World greatest performers reveal the secrets of their intentions and motivations. Tensions and conflicts of the people who dedicated their life to the ephemeral art of direct action. A story about universal human need of expression and communication.

dir. Jan Przyluski. starring: Jan Swidzinski, Adina Bar-On, Warpechowski, Nieslony, Wijono, Tatarczuk, etc

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Exit Through the Gift Shop: The story of how an eccentric French shop keeper and amateur film maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner with spectacular results. Billed as ‘the world’s first street art disaster movie’ the film contains exclusive footage of Banksy, Shephard Fairey, Invader and many of the world’s most infamous graffiti artists at work.

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In 1995 craigslist.org was born in the Bay Area: a free, down-to-earth and uncensored bulletin board that revolutionized the ease and speed with which people could communicate, exchange goods and services, and create community.  Primarily focusing on housing, jobs, items for sale and personal ads, the site soon became a hub for San Francisco’s wired community.

2003.  Craigslist is big.  Really big.  Over 1/3 of all Bay Area internet users utilize craigslist on a regular basis. Outside of the Bay Area, craigslist has spread to 31 cities across the globe, with no sign of slowing.  In San Francisco alone, the site receives over 23,000 posts daily, with page views close to 29 million daily.  With no advertising, no commercialization and only word-of-mouth promotion, craigslist has become a phenomenon.  And it’s still free.

Our film:

From a single post on craigslist we assembled eight film crews and a soundtrack to document a random day-in-the-life of what has evolved into the world’s largest community board. Not just the “Best-Of” or the “Success Stories”, but a real, down-to-earth look at the fastest-growing grassroots cyber-community in the city that started it: San Francisco.

This is that day: August 4, 2003:

An Ethel Merman drag queen searches for the perfect backup band for her Led Zeppelin covers. A suburban professional woman assembles a diabetic cat support group. A couple seeks the perfect rabbi for their marriage.  An aging, would-be mother finds her ideal sperm donor. Doors for sale, one night stands, compulsive roommates, transsexual erotic services.  The mundane and the sublime, the ridiculous and the profound, all come together to paint a portrait of a thriving, humanistic community in the midst of an ever-accelerating culture.

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Biology stands on the brink of a shift in the understanding of inheritance. The discovery of epigenetics — hidden influences upon the genes — could affect every aspect of our lives.

At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea — that genes have a ‘memory’. That the lives of your grandparents — the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw — can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren.

The conventional view is that DNA carries all our heritable information and that nothing an individual does in their lifetime will be biologically passed to their children. To many scientists, epigenetics amounts to a heresy, calling into question the accepted view of the DNA sequence — a cornerstone on which modern biology sits.

Epigenetics adds a whole new layer to genes beyond the DNA. It proposes a control system of ‘switches’ that turn genes on or off — and suggests that things people experience, like nutrition and stress, can control these switches and cause heritable effects in humans.

In a remote town in northern Sweden there is evidence for this radical idea. Lying in Överkalix’s parish registries of births and deaths and its detailed harvest records is a secret that confounds traditional scientific thinking. Marcus Pembrey, a Professor of Clinical Genetics at the Institute of Child Health in London, in collaboration with Swedish researcher Lars Olov Bygren, has found evidence in these records of an environmental effect being passed down the generations. They have shown that a famine at critical times in the lives of the grandparents can affect the life expectancy of the grandchildren. This is the first evidence that an environmental effect can be inherited in humans.

In other independent groups around the world, the first hints that there is more to inheritance than just the genes are coming to light. The mechanism by which this extraordinary discovery can be explained is starting to be revealed.

Professor Wolf Reik, at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, has spent years studying this hidden ghost world. He has found that merely manipulating mice embryos is enough to set off ‘switches’ that turn genes on or off.

For mothers like Stephanie Mullins, who had her first child by in vitro fertilisation, this has profound implications. It means it is possible that the IVF procedure caused her son Ciaran to be born with Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome — a rare disorder linked to abnormal gene expression. It has been shown that babies conceived by IVF have a three- to four-fold increased chance of developing this condition.

And Reik’s work has gone further, showing that these switches themselves can be inherited. This means that a ‘memory’ of an event could be passed through generations. A simple environmental effect could switch genes on or off — and this change could be inherited.

His research has demonstrated that genes and the environment are not mutually exclusive but are inextricably intertwined, one affecting the other.

The idea that inheritance is not just about which genes you inherit but whether these are switched on or off is a whole new frontier in biology. It raises questions with huge implications, and means the search will be on to find what sort of environmental effects can affect these switches.

After the tragic events of September 11th 2001, Rachel Yehuda, a psychologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, studied the effects of stress on a group of women who were inside or near the World Trade Center and were pregnant at the time. Produced in conjunction with Jonathan Seckl, an Edinburgh doctor, her results suggest that stress effects can pass down generations. Meanwhile research at Washington State University points to toxic effects — like exposure to fungicides or pesticides — causing biological changes in rats that persist for at least four generations.

