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- DirectorScott GallowayBrent PiersonStarsPearl FryarA Man Named Pearl tells the inspiring story of self-taught topiary artist Pearl Fryar. It offers a message that speaks to respect for both self and others, and shows what one person can achieve when he allows himself to share the full expression of his humanity.A MAN NAMED PEARL is an inspiring film about Pearl Fryar, an African-American man who challenged stereotypes and bigotry by creating a garden paradise in his own yard. With no formal training and limited resources, Pearl takes throwaway plants from a local nursery and teaches himself the art of topiary gardening. Along the way he creates a wonderland of nature that attracts visitors from all over the world and unifies the poorest county in South Carolina. Told in a candid and often humorous way, the film opens both hearts and minds offering an important message that speaks to respect for self and others.
- DirectorMegumi SasakiStarsPaula AntebiWill BarnetRobert BarryHerb and Dorothy Vogel redefine what it means to be an art collector.Tells the story of two middle-class collectors of contemporary art, Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, and the enormous and valuable collection of conceptual art and minimalist art they amassed. Many artists are interviewed in the film, including Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, and Pat Steir.
- DirectorRichard PressStarsBill CunninghamAnna WintourMichael KorsA profile of the noted and extraordinarily cheerful veteran New York City fashion photographer."We all get dressed for Bill," says Anna Wintour about Bill Cunningham, the legendary, yet enigmatic New York Times photographer known for his two columns in the Style section: "On The Street," and "Evening Hours." Obsessively interested in one thing – the pictures he takes that document the way people dress – Bill Cunningham has managed not only to chronicle fashion trends he spots emerging on the street but the intersection of fashion and society in New York for over fifty years. The documentary is not only a portrait of this elusive fashion-world deity but of New York City itself.
- DirectorVaron BonicosStarsOzwald BoatengGiorgio ArmaniMichael BayA documentary about fashion designer Ozwald Boateng.A profile of fashion designer, Ozwald Boateng; his design, his business, his personal life. Charismatic, glamorous, hard-working and very humanly flawed, Boateng's personal and professional triumphs and set-backs are the fascinating heart of this film which is set against a back-drop of models, movie stars and fabulous locations.
- DirectorDoug PrayStarsMary WellsDan WiedenHal RineyART & COPY is a powerful new film about advertising and inspiration. Directed by Doug Pray (SURFWISE, SCRATCH, HYPE!), it reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time -- people who've profoundly impacted our culture, yet are virtually unknown outside their industry. Exploding forth from advertising's "creative revolution" of the 1960s, these artists and writers all brought a surprisingly rebellious spirit to their work in a business more often associated with mediocrity or manipulation: George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney and others featured in ART & COPY were responsible for "Just Do It," "I Love NY," "Where's the Beef?," "Got Milk," "Think Different," and brilliant campaigns for everything from cars to presidents. They managed to grab the attention of millions and truly move them. Visually interwoven with their stories, TV satellites are launched, billboards are erected, and the social and cultural impact of their ads are brought to light in this dynamic exploration of art, commerce, and human emotion.Thought provoking film about advertising and inspiration. Directed by Doug Pray (SURFWISE, SCRATCH, HYPE!), it reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time -- people who've profoundly impacted our culture, yet are virtually unknown outside their industry. Exploding forth from advertising's "creative revolution" of the 1960s, these artists and writers all brought a surprisingly rebellious spirit to their work in a business more often associated with mediocrity or manipulation: George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney and others featured in ART & COPY were responsible for "Just Do It," "I Love NY," "Where's the Beef?," "Got Milk," "Think Different," and brilliant campaigns for everything from cars to presidents. They managed to grab the attention of millions and truly move them. Visually interwoven with their stories, TV satellites are launched, billboards are erected, and the social and cultural impact of their ads are brought to light in this dynamic exploration of art, commerce, and human emotion.
