Festival Express (2003)

Director:
Bob Smeaton

IMDB

Synopsis:
In 1970, with seemingly every North American city of any size holding a rock festival after the success of Woodstock, Ken Walker and Thor Eaton, a pair of Canadian entrepreneurs and music buffs, had an idea: instead of setting up one massive show with a bunch of top-name acts, why not stage a series of them across the country? With this in mind, Walker (then only 22 years old) and Eaton (whose family owned one of Canada's most successful department store chains) signed up Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Band, Buddy Guy, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and several others and hired out a private train that would carry the musicians in high style for a string of five shows from Toronto to Calgary. The jaunt was called "The Festival Express," and a camera crew tagged along to capture the shows on film, as well as the constant party that took place en route. The tour proved to be a financial bust and, as a result, the footage sat on the shelf for over thirty years until director Bob Smeaton recut the material into Festival Express, which not only documents the glorious folly of the tour, but offers a hindsight look at the events from some of the surviving participants.

Up the Yangtze (2007)

Director:
Yung Chang

IMDB

Synopsis:
Director Yung Chang uses the construction of China's massive Three Gorges Dam as a springboard to better understanding the social hierarchies and changing times in his homeland in this documentary focusing on the luxury cruise ship that carries predominately Western tourists down the Yangtze River. Constructed as a symbol of modern progress in China, the Three Gorges Dam has forced millions of common people out of their ancestral homes, and will soon swallow up numerous nearby towns and villages. Despite the fact that the government has funded alterative housing for the dislocated families, however, many citizens make their way to higher ground feeling as if they have been duped by the powers that be. In order to truly understand how this affects the people, Chang focuses on telling the stories of middle-class scion Chen Bo Yu (renamed "Jerry" by the cruise line) and Yu Shui (who answers to the call of "Cindy" while on duty). As the ship sets sail, this hard-working pair do their best to familiarize themselves with Western social cues, striving to perform to the best of their abilities, and ponder the prospects of a brighter future.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

Director:
David Gelb

IMDB

Synopsis:
Jiro Ono is one of the most-respected and acclaimed sushi chefs in Japan. At the age of 85, he operates an exclusive sushi restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, with a long waiting list for reservations (the restaurant has a mere ten tables and a typical meal costs $300) and a prized three-star rating from the Michelin restaurant guide. Perfecting the art of sushi has been one of Ono's obsessions since he was a young man, and filmmaker David Gelb offers a delicious look into his life and work in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In the film, Ono discusses his unhappy childhood, his early days in the restaurant game, and his techniques and philosophies about his chosen dish; he also interacts with fish dealers and his two sons, both gifted chefs who live and work in their father's shadow. Jiro Dreams of Sushi was an official selection at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

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.