How Does It Feel?

British director Elijah Moshinsky traveled to Istanbul's Topkapi Palace with a cast of gifted singers and actors to film a lavish production of Mozart's Die Entfuhrung Aus Dem Serail (aka The Abduction From The Harem), and this documentary offers a look at both the behind-the-scenes efforts to put the project on screen and extended highlights from the resulting production. Mozart in Turkey also touches on the opera's performance history and Mozart's life at the time it was composed.

Despite not being a household name today, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Her flamboyance, skill, and showmanship on the newly electrified guitar played a vital role in the conception of Rock & Roll as a genre of music. Featuring archival performances and using new interviews with fellow musicians, producers, friends, and colleagues, this film tells the story of a talented and determined woman that introduces spiritual passion of her gospel music background into Rock & Roll. Learn more about Sister Rosetta Tharpe, her life story, and lasting artistic legacy.

The Cold War and Civil Rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and their mixed-race band members, faced a painful dilemma: how could they represent a country that still practiced Jim Crow segregation?

The story of Josephine Baker takes us on a fascinating tour of 20th-century race relations on both sides of the Atlantic, yet it leads to no conclusion, and black girls in search of a role-model tend to look elsewhere. Part of her appeal is her startlingly unique appearance. Simply nobody has ever looked or acted like her. She fits no black stereotype. Nor does she look like any recognizable strain of Afro-American. I'd always heard she was half-white, but it seems that her paternity is unknown, and her contradictory claims on the subject don't do much to enlighten us. (We are tempted to imagine quite an exotic mix.) Her origins in sharply-segregated St. Louis, where she is said to have witnessed a lynching, do not seem to have left her embittered. Perhaps she had too much to give. There is a special innocence about that smile, and when she performs her cross-eyed gag, we are lifted into a strange pixie-world, all its own.

American Masters is a PBS television series which produces biographies on enduring writers, musicians, visual and performing artists, dramatists, filmmakers, and others who have left an indelible impression on the cultural landscape of the United States.

Documentary on the experiences of the hostages and captors when the American embassy in Iran was captured for 14 months in 1979.

Bob Bentley's Royal College of Art degree film, produced in 1969/70. It explores aspects of his life in a deliberately puzzling manner, influenced by French New Wave cinema.

A series about the history of Africa with Basil Davidson. It was produced in a collaboration between Channel 4, the Nigerian Television Authority and RM Arts in 1984 and consisted of eight parts in four episodes. The film received the Gold Award from the 1984 International Film and Television Festival of New York. Each part is around an hour long.