Browse Movies : 2012 : Rating Not Available : Documentary : T

An urgent expose of the culture wars being fought within America's public school system, The Revisionaries is a behind-the-scenes look at the Texas State Board of Education's decade-defining conference on state textbook standards. As Texas is the country's single largest textbook buyer--and publishers are forced to re-write content to comply with their educational standards--the board's decisions have the ability to affect the future of American education.

Anand, a modern Indian yogi and guru, asks his student Adam to join him on a motorcycle expedition through the highest passes of the Indian Himalayas.

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.

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.

Jon Shenk's The Island President tells the story of President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, a man confronting a problem greater than any other world leader has ever faced--the literal survival of his country and everyone in it. After bringing democracy to the Maldives after thirty years of despotic rule, Nasheed is now faced with an even greater challenge: as one of the most low-lying countries in the world, a rise of three feet in sea level would submerge the 1200 islands of the Maldives enough to make them uninhabitable. The Island President captures Nasheed's first year of office, culminating in his trip to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, where the film provides a rare glimpse of the political horse-trading that goes on at such a top-level global assembly. Nasheed is unusually candid about revealing his strategies--leveraging the Maldives' underdog position as a tiny country, harnessing the power of media, and overcoming deadlocks through an appeal to unity with other developing nations. When hope fades for a written accord to be signed, Nasheed makes a stirring speech which salvages an agreement. Despite the modest size of his country, Mohamed Nasheed has become one of the leading international voices for urgent action on climate change.

Ian Cheney moves from Maine to New York City and discovers an urban sky almost completely devoid of stars. The film poses a deceptively simple question, "What do we lose, when we lose the night?" and leads viewers on a quest to understand how light pollution affects people and the planet.

In this world of wonders there are still places that have not been smoothed over with the shallow surfaces of Western commercialism. This film is a personal Valentine to a life filled with amazing, exotic, beautiful and fearsome places for the world. The amazing thing is not just the visual demonstration of how fleeting life is, but a meditation on how the decisions that seem momentous on our time scale are flickering snapshots of life on this planet, too small to be observed by most. Somehow the music combined with technology becomes a personal experience that makes the earth and its inhabitants seem touchingly fragile and full of wonder.