Spider-Mania

A short documentary on the Francis Ford Coppola musical One From the Heart.

A look at Kevin Smith's life and career from his childhood in New Jersey, to the day they cemented his footprints at the world famous TCL Chinese Theater, with a flock of famous folks testifying on Silent Bob's behalf!

The order comes in the summer of 1941 from propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels himself: The best animators are summoned to Berlin. Their task: Producing feature-length cartoons in ‘Disney-Quality’ with the newly founded ‘Deutsche Zeichenfilm GmbH’. To get trained, the Disney movie “Snow White” is re-traced frame by frame. After the final victory, one new feature-length production of quality shall be released every year from 1947 onwards. – that is the plan. Only in 1943, the first production is completed: “Armer Hansi” a 17-minute-long colour movie, realized with the effortful Multiplane-technology. The second film by the ‘Deutsche Zeichenfilm’ is only completed in 1946 – by DEFA. In the territories occupied by Germany, cartoons are produced as well, sometimes harmless ones, sometimes propagandistic ones. With excerpts from animated movies, life-action film documents, and witness reports by contemporaries, this documentary draws a picture of the cartoon production in the third Reich.

This remarkable documentary dedicates itself to an extraordinary chapter of the second World War – the psychological warfare of the USA. America’s trusted cartoon darlings from the studios of Warner Bros., Paramount, and the “big animals” of the Disney family were supposed to give courage to the people at the homefront, to educate them, but also to simultaneously entertain them. Out of this mixture grew a genre of its own kind – political cartoons. Insightful Interviews with the animators and producers from back then elucidate in an amusing and astonishing way under which bizarre circumstances these films partially came into existence.

“Other People’s Footage: Copyright & Fair Use” uses on-camera interviews with 19 noted documentarians including Haskell Wexler, Tia Lessin, Carl Deal, and Scott Hamilton Kennedy along with several legal experts to examine the three questions crucial to determining fair use exemptions for documentary filmmakers. The documentary presents illustrative examples from nonfiction films that use pre-existing footage, music and sound from other individuals' creations—without permission or paying fees.

A strange story from Somerset, England about a filmmaking farmer and the inspiring legacy of his long-lost home movies.

Spain. 1978. Year of the first democratic elections following the dictatorship, and of the birth cine quinqui (delinquent movies): films that rapidly became a big commercial success, showing things that were banned by the censorship not too long before.

Feature-length documentary on the making of the 1984 slasher film classic.

In the context of Australia's cold war a 'hidden history' of Melbourne's Realist film movement (1945-1959) is explored through the first person account of a filmmaker of another generation, speaking to the 'indy-media' movement of the present day.