Results tagged “documentary”

However hard it was for you to make it to your high school each morning, the teen moms at Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit likely have it harder. In Grown in Detroit, the principal says that it takes some girls 2 hours and multiple bus routes to get to school (especially since the auto lobby held back any progress on Detroit's mass transit system). Catherine Ferguson Academy is unique in that it is only one of a few schools in the nation geared exclusively towards pregnant teens/teen moms. Another factor that makes this school unique: they have their own urban, organic farm.

The Troubadour on Santa Monica Blvd. is the cozy club that did it for us. After rock-out worshipping Beth Ditto of The Gossip, witnessing the hypnotic effect Bon Iver has on an audience, and giggle-festing with Chelsea Peretti, we were dead set on finding a way to actually live in one of the best venues on Planet Earth. We could imagine ourselves waking up under the blue glow from the light above the stage and high-fiving Joni Mitchell on our way to pay rent. There’s a unique, comfortable, respectful vibe where the performer rules and being a member of the audience can be pretty darn special. It’s an atmosphere that offers up a multitude of more than memorable nights and it was recreated by club owner and filmmaker Mark Flanagan at Largo on Sunset Blvd. No, you didn’t accidentally click on sibling site LAist; we’re just setting you up for Austin Film Festival’s documentary screening of the stellar, performance-heavy Largo at Alamo Lake Creek this Thursday. It’s a required A/V workout for all Austin music buffs.

in the war-torn country of Afghanistan, there’s a TV show much like our own inexplicably popular American Idol, where anyone can compete regardless of race, age, religion, or any other factor. And people all over the country use their cell phones to vote for their favorite performer. This remarkable film (winner of Directing and Audience Awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival) follows four finalists as they compete to become the next Afghan Star.It's sure to inform, inspire, enlighten, and entertain you. And that’s a lot more than Simon Cowell could ever do for you.

Tonight at the Alamo Drafthouse S. Lamar, you can experience the tornado-like fury that surrounds the competitive Dachshund circuit in the dog-umentary Wiener Takes All. Canadian filmmaker Shane MacDougall, who apparently challenged Queen Elizabeth II to a kickboxing match or math test to win the monarchy of Canada at one point in time, spent two years following what we would assume to be a real-life Best in Show, documenting the heated rivalries, the epic speed trials, the allegations of doggie doping and the amazingness that is the Westminster Dog Show, watching as the broad field is winnowed down to one winning weenie.

Anxious Wilco lovers must wait a few more weeks until the still-untitled next album is released, but a worthy distraction will soon arrive to make the suspense a little less terrible. Ashes of American Flags, a live concert film featuring performances from the band’s 2008 tour, will be released on DVD April 18 and will also be shown at the Alamo Ritz on Monday night.

Bugs! Gross or amazing? According to the premise of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a documentary directed by Jessica Oreck, our aversion to the insect and arachnid kingdoms may be culturally conditioned, rather than innate.

Winter and snow offer a sort of pay to play combination. There are the sunburns in January from hitting the slopes, or the fact that playing the world's most glorious game requires that you endure frigid temperatures and fasten knife-like blades on a surface as hard as concrete. "Snowblindness" is a condition that occurs when you essentially become blinded by light in the middle of the dark winter, but this is a documentary about a more serious variety.

Whatever the reason for its initial failure, Troll 2 (once regarded as the "Worst Movie Ever Made") has gone on to become a bona fide cult phenomenon, riding a wave of grassroots word-of-mouth popularity that most Hollywood marketers would trade a kidney for. In Best Worst Movie, actor/filmmaker Michael Paul Stephenson (along with actor-turned-dentist George Hardy) revisits the cast and crew of Troll 2, chronicling their varied reactions to the film’s newfound success. Recommended.

The film starts typically enough—a lot of fanatical D&D gamers at a convention full of dwarves, elves, wizards, and the occasional stormtrooper (btw, wtf?)—but soon Dungeon Masters takes us into an alternate dimension. Not the one with enchanted forests and nefarious mages, but these surprisingly open people's actual lives. By meeting their significant others, seeing them with their kids, hearing about their own childhoods, and watching their day-to-day struggles, it’s hard not to think that the obstacles they have had to overcome are the same ones that drive some people to become an alcoholic or a gang banger. They just handled it a bit…differently.

Reformat the Planet, a documentary that debuted at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival, delves into that youthful ingenuity by exploring the underground music scene known as ChipTunes, which focuses on taking old, outdated gaming devices, most notably the Nintendo Gameboy and NES, and creating something wholly new and different from what existed before. Possibly as an affront to the 32 and 64-bit technology that we see today, these musicians employ a very punk aesthetic of taking what seems to be a very limited set of tools and expounding upon them to create layers and layers of sound that our-10-year-old brains could never have dreamed would be produced by our little game consoles.

