S1.E1 ∙ My Cinematic Media Collection (04/08/11)

In his mid-forties, half-white/half-Hispanic musician Chris Rael, who 'grew up white' on the East Coast, searches for and discovers long lost Hispanic family he never knew existed in remote New Mexico. Searching back further, he travels to Spain and researches the family's Jewish roots - they fled the Inquisition from Andalucia to the new world during the reign of Queen Isabella. Featuring Rael, his performance artist wife Penny Arcade, and amazing 92-year-old aunt Ruth Chavez, with original music by Rael.

Together, two college-age friends reflect on their youth as they prepare to turn 20 and face adulthood.

We are still here. This is our story, the story of the bison, who inhabit the Northern Hemisphere. We are walking sacred sites because we take care of our biggest sacred site: The Earth.

An unmarried father struggles against an unjust law that separates him from the daughter he loves.

Lost Down Memory Lane is the first author's documentary about living with Alzheimer's, seen exclusively through the eyes of people who suffer from it. Eight of them live together under constant supervision and care. They are all in the first phase of the disease: bouts of lucidity, forgetfulness and falling into oblivion constantly alternate. The patients live their lives, as long as they're capable. The film is a 'tranche de vie': a portrait of the daily coming and going of people in that particular and ditto state. It is also the portrait of a brutal disease that irreversible expropriates the memory from the characters. Eventually the characters will have changed. Because of their illness, they may have been disappeared completely, physically or mentally.

Shaken by the tsunami and nuclear disasters, a grown daughter returns to her rural Japanese artist community to reconnect with her estranged parents and hometown. Meditative moments at the pottery wheel punctuated by tense family conversations, sudden earthquakes and radiation level readings, "Kasamayaki (Made in Kasama)" exposes the fragility of life and the imperfect nature of human relationships.