Billy the Kid (2007)

Director:
Jennifer Venditti

IMDB

Synopsis:
Filmmaker Jennifer Venditti crafts a cinéma vérité-style coming-of-age story with this portrait of a small-town teen from Maine who struggles to embrace his outsider status while still being shaped by the tragic events of his childhood. It was while casting the Carter Smith film Bugcrush that Venditti first encountered the boy named Billy -- his eccentric wisdom leaving an immediate and lasting impression on the filmmaker. Later, after casting Billy in the film and preparing to craft a documentary about everyday heroes, Venditti and her crew returned to Maine to spend five days with the troubled young boy who had commanded her attention. Shunned by his classmates and categorized as a "special needs" student by his teachers, Billy boldly refuses to be victimized by his individuality in an environment obsessed with labels and conformity.

The Gleaners & I (2000)

Director:
Agnès Varda

IMDB

Synopsis:
Legendary filmmaker Agnes Varda takes digital camcorder in hand and roams about the French countryside in search of "gleaners." An age-old practice, as depicted in Millet's famous painting, performed traditionally by peasant women, gleaners scavenged the remains of a crop after the harvest. Varda finds their modern-day equivalent collecting rejected potatoes outside of Lyon, fallen apples in Provence, and refuse in the markets of Paris. Along the way, she talks to a man sporting yellow rubber boots who has lived on trash for ten years, a gourmet chef who gleans for his restaurant, a homeless doctorate in biology who teaches literacy courses to immigrants for free, a couple of artists who use trash in their work, and the grandson of early cinema innovator Étienne-Jules Marey. Along the way, Varda discusses heart-shaped potatoes, big trucks on the highway, the waste of consumerism, and the ravages of time. This film was screened at the 2000 Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals.

Black Gold (2006)

Directors:
Marc Francis, Nick Francis

IMDB

Synopsis:
Filmmakers Marc and Nick Francis team to explore the discrepancy between the skyrocketing profits of multinational coffee companies and the all-time low prices paid for coffee harvests in a documentary that aims to provide a voice to the struggling farmers and laborers who strive to keep the coffee flowing. As devastated farmers are forced to sell off their once-bountiful lands simply to make ends meet, Ethiopia's once-thriving coffee industry slowly falls to ruin; but one man is out to fight for the struggling laborers. Tadesse Meskela represents over 70,000 struggling coffee farmers, and in his mission to help the farmers preserve their rich heritage, Meskela has traveled to every corner of the globe on a mission to seek out fair prices for what are often considered the highest-quality beans on the market.

9 Star Hotel (2007)

Director:
Ido Haar

IMDB

Synopsis:
Middle Eastern director Ido Haar helms the haunting cinema direct documentary 9 Star Hotel. The work introduces the audience to a cadre of Palestinian men who have built a transient community on the Israeli border, comprised of jerry-built huts and tiny, sarcophagus-like sleeping compartments. The men leave these quarters and systematically cross the border each morning before dawn, to work illegally at construction jobs in Israel - risking their safety and their lives to simply draw a regular income. Throughout, the workers stick close together (Haar suggests that the circumstances actually engender tighter social bonds between them) and evince a surprising sense of humor, tenacity and resilience. Meanwhile, constant hopes for improved circumstances in the future belie their lingering fears of being discovered and shot or arrested by Israeli authorities.

Girl Model (2011)

Directors:
David Redmon, Ashley Sabin

IMDB

Synopsis:
Documentary filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin offer this illuminating - and often disturbing - look at the challenges faced by young, aspiring Russian models determined to break into the fashion industry. Ashley (not Sabin) is a former American model who has parleyed her experience in front of the camera into a lucrative job scouting young girls in Siberia. The lucky few who Ashley selects to move on are then offered the opportunity to model in Japan. Ashley's latest discovery is Nadya, a 13 year old, self-described "grey mouse" who possesses a striking natural beauty, and who endeavors to pull her family out of poverty through her modeling career. Upon arriving in Japan and attempting to navigate the strange new world without the benefit of speaking the language, however, Nadya and homesick fellow model Madlen soon realize that nothing is what they thought it would be, and that the work they were "guaranteed" back home seems frustratingly hard to come by. Meanwhile, surreptitious contract clauses stipulate that the girls could quickly be sent home at a moment's notice, and wind up deeply in debt to the same company who promised them the opportunity of a lifetime.

