Mount Lobuche. With blind adventurer Erik Weihenmayer and a team of Everest summiters as their guides, they set out on an emotional and gripping climb to reach the top in an attempt to heal the emotional and physical wounds of the longest war in U.S. history.

Volunteers race against the clock to fly thousands of WWII veterans to Washington, DC to see the memorial constructed for them in 2005, nearly 60 years after the War. The trips are called "Honor Flights" and for the veterans, who are in their late 80s and early 90s, it's often the first time they've been thanked and the last trip of their lives.

The 24-hour journey is full of surprises that deep ly move all who are involved. It’s uncommon for World War II veterans to talk about the War, but the Honor Flight experience brings their stories out. Many veterans say, with the exception of their wedding day and the birth of their children, the trip is the best day of their life.

The film traces the rise of one of the world’s premier architects, Norman Foster and his unending quest to improve the quality of life through design. Portrayed are Foster’s origins and how his dreams and influences inspired the design of emblematic projects such as the largest building in the world Beijing Airport, the Reichstag, the Hearst Building in New York and works such as the tallest bridge ever in Millau France.