Whatever happened to Bill Withers? Filmmakers Damani Baker and Alex Vlack made a decision eight years ago to find the answer. After dealing with some initial resistance, they found that Bill Withers was willing to open up to them. The final result of their collaboration, Still Bill focuses on the life of the singer-songwriter of such hits as "Ain't No Sunshine", "Lean on Me" and "Just the Two of Us." The documentary follows Withers to his birthplace of Slab Fork, West Virginia and to New York City, where a concert is given in his honor, but is mainly based in Los Angeles where Withers lives with his family. Bill Withers grew up an asthmatic stutterer, which led to some self-esteem/self-worth issues that he still deals with. Before he burst into the world of music, Withers spent time working in a factory and seemed to have no real hankering for fame. Perhaps that is why it wasn't too difficult for him to stop releasing albums after his lousy experience with a big-name record company.

If there's one documentary we recommend seeing during this year's Austin Film Festival, it's Eric Bricker's Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, a fascinating, beautifully realized portrait of famed architectural photographer Julius Shulman. Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, Visual Acoustics explores Shulman's life and work through interviews, animation, archival footage and heaps of gorgeous photographs. Featuring conversations with architect Frank Gehry, designer Tom Ford, artist Ed Ruscha, publisher Benedikt Taschen and a host of notable design-o-philes, the film is an intimate portrait of an extraordinary talent.

Grocery stores are the great equalizer—pretty much every one in America frequents one, be they monolithic or modest. And after you have purchased your snacks and sundries, there is generally one question that remains: do you want to carry your wares home in paper or plastic? Granted, in Austin the swing is towards "neither" with our cloth bag revolution, but across the country you will find dutiful baggers, sackers, or whatever you choose to call them, packing up jars, cans and bread, hopefully with the later after the former. Sounds like the stuff of legend, right? You wouldn't think so, but in the Austin Film Festival documentary feature Paper or Plastic?, those disregarded courtesy clerks finally get their moment in the sun.

Please Vote for Me documents a Model UN-styled event held by a Chinese elementary school to elect a class monitor, a position that (surprise, surprise) is usually appointed by the teacher. The ensuing melee is a Nixon/Stalin-like wheeling and dealing from which, evidently, only one can emerge as "Supreme Leader."

Heavy Metal in Baghdad follows the boys in "Acrassicauda" through the heady days of post-Saddam, pre-insurgency life, when they thought that after years of repression, they might finally be able to Live the Rawk, and then chronicles the downturn of their dreams as their country falls to pieces. (Think the dancers in "Footloose" were oppressed? Think again!)

However, Marina Zenovich's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which plays at the Alamo this weekend and next week, looks at the 1978 "incident" through somewhat sympathetic eyes, questioning the motivations of the judge and the press in hyping up the story.

American Teen, the new documentary from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nannette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture), made quite a splash at Sundance as well as here at SXSW this year, and for good reason. The film follows five very different high school kids going through the ups and downs of their senior year in Warsaw, Indiana. Make no mistake, any resemblance to the seminal John Hughes film is purely intentional; witness the movie poster’s loving pose-for-pose homage and the extremely hip soundtrack. But hey, if you’re going to emulate a movie, it’s not a bad choice.

Last August, as the Austin Film Festival was ramping up, we spoke to Austin-based filmmaker Don Swaynos about the creepy slash awesome animated commercials he'd produced (along with partner Cameron Petri) for the folks at AFF. But Don's commercials weren't the only work he had premiering at AFF '07. Along with pal Steve Metze, he presented a documentary feature called Year at Danger, a firsthand account of Metze's deployment as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Austin dweller Margaret Brown brings her new documentary, The Order of Myths, to SXSW after a successful showing at Sundance. Brown was born in Mobile, Alabama, where Myths takes place. The film follows Mobilians through one cycle of their Mardi Gras celebrations—a festival which the city is proud to have begun celebrating before New Orleans. Unlike the Big Easy’s do, however, the Mobile Mardi Gras is, effectively, segregated.

"I was initially drawn to Crawford, because I'd been effectively duped. I didn't know that Bush wasn't from Crawford."

With the faith of a thousand men, Pastor Richard Gazowsky set out ten years ago on a divine mission: to make the greatest film ever made. Nevermind that the first film he ever saw was The Lion King, at the tender age of 40. Nevermind that he had absolutely no background in directing, editing, or producing an epic so grand that it's concept was enthusiastically described as "The Ten Commandments meets Star Wars." Nevermind that his only solid source of funding was the generous tithes of his congregation at the Voice of Pentecost Church.