Smile

A heartwarming exploration of a community art project by photographer Tawfik Elgazzar providing free portraits for locals and passers-by in Sydney, Australia's Inner West. The film explores the nature of individuality, cultural diversity and the positive joy for the photographer of seeing his subjects smile.

Dig!

A documentary on the once promising American rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. The friendship between respective founders, Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor, escalated into bitter rivalry as the Dandy Warhols garnered major international success while the Brian Jonestown Massacre imploded in a haze of drugs.

In the Realms of the Unreal

In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Time Being

Gunvor Nelson stares intently at her mother Carin, a woman whose body has been devastated by the challenges of her last days on this earth. In three astute shots, Nelson looks with honesty rather than awe at a woman whose spirit has somehow flown away but whose body still demands a share of our time and our space.

In Order Not to Be Here

A night flight through hysteria and police surveillance in suburban America.

Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business

A biography of the Portuguese-born Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda, whose most distinctive feature was her tutti-frutti hat. From her arrival in the US as the "Brazilian Bombshell" to her Broadway career and Hollywood stardom in the 1940s.

Vanilla Ice Archive

The life and career of American rapper Vanilla Ice, showcasing his start as a breakdancer in South Dallas to his mainstream international success and the hardships that followed through archive personal, TV, news and concert footage.

Joyce at 34

After giving birth, Joyce attempts to regain her position as a filmmaker while also caring for her new baby. The changes to both her and her husband’s professional lives are remarkable and frustrating. The new parents love the baby but must recognize the limitations she puts on their careers.

Julia

Julia is a young transgender woman who left her home country of Lithuania. Now living in Germany, she walks the streets of Berlin, working as a prostitute to survive. This documentary revisits Julia over a ten-year period of her life.

Dance for All

10 + 4 (Dah be alaveh chahar)

After casting painter and video artist Mania Akbari as the central figure of his groundbreaking Ten (2002), and then witnessing her outstanding debut as a feature film director in 20 Fingers (2004), Abbas Kiarostami urged her to direct a sequel to the film. In Dah be alaveh Chahar (10 + 4), though, circumstances are different: Mania is fighting cancer. She has undergone surgery; she has lost her hair following chemotherapy and no longer wears the compulsory headscarf; and sometimes she is too weak to drive. So the camera follows her to record conversations with friends and family in different spaces, from the gondola she had famously used in her first feature to a hospital bed.

Mabel

Feisty, fiercely independent and firmly rooted in place, 90 year-old Mabel Robinson broke barriers back in the 40s when she became the first woman in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, to launch her own business—a hairdressing salon where she still provides shampoo-n-sets over 70 years later. Weaving animation and archival imagery with intimate and laugh out loud moments in the salon, the film celebrates the power of friendship, doing what you love and staying active. With no desire to retire anytime soon, Mabel gives voice to a generation who are not front and center of cinema or the pop hairstyles of the day, and subtly shifts the lens on our perception of beauty and the elderly.

Trade Center

The voices of five gay men who cruised for sex at the World Trade Center in the 1980s and 1990s haunt the sanitized, commerce-driven landscape that is the newly rebuilt Freedom Tower campus.

Freedom Downtime

A feature-length documentary about the Free Kevin movement and the hacker world.

Nana

Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World

Experience an inside look at David Bowie's incredible influence on music, art and culture via interviews with some of the people who knew him best.

Que Bom Te Ver Viva

Four years after a military coup overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964, all civil rights were suspended and torture became a systematic practice. Using a mix of fiction and documentary this extraordinary film is a searing record of personal memory, political repression and the will to survive. Interviews with eight women who were political prisoners during the military dictatorship are framed by the fantasies and imaginings of an anonymous character, portrayed by actress Irene Ravache.

Crimes of Honour

Throughout the Islamic world, each year hundreds of women are shot, stabbed, strangled or burned to death by male relatives because they are thought to have “dishonoured” their families. They may have lost their virginity, refused an arranged marriage or left an abusive husband. Even if a woman is raped or merely the victim of gossip, she must pay the price. Crimes of Honour documents the terrible reality of femicide – the belief that a girl’s body is the property of the family, and any suggestion of sexual impropriety must be cleansed with her blood. We meet women in hiding from their families, a brother who describes his reasons for killing the sister he loved, and a handful of women who have committed themselves to the protection of young women in danger of losing their lives.

411VM Issue #15

Chaos Switchstance Profiles: Chet Thomas, Laban Pheidias, Gershon Mosley, Andy Macdonald Wheels Of Fortune: Tyrone Olson, Satva Leung, Ryan Kenreich Tampa Am Contests Industry: ATM Southside Skatepark Spot Check Japan Switzerland France World Report Board Aid 3 Transitions

Becky Watts Killed for Kicks

The story behind the murder of 16-year-old Becky Watts, who was killed by her stepbrother Nathan Matthews and his 21-year-old partner Shauna Hoare in Bristol in February 2015. This programme documents the huge police manhunt that unfolded in the wake of her disappearance, and the police investigation which eventually brought her murderous stepbrother to justice.