- DirectorGary HustwitStarsManfred SchulzMassimo VignelliRick PoynorA documentary about typography, graphic design, and global visual culture.Helvetica is an independent feature-length documentary film about typography and graphic design, centered on the typeface of the same name. Directed by Gary Hustwit, it was released in 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the typeface's introduction in 1957 and is considered the first of the Design Trilogy by the director.
- DirectorGary HustwitStarsPaola AntonelliChris BangleAndrew BlauveltA feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them.A feature-length documentary film examining the role of everyday non-living objects, and the people who design them, in our daily lives. The film is directed by Gary Hustwit, premiered at the South By Southwest Festival on March 14, 2009. and is the second part in a 3-film series, Design Trilogy.
- DirectorGary HustwitStarsAmanda M. BurdenRem KoolhaasNorman FosterA documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world's foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.2011 documentary film by Gary Hustwit released on 26 October 2011. The third of a three-part series on design known as the Design Trilogy, the documentary discusses the design of cities, looking at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world's foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers. The four main themes (Housing, Mobility, Public Space & Infrastructure). were represented and promoted with limited edition screen printed posters.
- DirectorMatt TyrnauerStarsValentino GaravaniGiancarlo GiammettiNati AbascalA look at the life of legendary fashion designer Valentino.Extravagnt and lush film about the life of Valentino Garavani, produced and directed by Matt Tyrnauer, Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine. An exploration of the singular world of one of Italy's most famous men, Valentino Garavani, the film documents the colorful and dramatic closing act of Valentino's celebrated career, tells the story of his life, and explores the larger themes affecting the fashion business today. At the heart of the film is the unique relationship between Valentino and his business partner and companion of 50 years, Giancarlo Giammetti.
- DirectorR.J. CutlerStarsAnna WintourThakoon PanichgulAndré Leon TalleyA documentary chronicling Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour's preparations for the 2007 fall-fashion issue.The September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine weighed nearly five pounds, and was the single largest issue of a magazine ever published. With unprecedented access, this film tells the story of legendary Vogue editor in chief and feckless shrew, Anna Wintour and her larger-than-life team of editors creating the issue and ruling the world of fashion.
- DirectorNelson GeorgeDiane ParagasStarsRhonda F. CowanSpike LeeBranford MarsalisAn intimate portrait of the black arts movement that exploded in Fort Greene from the mid 1980s through the 90s as told by writer, historian and Brooklyn resident Nelson George.First hand account of this vibrant African American artistic community that included the great Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Branford Marsalis, Rosie Perez, Saul Williams, Lorna Simpson just to name a few. Narrated and written by Fort Greene resident Nelson George, this documentary celebrates 'Brooklyn's equivalent of the Harlem Renaissance' and follows the rise of a new kind of African American artist, the Brooklyn Boheme.
- DirectorChris MaybachStarsRichard TuttleConnie ButlerRoy DowellRichard Tuttle is an unconventional artist. Many of Tuttle's works are small pieces made of unusual materials, such as wire, or string, and many are both sculptures and paintings. Utilizing a wide variety of materials and possessing a unique sensibility, Tuttle produces works which confound art critics and museumgoers. Richard Tuttle: Never Not an Artist explores Tuttle's work and critical response to it. The film examines Tuttle's art and its impact in several locations: his home in New Mexico, in New York with collectors, and in Miami Beach, where Tuttle was chosen to create a rather large piece of public art.Richard Tuttle’s extraordinary work has exuded vitality and energy for over four decades–a remarkable feat, particularly since his art is so modest, vulnerable and daringly simplified. An elegant iconoclast who never hesitates to take risks, Tuttle uses frail and transitory materials such as plywood, tissue, wire, cloth–even shadows–to create entire worlds of thought, while challenging the ‘super-size’ aesthetic with his minor-scaled works.
From his early years as assistant at the famed Betty Parsons Gallery in New York to his major retrospective launched in San Francisco in Summer 2005, Tuttle’s commitment to the small, the anti-heroic, the barely visible, has inspired generations of younger artists to follow one’s own personal vision.
