The Pocketbook

Are even the best and brightest revolutionary movements doomed to inevitable compromise, betrayal and failure? That question haunts this documentary, a biography of Angolan-born Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990), a key figure in African revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles.

A documentary that examines the films made by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist and offers a radically different perspective on a key period in the history of American cinema.

Charlie Banks, chronically unemployed, struggles to find dignity and a meaning for life in the impoverished Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts.

James Benning's "Four Corners" uses a specific geographical location to pose larger questions about the United States. Here, the geographic and wholly imaginary place Four Corners, that favorite tourist destination where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet, becomes a kind of theoretical ground zero, the site from which Benning can give voice to other, pointedly unofficial American stories.

A musician spends New Year's Day trying to help his friend pay the rent.

A journey into the life and work of beat poet and activist Bob Kaufman and his insistence that poetry is fundamental to humanity's moral survival.

The film uses a collection of post-World War II black & white photographs to portray the dockworkers of Marseilles, many of whom were of African descent. Set in and around a 1947 strike protesting weapons shipments to the French in Indochina, the images evoke the life and work of Senegalese filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, a former dockworker, and one of the founding figures of the New African Cinema of the 1960s.

Following the 1884–85 Berlin Conference resolution on the partition of Africa, the Portuguese army uses a talented ensign to register the effective occupation of the territory belonging to the Cuamato people, conquered in 1907, in the south of Angola. A STORY FROM AFRICA enlivens a rarely seen photographic archive through the tragic tale of Calipalula, the Cuamato nobleman essential to the unfolding of events in this Portuguese pacification campaign.