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Agents of Change: The Longest Student Strike in U.S. History
From the well-publicized events at San Francisco State in 1968 to the image of black students with guns emerging from the takeover of the student union at Cornell University in April 1969, the struggle for a more relevant and meaningful education became a clarion call across the country in the late 1960s. Through the stories of the young men and women who were at the forefront of these efforts, Agents of Change examines the untold story of the racial conditions on college campuses and in the country that led to these protests, revealing how unprepared these institutions were when confronted by demands for black studies programs, safer housing, fairer judicial proceedings, and changes to democratize the institutions. The film's characters were at the crossroads of change and controversy at a pivotal time in America's history.
Back to Burgundy: Ce qui nous lie
Anticipating their father’s imminent death, three siblings reunite at their home in Burgundy to preserve the vineyard that ties them together in this tender and modern tale of familial strife and resilience from director Cédric Klapisch.
Baraka
In the months before the war in Iraq, Abdel and Umayr, two brothers are forced apart. Months later, with the war in full swing, they meet again, but neither of them are the same.
Behind the Shield: The Power & Politics of the NFL
Celebrated author and Nation magazine sports editor Dave Zirin tackles the myth that the NFL was somehow free of politics before Colin Kaepernick and other Black NFL players took a knee. BEHIND THE SHIELD digs deep into the history of the league, and navigates a stunning excavation of decades of archival footage and news media. Zirin traces how the NFL, under the guise of “sticking to sports,” has promoted wars, militarism, and nationalism; glorified reactionary ideas about manhood and gender roles; normalized systemic racism, corporate greed, and crony capitalism; and helped vilify challenges to the dominant order as “unpatriotic” and inappropriately “political.” The result is a case study not only in the power of big-time sports to disseminate stealth propaganda and reinforce an increasingly authoritarian status quo, but also the power of activist athletes to challenge this unjust status quo and model a different, more democratic vision of America.
Black Art: In the Absence of Light
At the heart of this feature documentary is the groundbreaking “Two Centuries of Black American Art” exhibition curated by the late African American artist and scholar David Driskell in 1976. Held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this pioneering exhibit featured more than 200 works of art by 63 artists and cemented the essential contributions of Black artists in America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibit would eventually travel to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Brooklyn Museum. The film shines a light on the exhibition’s extraordinary impact on generations of African American artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-century art world. ©2021 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO® and all related programs are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.
Classes and Object-Oriented Programming
Learn about an exciting approach to programming called object-oriented design, which bundles functions together with data into a series of objects, whose tools and properties can be defined in a single class. Try your hand at this powerful technique by constructing a bank account program.
Electricity and Electronics
What is the difference between electricity and electronics? Begin your study of modern electronics by examining this distinction, and observe how electronics use the basic properties of electric circuits in a more sophisticated way. Witness firsthand how resistance is described with Ohm's law, and learn how to measure electric power.
Fatima
Fatima lives on her own with two daughters to support: 15-year old Souad, a teenager in revolt, and 18-year old Nesrine, who is starting medical school. Inspired by a true story and the poetry of the North African writer Fatima Elayoubi, who immigrated knowing very little French and slowly taught herself the language. A patient, reflective study of a woman pressured by her children and her neighbors alike to assimilate into a culture of which she's wary.
The Internet of Things
Technology is quickly transforming our lives with marvelous tools: smart thermostats that automatically adjust the temperature of our homes, self-regulating insulin dispensers, medication management systems, and more. But these technologies come with a cost in terms of the data they aggregate. Who owns the data? How can it be used? What are the responsibilities of the data collectors?
Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women
In this new, highly anticipated update of her pioneering Killing Us Softly series, the first in more than a decade, Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics in distorted and destructive ideals of femininity. The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes -- images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality. By bringing Kilbourne's groundbreaking analysis up to date, Killing Us Softly 4 stands to challenge a new generation of students to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence.
Manufactured Landscapes: The Art of Edward Burtynsky
A striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.
The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.
Modern Times
With its barrage of unforgettable gags and sly commentary on class struggle during the Great Depression, MODERN TIMES — though made almost a decade into the talkie era and containing moments of sound (even song!) — is a timeless showcase of Chaplin’s untouchable genius as a director of silent comedy.
Myth of Naro as Told by Dedeheiwa
This film presents a version of a myth, different from the Myth of Naro as Told by Kaobawa, in narrative detail and also in the individual raconteur's style. The myth concerns the jealousy of Naro the Ugly toward his brother Yanomamo, who is fragrant and beautiful and has two wives. Desiring the women, Naro kills his brother by blowing magical charms, and is eventually killed himself by a third brother and a variety of ancestors. This is the origin of harmful magic.