New York Doll (2005)

Director:
Greg Whiteley

IMDB

Synopsis:
The New York Dolls were a rock band who titled their second studio album Too Much Too Soon, and it summed up the band's career all too well. Playing hard, swaggering rock & roll that anticipated the aural chaos of punk five years before the Sex Pistols became a cause célèbre, and boasting an androgynous fashion statement that made David Bowie look timid, the Dolls made headlines and earned a loyal cult following between 1971 and 1976, but their look and sound were too extreme for the mass audience at the time, and the fact that several members of the band had serious drug and alcohol problems hardly helped matters. After the New York Dolls finally fell apart in 1977, singer David Johansen went on to a successful solo career (scoring hit records under the alter ego Buster Poindexter), lead guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan kept the band's sound alive in the Heartbreakers, and guitarist Syl Sylvain cut a few solo albums and occasionally worked with Johansen. But bassist Arthur Kane struggled for years to get his musical career back on track while battling alcoholism, with little success on either front. In 1989, after a stay in the hospital, a clean and sober Kane embraced the Mormon faith, and through his contacts in the church he got a job working in a Mormon genealogy library in Los Angeles. Despite his quiet new life, Kane's greatest dream was to someday play a reunion show with the New York Dolls, and in 2004 his wish unexpectedly became a reality when British pop icon Morrissey invited the surviving members of the band to appear at a prestigious music festival he was curating. Filmmaker Greg Whiteley knew Kane as a fellow Mormon, and New York Doll is a documentary about the ups and downs of Kane's life in music, how his faith came into his life, and his unexpected return to the rock & roll stage at the age of 55.

E-Dreams (2001)

Director:
Wonsuk Chin

IMDB

Synopsis:
In 1998, Joseph Park had an idea: What if someone created an Internet-based delivery service in which, after you'd typed a few commands into a web page, you could have videos, snacks, books, or other small items delivered to your door in less than an hour? By January of 1999, Park and his friend and business partner, Yong Kang, had turned their idea into a business proposal for Kozmo.com, and by the end of that year, the company had managed to secure 150 million dollars in financing, with seemingly everyone on board poised to become fabulously wealthy. In April of 2000, the NASDAQ market crash tolled the end of the e-commerce boom, and it soon became evident to Kozmo.com's investors that the company was losing money like water through a sieve; within months, Park's dream was in ruins. E-Dreams is a documentary that examines the rise and fall of Kozmo.com, and by extension the failings and foibles of the Internet commerce explosion of the late '90s.

Triage: Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma (2008)

Director:
Patrick Reed

IMDB

Synopsis:
Documentarist Patrick Reed's Triage: Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma creates a biographical portrait of Orbinski, former head of the non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders and one of the most ardent social crusaders to work in Third World African countries during the late 20th century. Triage visits Dr. Orbinski at a point when this physician - amid the completion of his memoirs - returns to the countries of his life's work, including Rwanda, Somalia, and Congo, to evaluate the status quo in each locale. As memories of deplorable conditions and grave personal dangers come flooding back to haunt the physician, his current findings are even more sobering and challenging: today, the countries have worsened, elevating the need for social activism. Nevertheless, Orbinski feels encouraged by the individuals who continue to strive for improved conditions, and issues a not-so-subtle plea for westerners to assume social responsibility and become involved at all costs with alleviating the plight of their African neighbors.

The Glass House (2009)

Director:
Hamid Rahmanian

IMDB

Synopsis:
Growing up can be hard under ideal circumstances, but for young women in Iran, a male-dominated society where a female's rights and opportunities are compromised from birth, growing into an emotionally healthy adult can be profoundly difficult. Iranian expatriate Marjaneh Halati has opened an outreach center for teenage women in Tehran, where they can speak to counselors and receive training that can help them deal with the crises they face. Filmmaker Hamid Rahmanian offers a telling portrait of four of the young women who have come to Halati's center for help in the documentary The Glass House. Mitra is sixteen years old and growing up in a violent household where her father will beat her for talking back to him, and she's come to the center looking for help in conflict resolution while learning to express herself through her fiction. Nazila is nineteen and has found an outlet for the anger she feels about her life as a rapper; however, her family forbids her to record her music and her outspoken rhymes would almost certainly never be aired in Iran. At twenty, Sussan has been the subject of physical and emotional abuse for much of her life, and repeated beatings have left her with brain damage and memory loss. And Samira is trying to deal with an addition to drugs that was inflicted upon her by her own family. The Glass House received its American premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

4 Little Girls (1997)

Director:
Spike Lee

IMDB

Synopsis:
Director Spike Lee made his first feature-length documentary with this powerful story of the bombing of an African-American church in Birmingham, AL, in 1963, which took the lives of four girls, ages 11 through 14. The shocking incident received national press attention and became a rallying point in the ongoing struggle for civil rights, but while Lee's film examines the crime, the perpetrators, and the long struggle to bring them to justice, it also offers a close look at the four girls themselves as their friends and families recall, in moving detail, who they were and how they lived. A variety of civil rights activists, politicians, journalists, and lawyers are interviewed onscreen, including Walter Cronkite and a brief but disturbing meeting with former Alabama governor George Wallace.