Michael Roemer

Railroad laborer Duff Anderson struggles to maintain his dignity and marriage to a preacher's daughter in the racially segregated South.

Unsuccessfully trying to close old family wounds on a trip back to the Rhode Island home of her miserable childhood, a troubled young woman finds her new friendship with a neighbor has her stuck in another family drama.

Deadpan, small-time Kosher Nostra mobster Harry Plotnick goes meshugga when he gets into the catering biz with his ex-brother-in-law.

A woman suffering from terminal cancer struggles to resolve several relationships in her life: a devoted but stressed lover, an estranged sister, and a daughter on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

This long-suppressed and controversial documentary was produced in 1961 for network television but never broadcast. Co-mingling cinema verité and narrative techniques, the film offers a sensitive but critical look at the slum called Cortile Cascino in the center of Palermo, Sicily where poverty and early death are constants and where the church and the Mafia compete for the inhabitants' fealty. The established church, largely ignoring the plight of its parishioners, nonetheless voices its outrage when a faith healer draws large crowds. The Mafia runs an illegal slaughterhouse and controls the concession to funerals but also distributes free food to the district's hungry residents. In the face of relentless adversity, the women provide the only stabilizing force. The neighborhood's despair is tragically foregrounded in a sequence depicting the burial of baby who died of malnutrition. The soundtrack is composed of comments by the people, recorded and translated by the filmmakers.

Last days: Sally, 46, bonds with her elderly mother as they take things day to day; Bill, in his early 30s, stoically goes on while his wife loses herself in rage; grandfatherly Reverend Bryant preaches a final sermon, then goes back South one last time. Three different cinema verité’s Ikiru’s, filmed over a two-year period.

Documentary film about life in the slums of Palermo, Sicily. Revisiting the family featured in a 1961 documentary from Michael Roemer, and Robert Young (the father/ father in law of this film's directors).

Major aspects of life in Israel are reflected in the faces of its multi-ethnic society.