This work is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in scientific thinking. It will change the way the causes of disease are viewed, as well as the importance of lifestyles and family relationships. What people do no longer just affects themselves, but can determine the health of their children and grandchildren in decades to come. “We are,” as Marcus Pembrey says, “all guardians of our genome.”

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Award winning documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy explores the human and political consequences of one of the most bitter scandals of the war in Iraq in this feature. In the 1960′s, a prison was built in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi city west of Baghdad, and during the regime of Saddam Hussein it became a center of torture and abuse where political dissidents were subjected to agonizing punishment or death.

Following the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, the prison was taken over by American military authorities, and was used as a holding facility for prisoners of war and suspected terrorists captured by U.S. forces.

The prison’s reputation as a site of widespread abuse rose again when journalists discovered photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured and humiliated in an ugly variety of ways by American soldiers, a scandal which had a major impact on international thinking about the war.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib offers an in-depth look at the story behind the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, featuring interviews with observers on both sides of the national divide. Ghosts of Abu Ghraib received its world premiere at the 2007.

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UNGRIP is a film that explores the abstract boundaries of what human freedom means to you as an individual told, through the life of one man who lives it.

From the creators of Esoteric Agenda (www.esotericagenda.net) and Kymatica (www.talismanicidols.org), UNGRIP penetrates the illusions and delusions of the legal system with direct relation to the psychology of humanity. Inspired by the story of rob in the pagé family, as well as clips of Bruce Lipton, PHD and Ben: Stewart.

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A heartbreaking story about a lion who was raised by humans, by the friends John Rendall and Ace Bourke. This lion got too big for them, so they put him in the wilderness. One year later they decided to visit him in Africa where he was put. Scientists said that lions would never remember their human parents after such time separated. Something that this film contradicts. It was a reunion that you will never forget.

Description:

In 1969 Ace Bourke and John Rendall were two young Australian travelers who had just arrived in London when they bought a lion cub from Harrods department store. It was an impractical “impulse” buy, but while he was a cub they felt they could look after him as well as anyone, and do their best to secure his future. They called him Christian.

Ace and John lived with Christian on the King’s Road, Chelsea and when Christian grew too big they moved to the country until it was arranged for Christian to be returned to the wild in Kenya.

Two documentaries entitled The Lion from World’s End, and Christian the Lion were made about his life in London, his return to Africa, George Adamson assembling a “man-made” pride around Christian, and his rehabilitation back into the African wild. Ace and John also wrote A Lion Called Christian (1971) which was re-published in 2009 with superb photographs by Derek Cattani who documented Christian’s early life.

Forty years later the YouTube clip featuring Christian’s unforgettable reunion with Ace and John, a year after his return to Africa, introduced a new world audience who are intrigued and enchanted by Christian’s extraordinary story. With the mutual love and trust he shared with Ace and John, he has become a symbol of the potential of human-animal relationships and the importance and urgency of animal and wildlife conservation.

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This 80-minute documentary focuses on the growing “wealth gap” in America, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 27-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune. Johnson, who cut his film teeth at NYU and made the Emmy®-nominated 2003 HBO documentary Born Rich, here sets his sights on exploring the political, moral and emotional rationale that enables a tiny percentage of Americans – the one percent – to control nearly half the wealth of the entire United States.

The film Includes interviews with Nicole Buffett, Bill Gates Sr., Adnan Khashoggi, Milton Friedman, Robert Reich, Ralph Nader and other luminaries.

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Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine is a 2003 documentary film by Vikram Jayanti about the match between Garry Kasparov, the highest rated chess player in history and the World Champion for 15 years (1985–2000), and Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer created by IBM. It was coproduced by Alliance Atlantis and the National Film Board of Canada.

Kasparov had beaten Deep Blue, a computer designed specifically to beat him, in a match played in 1996. He agreed to offer a rematch the following year. Kasparov won the first game of the rematch easily with the white pieces. In the second game, Kasparov was struggling with the black pieces, but set a trap that most computers fall for. Deep Blue didn’t fall for it and won to level the match, although Kasparov and Deep Blue both missed a perpetual check that could have given Kasparov a draw.

The next three matches ended in draws, with Kasparov appearing to weaken psychologically. Deep Blue went on to win the decisive sixth game, marking the first time in history that a computer defeated the World Champion in a match of several games.

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From Oscar-wining director Alex Gibney and producer Graydon Carter comes a probing look into the uncanny life of national treasure and gonzo journalism inventor Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

A fast moving, wildly entertaining documentary with an iconic soundtrack, the film addresses the major touchstones in Thompson’s life-his intense and ill fated relationship with the Hell’s Angels, his near-successful bid for the office of sheriff in Aspen in 1970, the notorious story behind the landmark Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his deep involvement in Senator George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, and much more. Narrated by Johnny Depp.

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