Filmed in New Mexico, New York, San Francisco, Miami and Los Angeles, this engaging production takes viewers into the studio and life of a most distinctive artist, while exploring issues of commitment, communication and controversy, the relationship between size and value, the language of materials and learning how to "see" art. - DirectorCeline DanhierStarsAmos PoeAnn MagnusonBecky JohnstonDuring the punk rock stage in the late '70s, downtown New York experienced a wave of "Do it yourself" independent filmmaking.Today, Manhattan is a byword for overpriced property, overexposed landmarks and overdressed fashionistas. In the late 70s, however, it was rat-infested, crime-crippled, cheap and nasty - somewhere for America to dump its immigrants, poor people and artists. Music, art, fashion and filmmaking burgeoned, fueled by drugs, dares, fads, feuds, and a fair helping of madness.
- DirectorDavis GuggenheimStarsJimmy PageThe EdgeJack WhiteA documentary on the electric guitar from the point of view of three significant rock musicians: The Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White.Some documentaries — “Soul Power” is an excellent recent example — immerse the viewer in the sensory spectacle of a live performance. Others, like “Anvil: The Story of Anvil,” acquaint us with the lives and personalities of performers. “It Might Get Loud,” a new film directed by Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), is more unusual. It’s a group portrait of three musicians and also, more intriguingly, a free-form historical and philosophical essay on the instrument that unites them. -New York Times
- DirectorMatthew MieleStarsRachel ZoeCandice BergenAshley OlsenA documentary on the Manhattan department store with interviews from an array of fashion designers, style icons, and celebrities.It’s clear that top fashion designers aspire to a presence at Bergdorf Goodman, the high-end Manhattan department store, given the numbingly relentless litany of encomiums in Matthew Miele’s documentary “Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s.” In this glossy, fawning valentine to conspicuous consumption (the title derives from a Victoria Roberts cartoon in The New Yorker), the stars — Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani, the Olsen twins, Marc Jacobs, Manolo Blahnik, Michael Kors and others — dutifully pay tribute. Thank heaven for a bubble-popping Joan Rivers, who blithely observes, “People who take fashion seriously are idiots.”
Of greatest interest here are portraits of Bergdorf players: Linda Fargo, the sensible, influential and straight-talking if flamboyantly attired buyer; Betty Halbreich, a winningly acerbic in-house personal shopper; and David Hoey, who creates the renowned store windows. (The preparation of his stunning 2011 holiday displays is a highlight; passers-by take pictures of them like awe-struck peasants outside a castle.)
Almost absent is conflict, except for a cursory account of recessionary speed bumps, the loss of clients after the Bernie Madoff scandal and the frustration of designers denied entry into the collections. The end credits offer a number from Barbra Streisand’s 1965 TV special in which she sings and dances in Bergdorf’s after hours. It’s a sequence with more charm than the rest of this brazen screen plug. -ANDY WEBSTER, New York Times - DirectorMark Christopher CovinoJeff HowlettStarsBobby HackneyDavid HackneyDannis HackneyA documentary on the 1970s punk trio Death, and their new-found popularity decades after they disbanded.Before Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols or even the Ramones, there was a band called Death.
