During World War II, a hand-picked group of American GI’s undertook a bizarre mission: create a traveling road show of deception on the battlefields of Europe, with the German Army as their audience. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops used inflatable rubber tanks, sound trucks, and dazzling performance art to bluff the enemy again and again, often right along the front lines. Many of the men picked to carry out these dangerous deception missions were artists. Some went on to become famous, including fashion designer Bill Blass. In their spare time, they painted and sketched their way across Europe, creating a unique and moving visual record of their war. Their secret mission was kept hushed up for nearly 50 years after the war’s end.
You May Also Like
After a life-altering experience, an influential musician is moved to challenge his Culture with a message of Resurrection in an era dedicated to murder, death, and self-destruction.
The world fell in love with Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová when their songwriting collaboration in the film Once (2006) culminated in a jubilant Oscar win. But behind the scenes, where Glen and Mar’s on-screen romance became reality, a grueling two-year world tour threatens to fracture their fated bond. Filmed in black and white, this music-filled documentary is an intimate look at the exhilaration and turmoil created by both love and fame.
A tomboyish girl disguises herself as a young man so she can fight with the Imperial Chinese Army against the invading Huns. With help from wise-cracking dragon Mushu, Mulan just might save her country — and win the heart of handsome Captain Li Shang.
Thorsten Schütte’s film is a sharply edited and energetic celebration of Zappa through his public persona, allowing us to witness his shifting relationship with audiences. Utilizing potent TV interviews and many forgotten performances from his 30-year career, we are immersed into the musician’s world while experiencing two distinct facets of his complex character. At once Zappa was both a charismatic composer who reveled in the joy of performing and, in the next moment, a fiercely intelligent and brutally honest interviewee whose convictions only got stronger as his career ascended.
From Iowa to Studio 54, this investigation into the rags-to-riches story of America’s first superstar designer uncovers the cautionary tale of an artist who sold his name to Wall Street.
Louis goes to South Africa where American tourists pay to hunt wild animals in privately owned reserves.
Sundance-and-Emmy-Award-winning filmmaker Judy Irving (with her first film since the widely acclaimed and loved “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”) follows a wayward California brown pelican from her “arrest” on the Golden Gate Bridge into care at a wildlife rehabilitation facility, and from there explores pelicans’ nesting grounds, Pacific coast migration, and survival challenges of these ancient birds, sometimes referred to as the flying dinosaurs. The film is about wildness, and asks the following questions: how close can we get to a wild animal without taming or harming it? Why do we need wildness in our lives, and how can we protect it? PELICAN DREAMS, stars “Gigi” (for Golden Gate) and Morro (a backyard pelican with an injured wing).
A searing account of what happens when raw talent and extreme personalities collide. In this unflinching, never-before-seen account of drugs and the dark side of professional skateboarding, brothers Tas and Ben Pappas’ intense bond and charisma take them from the pinnacle of their sport into a spiraling world of self-destruction.
This is a David and Goliath story of one veterinarian’s battle to protect her patients (tigers, lions and even house cats) from big corporations, with their big corporate money, that will shamelessly do anything to animals to increase their bottom line. She starts a grassroots movement that is fueled by passion, but appears to be losing the battle. Then, unexpectedly, she realizes that the corporations accidentally left her a giant loophole. In a scramble to take advantage of this unforeseen gift, she leads the crusade passing legislation protecting animals from de-clawing in seven cities in just six weeks.
Over fifty very famous American and Canadian funny people (filmmakers, writers, actors and comedians) share life and professional journeys and insights, in an effort to shed light on the thesis: Do you have to be miserable to be funny?
Before Google, Yahoo and even Apple, before the Silicon Valley cliché of informal dress code, skateboards running the corridors and wild creativity became commonplace, one company embodied the digital economy lifestyle and business style: the one firm coming out of the Age of Aquarius was Atari. The story of Atari is two-thirds the story of Nolan Bushnell, founder and visionary, and one-third the first and probably biggest boom and bust of the new economy some 20 years before the new economy even existed. Atari was showing that technology is cool, way before the personal computer revolution took place and they were reaching out to an ever-growing audience with something that is still cool today: video games. Atari literally introduced the digital world to the mass consciousness.
An investigation of how Hollywood’s fabled stories have deeply influenced how Americans feel about transgender people, and how transgender people have been taught to feel about themselves.
