Zeitgeist

An intimate, personal and powerful telling of the story of the 2006 war in Lebanon by a mother living in Beirut. What emerges is a universal story - a complex picture of love, pain, resistance and survival in the face of uncertainty and violence.

Decline and Fall is an experimental feature-length documentary about aerial bombing, reconstruction, mass protest, and monumentality. Spanning historical and present day images from Rome, Yucatan, Berlin and Los Angeles this work examines empire; its artifacts, structures and collapse. Through archival footage of the bombing, aerial reconnaissance and rebuilding of WWII Berlin, contemporary footage of a 2.8 million person peace march in Rome at the start of the Iraq war, a neighborhood candlelight vigil in Los Angeles, and stock footage of astronomical events in and around Mexico. Decline and Fall examines how the individual, the institutionalized collective (military, party affiliated or affinity group) and the body politic operate within Empire's boot print. And how these collections of bodies archive empire's leavings, protest its destructive capacities, manufacture alternatives and agitate for its dissolution. this work decomposes the macro and micro movements of destruction, memorialization and everyday life. Decline and Fall is structured as a historical epic and operates in the frisson between bodies moving through artifact and reinventing the space of urban memory as a lived place. As Empire declines its decay cannot be sterilized. Decline and Fall is a visual contemplation of these conscious leavings and the bodies that move through and recognize their complicity with the Empire machine. The project operates in the interstitials, refusing a comforting explanatory voice-over, a singular location, and a conclusion. It represents bodies and objects in motion in reaction to the decay of Empire, the messy, exuberant, horrifying, stultifying recall engendered by images of war, protest and the quotidian that nestle amongst these contradictions.

Since 1975, waves of Laotian people have been fleeing to Thailand through the Mekong River. Many have died trying. Through the use of text and the voices of his parents, Peter Chanthanakone shares the powerful story of the couple's own escape and the dangers they faced.

A short documentary that explores the concepts of power and freedom as modern teenagers and senior citizens of the 'atomic age' talk about their driving experiences.

A long-forgotten colonial fort evolves into a monument to true freedom

Using reenactments, newsreel footage, and photographs, Longfellow tells the story of Tina Modotti (1896-1942), from 1920 when she's living in LA with artist Robo Richey to the assassination of her lover Julio Metta in 1929. She goes to Mexico in 1921 as Weston's companion, gets her first camera in 1924, and becomes an artistic photographer and a photojournalist, later a member of the Communist Party. Her beauty, liaisons, politics, and friendships with Rivera and other Mexican intellectuals are part of the story. But it is her observations, her journals, and her photographs - as well as those Weston took of her - that are the focus of the story.