In telling the myth Dedeheiwa is, as always, a true performer, embellishing his words with gestures and evident delight at the drama and evocativeness of his tale. In another film, Kaobawa, also a village headman, tells the same myth in a gentle, more reflective style.
Parasite
Winner of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Film at the Academy Awards. Winner of Best Foreign Motion Picture – Foreign Language at the Golden Globe Awards. Winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Persona
In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference that would prove to be one of cinema’s most influential creations. Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by the great Sven Nykvist, PERSONA is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.
The Pollinators
THE POLLINATORS is a cinematic journey around the United States following migratory beekeepers and their truckloads of honey bees as they pollinate the flowers that become the fruits, nuts and vegetables we all eat. The many challenges the beekeepers and their bees face en route reveal flaws to our simplified chemically dependent agriculture system. We talk to farmers, scientists, chefs and academics along the way to give a broad perspective about the threats to honey bees, what it means to our food security and how we can improve it.
Precious Knowledge: Fighting for Mexican American Studies in Arizona Schools
Precious Knowledge reports from the frontlines of one of the most contentious battles in public education in recent memory, the fight over Mexican American studies programs in Arizona public schools. The film interweaves the stories of several students enrolled in the Mexican American Studies Program at Tucson High School with interviews with teachers, parents, school officials, and the lawmakers who wish to outlaw the classes.
While 48 percent of Mexican American students currently drop out of high school, Tucson High’s Mexican American Studies Program has become a national model of educational success, with 93 percent of enrolled students, on average, graduating from high school and 85 percent going on to attend college.The filmmakers spent an entire year in the classroom filming this innovative curriculum, documenting the transformative impact on students who became engaged, informed, and active in their communities.
As the nation turns its focus toward a wave of anti-immigration legislation in Arizona, the issue of ethnic chauvinism becomes a double-edged weapon in a simmering battle making front page news coast to coast. When Arizona lawmakers pass a bill giving unilateral power to the State Superintendent to abolish ethnic studies classes, teachers and student leaders fight to save the program using texts, Facebook, optimism, and a megaphone. Lawmakers and politicians respond with a public relations campaign to discredit the students, claiming that a textbook used in the classes, Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed teaches victimization and sedition. Officials ask that the classroom’s Che Guevara posters be replaced with portraits of founding father Benjamin Franklin. Meanwhile, the students answer back by fighting for what they believe is the future of public education for the entire nation, especially as the Latino demographic continues to grow.
Riverblue: Can Fashion Save the Planet?
This film spans the globe to infiltrate one of the world’s most pollutive industries, fashion. Blue Jeans, one of our favorite iconic products has destroyed rivers and impacted the lives of people who count on these waterways for their survival.
Following international river conservationist, Mark Angelo and narrated by clean water supporter Jason Priestley, this RIVERBLUE examines the destruction of our rivers, its effect on humanity, and the solutions that inspire hope for a sustainable future.
She's Beautiful When She's Angry: The History of the Women’s Liberation Movement
A provocative, rousing and often humorous account of the birth of the modern women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s through to its contemporary manifestations in the new millennium, direct from the women who lived it.
The Transformability of Information
What is information? Explore the surprising answer of American mathematician Claude Shannon, who concluded that information is the ability to distinguish reliably among possible alternatives. Consider why this idea was so revolutionary, and see how it led to the concept of the bit—the basic unit of information.
Un héros très discret - A Self-Made Hero
One evening in November 1944, during the final months of a war he didn't fight, a man decides to become a hero. Or rather, to be taken for a hero… to invent a wonderful life for himself, more beautiful, more colourful than his own. In an era lending itself to all kinds of confusion, in the hard and strange Paris of the winter of' 44, he masters the art of lying, using omission and allusion to build a shadowy character like no other. After having succeeded in introducing himself into Resistance circles, he is called to an important post in the French-occupied zone of Germany. This man, who is actually another and one who had nothing, gains everything : honor, admiration, friendship, power, love… But for how long?
Waste Land: An Art Collaboration in the World’s Largest Garbage Dump
Filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of "catadores" -- or self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz's initial objective was to "paint" the catadores with garbage.
However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Walker (DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND, BLINDSIGHT, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) has great access to the entire process and, in the end, offers stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.
