Browse Movies : 2017 : Documentary : C

In the summer of 2015, legendary musician David Byrne staged an event at Brooklyn's Barclays Center to celebrate the art of Color Guard: synchronized dance routines involving flags, rifles, and sabers.

A documentary chronicling the barrier-breaking Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas whose international fame peaked after a triumphant return to the stage at the age of 71.

Features new interviews with singer-songwriter Chris Brown and reveals long-awaited answers about his passion for making music, his tumultuous and much publicized relationships, and the pitfalls of coming of age in the public eye. It also includes brand-new concert footage, behind-the-scenes access and special interviews from Usher, Jennifer Lopez, DJ Khaled, Mary J Blige, Mike Tyson, Rita Ora, Jamie Foxx, Terrence Jenkins and more.

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City is a story about our global urban future, in which nearly three-fourths of the world’s population will live in cities by the end of this century. It’s also a story about America’s recent urban past, in which bureaucratic, “top down” approaches to building cities have dramatically clashed with grassroots, “bottom up” approaches. The film brings us back mid-century, on the eve of the battles for the heart and soul of American cities, about to be routed by cataclysmically destructive Urban Renewal and highway projects.

The film details the revolutionary thinking of Jane Jacobs, and the origins of her magisterial 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she singlehandedly undercuts her era’s orthodox model of city planning, exemplified by the massive Urban Renewal projects of New York’s “Master Builder,” Robert Moses. Jacobs and Moses figure centrally in our story as archetypes of the “bottom up” and the “top down” vision for cities.

They also figure as two larger-than-life personalities: Jacobs—a journalist with provincial origins, no formal training in city planning, and scarce institutional authority—seems at first glance to share little in common with Robert Moses, the upper class, high prince of government and urban theory fully ensconced in New York’s halls of power and privilege. Yet both reveal themselves to be master tacticians who, in the middle of the 20th century, became locked in an epic struggle over the fate of the city.

The documentary takes viewers into the warzone of ISIS-occupied Syria, where a band of anonymous activists known as Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently wage a counteroffensive against the terrorist group’s campaign of propaganda and misinformation. Armed with video cameras, these intrepid citizen journalists risk their lives to spread the truth about life under ISIS.