Nagasaki Journey

Sundance-and-Emmy-Award-winning filmmaker Judy Irving (with her first film since the widely acclaimed and loved “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”) follows a wayward California brown pelican from her “arrest” on the Golden Gate Bridge into care at a wildlife rehabilitation facility, and from there explores pelicans’ nesting grounds, Pacific coast migration, and survival challenges of these ancient birds, sometimes referred to as the flying dinosaurs. The film is about wildness, and asks the following questions: how close can we get to a wild animal without taming or harming it? Why do we need wildness in our lives, and how can we protect it? PELICAN DREAMS, stars “Gigi” (for Golden Gate) and Morro (a backyard pelican with an injured wing).

A homeless musician finds meaning in his life when he starts a friendship with dozens of parrots.

A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.

Pseudo-documentary showing footage shot by a television crew studying the life of a young, middle-class drifter named John Little, a fellow who describes himself as "the last of the hippies."

This documentary explores the connections between nuclear weapons production, nuclear power, and their human and environmental consequences. Through archival footage and interviews with residents living near the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado—as well as survivors of atomic bombing and nuclear testing—Dark Circle traces the development of the atomic age and its lasting impact on communities exposed to radioactive contamination.

Cold Refuge is about the physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of full immersion in the natural world: how, though it may seem counter-intuitive, swimming in cold water helps mitigate some of life’s most serious challenges. The film’s diverse film subjects include a wheelchair-bound, paralyzed swimmer who faces fear by diving off a high pier; a Black man who was told by whites when he was 13 that “Black people don’t swim” (it took him 30 years to try); a blind man who tethers himself to a sighted swimmer; a woman with aggressive breast cancer who “swims to chemo;” a lawyer who reduces courtroom stress in the open water; and a young woman who communes with her late mother in San Francisco Bay, where they both swam together. Along with swimmers’ stories of adversity and resilience, the film’s marine mammals, birds, artwork, and a variety of open-water locations create a visual meditation on what it means to escape our abstract digital world in favor of what’s real.