Pola Rapaport

This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.

Published in Paris in 1954, Story of O was an immediate bestseller and literary scandal: an elegantly written S&M fantasy that had all the hallmarks of being an autobiographical account by the pseudonymous Pauline Réage. In 1994 Dominique Aury, a mild-mannered, dowdy editor for France’s prestigious Gallimard press, revealed her authorship. Pola Rapaport explores Aury's inspiration, recreating the world of '50s literary Paris and setting it against dramatic sequences that bring the infamous book to life. The author as well as various French intellectuals expound on the thorny relationship between sexuality and power, submission and freedom, liberation and non-being.

A trip along the seamy edges of New York City and a voyage through the consciousness of the mad beat poet Alan Granville. “Broken Meat” captures Alan’s New York, stripped of its glittering surface: a strange, deserted place.

A documentary portrait of legendary Perfect Ten gymnast Nadia Comaneci after becoming an icon in the 1976 Olympics, during her Romanian period, and her challenging years under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu.

A WOMAN LIKE ME is a hybrid documentary that interweaves the real story of director Alex Sichel, diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2011, with the fictional story of Anna Seashell, who struggles to find the glass half full when faced with the same diagnosis. The film follows Alex as she uses her craft to explore what is foremost on her mind while confronting a terminal disease: parenting, marriage, faith, life, and death. When we are stuck between a rock and hard place, can our imagination get us out?

A rural American town suffering economically from factory closures finds an unconventional route to recovery with the help of MASS MoCA.

Pool is a melange of documentary and fiction, about its actors’ lives: a 14-year old girl, a Chilean exile, a French actress and an unfulfilled shoestore manager. No plot runs through it, but the characters all move in and out of their roles. When we get too close, we are reminded It’s only a movie. The young girl who appears at the beginning of the film is Ally Sheedy at fourteen. She has since appeared in many feature films including The Breakfast Club and High Art.

Heather Booth is the most influential person you have heard of. The newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Lilly Rivlin, HEATHER BOOTH: CHANGING THE WORLD is an urgent response to the recent election of Trump and all that has ensued. At a time when many are wondering how to make their voices heard, when civil and women’s rights are under attack, this empowering documentary is an inspiring look at how social change happens. Heather Booth, a renowned organizer and activist, began her remarkable career at the height of the Civil Rights movement. Through her life and work this inspiring film explores many of the most pivotal moments in progressive movements that altered our history over the last fifty years: from her involvement with Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, to her founding of the JANE Underground in 1964, to her collaborations with respected leaders such as Julian Bond and Senator Elizabeth Warren.