Punk before punk existed, three teenage brothers in the early '70s formed a band in their spare bedroom, began playing a few local gigs and even pressed a single in the hopes of getting signed. But this was the era of Motown and emerging disco. Record companies found Death’s music— and band name—too intimidating, and the group were never given a fair shot, disbanding before they even completed one album. Equal parts electrifying rockumentary and epic family love story, A Band Called Death chronicles the incredible fairy-tale journey of what happened almost three decades later, when a dusty 1974 demo tape made its way out of the attic and found an audience several generations younger. Playing music impossibly ahead of its time, Death is now being credited as the first black punk band (hell...the first punk band!), and are finally receiving their long overdue recognition as true rock pioneers. - StarsMark CousinsJuan Diego BottoAleksandr SokurovA comprehensive history of the medium and art of motion pictures.Filmmaker Mark Cousins presents a personal and poetic history of world cinema in this long-form documentary. The Story Of Film: An Odyssey offers an overview of the rise of the motion picture and its role as one of the key art forms of the 20th Century, but rather than simply recount the facts of movie history, Cousins focuses on the creative and stylistic threads that unite great filmmakers through history, and instead of placing the emphasis on the American film industry in Hollywood, Cousins sets out to represent the best film artists from around the world, and the result is a documentary that embraces both familiar audience favorites and lesser-known classics from a century of filmmaking around the globe, offering a look at the many phases and forms of this lively art as well as paying homage to a rich variety of bold and innovative pictures. Produced in fifteen one-hour segments, The Story of Film: An Odyssey was originally produced for British digital cable network More4; prior to its initial broadcast, it was screened at several major film festivals, including the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
- DirectorAlison KlaymanStarsAi WeiweiDan AiLao AiA documentary that chronicles artist and activist Ai Weiwei as he prepares for a series of exhibitions and gets into an increasing number of clashes with the Chinese government.The American documentarist Alison Klayman had unequalled access to Ai Weiwei during the time he was working on the Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and staging his large So Sorry exhibition in Munich, and her excellent film is a lively, informative, funny and inspirational portrait of a courageous, charismatic, highly original man. He comes across as a gregarious, unpompous, comic version of the Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Drawing on interviews with his wife, mother, brother, numerous people from the art world in China and elsewhere and the man himself, Klayman deals with every aspect of his career as architect, photographer, conceptual artist, social critic, blogger, tweeter and gadfly extraordinaire.
The movie is equally good on his formative childhood and adolescence in exile to a distant part of China as the son of the despised modernist poet Ai Qing, as well as on his 12 years in America where he developed his art, had his first one-man exhibition, and literally gave the finger to the Chinese government with the famous photograph that has a raised middle finger in the foreground and Tiananmen Square in the background. The account of his work in exposing the cover-up over the student deaths during the Sichuan earthquake is deeply moving (as is the dedication of the young people who assisted him). The indignation one feels over the vindictive bureaucrats who framed, persecuted and jailed him is tempered by the wit and humour with which he responded.
His defiant art is often extremely funny. There are several heartbreaking moments, such as his 78-year-old mother expressing her pride and concern, and some beautiful images such as Ai walking across the hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds in the Tate's Turbine Hall accompanied by his little son. The film ends with the words "Never Retreat, Re-tweet", a characteristically pawky variation on the battle cry of the American socialist martyr Joe Hill, "Don't Grieve, Organise". -Philip French, The Observer - DirectorIsaac JulienBernard RoseStarsDavid HockneyDerek JarmanChris LoweA film involving two courageous and innovative artists-one the subject and one the filmmaker-provides a cinematic journey that illuminates the work and enduring importance of the late Derek Jarman.In voiceover, Derek Jarman’s friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton begins reading ‘Letter to an Angel’, a haunting and beguiling text she wrote in 2002. By then Jarman, one of Britain’s best–loved and most original artists, had been dead for eight years. An honest and previously unseen interview, shot in 1991 with Jarman in the shadow of his impending death, is the core of the film. Both letter and interview are intricately interwoven with rarely seen home-movie footage of Derek and his family, archive material, excerpts from Jarman’s feature films, pop promos, super-8 work, and new footage of Tilda Swinton in Dungeness and London and the director Isaac Julien exploring the Jarman archive.
Via these three strands we get to meet Derek the Renaissance man; artist, painter, writer, gay activist, gardener and, most importantly, filmmaker. We are introduced to his parents and hear revelations from his early childhood and adolescence, see evidence of his life in the pre-punk sixties as he hung out with people like David Hockney and Patrick Procter. Moving to London’s Bankside he produced his rarely seen Bankside Studio films, a sketch book of his studio life and the vivid characters with whom he collaborated, partying with Ken Russell and Tennessee Williams – Russell went on to offer him his first job as film-set designer. Then Jarman discovered Super-8 and he was hooked.