Browse Movies : 2003 : Rating Not Available : Documentary

A moving documentary from director Jennifer Dworkin, "Love and Diane" tells the hard tale of Diane, whose crack cocaine drug addiction in the 1980s resulted in social services taking each of her six children out of her care for more stable lives in foster homes and group homes. Now Diane is clean, and the oldest of her children, Love, is 18-years-old, HIV positive, and has a baby boy. Diane tries to reunite the family, which consists of five teenagers (one of her sons died), but life for them is not easy. At the beginning of the film they are all living together in a Brooklyn, New York apartment. But slowly things go awry. Diane and Love quarrel and social services comes to take the baby away. Neglect charges are filed against Love and social services separates her sisters into another living situation. Their younger brother stops going to school and then also leaves the apartment, no longer interested in living with his mother or with his family. A moving and emotional look at a family struggling against difficult odds to do what's best, LOVE & DIANE is mostly made up of conversations between Diane, Love, and the family. They talk about the hardships they've endured, how they got through difficult times, and how they pray for a brighter future. All combined, it is a truly affecting portrait of a family trying to keep together.

This documentary is an intimate portrayal of several months at a one-room elementary schoolhouse in a small village (Saint-Etienne Sur Usson) in rural France, where a single teacher, Georges Lopez, gives his small class of thirteen students, ages 3-10, the sort of attention that is dwindling in many other schools in France (and elsehwere), where crowded classrooms are the norm.

Avery has finally gotten his life back on track. A competitive swimmer, he had to drop out of college to support his girlfriend, Krista, and their son, Jordan. He's back on the swim meet circuit, and starting to have some success. When he's approached by a college scout after winning his latest race, he goes out to celebrate with his friends, Cashmere and Dre. In an instant, Avery's luck is about to run out...

This documentary captures what happened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 12th, 2000 when Bus 174 was highjacked by an armed young man, Sandro do Nascimento, with a dozen passengers. Nascimento threatened to kill all of the passengers, but eventuallly agreed to surrender, as TV cameras were rolling and an entire nation was glued to their screens watching the event take place. Then, a police officer decided to fire at Nascimento anyway, accidentally killing one of the female passengers instead. What followed was a revolt among the city's population, enraged at police brutality. The film intertwines the story of the standoff with biographical information about Sandro do Nascimento, including his childhood as a survivor of the "Candelaria" child mass murders in the early 1990s, and the trauma of seeing his mother stabbed to death in front of him.

"Step Into Liquid" is a personal glimpse into the world of surfing from the original family of surf films. It's a film for surfers as well as non-surfers alike because it is a film about people with a passion for life. "Step Into Liquid" is a collection of stories about people who live for surfing. The cross-section of characters featured in this film come from many walks of life, but share one thing in common, the need to surf. For many of them, surfing is merely a hobby. For others, surfing is an identity and maybe even a lifestyle. For a fortunate and talented few, it is a profession. And, for one, it is a salvation.

On April 11th, 2002, Irish documentarians Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain were in Venezuela, with the intention of making a movie about the nation's left-leaning (and Castro-inspired) democratic president, Hugo Chavez, whose support comes mostly from the country's impoverished, who make up 80% of the population (versus past leaders who were often supported by the country's big money minority, like the petroleum industry). Although they did accomplish that, the film took a seriously unexpected turn when the filmmakers found themselves in the heart of a coup d'etat, trapped in the president's palace as Chavez's right-wing oligarchic opposition overthrew the leader. Chavez was able to return to power within 48 hours, buoyed by public support, but this film captures those frightening moments and days in which a nation's political future was fought over using both bullets and manipulation of the media. Venezuela's television networks, all owned by oil companies except for the state channel which the coup brought down, reported distorted interpretations of the coup, as proven by this movie's footage, which was then picked up by international news organizations like CNN. This movie also addresses what the White House thought about this coup in the world's fifth largest producer of oil (providing 14% of the United States' petroleum).

In this documentary, Nathaniel Kahn examines the life and career of his father, Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974), whose work included the Salk Institute and the Parliament and Capitol Buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh, before dying of a heart attack in a Penn Station bathroom in 1974, unidentified and broke despite having been one of the century's most influential architects. Louis Kahn also led three different personal lives, with three different families, fathering a daughter with his wife, and a child each by two other lovers (one of whom was the mother of Nathaniel, who was 11 when his father died).

At Dominquez High School in Compton, California, basketball is valued above all else. The end of the year is marked by a traditional cycle of proms, riots and graduation. And there hasn't been a play at the school in over twenty years. In an effort to make a change, English teacher Catherine Borek attempts to mount a theatrical production of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town,"the classic American play about the classic American town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. In the process she takes her fledgling students on a journey of self discovery. With no budget and no stage, Ms. Borek chooses "Our Town" for its universal and timeless themes of community, family, love and loss, life and death, with the hope that her students might see themselves reflected in the roles they play.

This documentary, filmed over six years (1996-2002), is about Mark "Gator" Rogowski, a pro skateboarding star in the '80s currently serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of a woman he barely knew. The film mixes old footage of Gator skating and carousing with recent interviews with such skateboarding icons as Tony Hawk and Stacey Peralta. It examines what drove a charming, rich, and famous bad-boy skater to kill.

This documentary investigates the stories of the dozens of thousands of Jews who emigrated to Israel in 1948 from Iraq, making up 25% of the new nation's Hebrew population. Leaving an Iraq in the 1940s in which Jews lived in peace with Christian and Muslim neighbors, these emigres found themselves pitched into a new political environment in which they were not exactly welcomed, with Ben Gurion once saying of the Iraqi Jews, "We kicked out good Arabs and brought in bad Jews". Director Samir interviewed a quartet of elderly survivors from that time (who also happened to be Communists, which was another reason they were not welcomed), along with NYU film historian Ella Shohat, to make a film that combines their testimony with light-hearted fragments of the last 100 years of Jewish culture as documented in the movies, to demonstrate the sometimes thin, sometimes thick lines between Arabs, Jews, and those who have claim to both heritages (ie, the "Mizrahim", or Eastern Jews).

A chronicle of the true story of Kurt Gerron, a well known and beloved German-Jewish actor, director and cabaret star in Berlin in the 1920's and '30's. Among his greatest accomplishments, he co-starred with the legendary Marlene Dietrich in the film classic, "The Blue Angel." He also sang "Mack The Knife" in the original production of "Threepenny Opera." Ultimately, Gerron was captured and sent to a concentration camp, where he was ordered to both write and direct a pro-Nazi propaganda film.

This documentary explores the lives and worlds of women who explore their masculine sides as "drag kings," using a legendary Drag King Night in New York as a starting point to follow some of the women into their lives, whether their drag persona be an identity they assume part or full-time. Drag kings in London and Zurich are also interviewed, including some who are experimenting with hormones to accelerate their masculinity.

This documentary examines the short life of Australian-born Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) whose resume included being a famous fashion designer, a 1980s gay nightclub icon in London (as host of the Taboo nightclub), outrageous performance artist, lead singer of the art rock group Minty and the costume designer for the Michael Clarke Dance Company.