Cynthia Wade

An annual American awards ceremony honoring cinematic achievements in the film industry. The various category winners are awarded a copy of a statuette, officially the Academy Award of Merit, that is better known by its nickname Oscar.

New Jersey car mechanic Stacie Andree and her police detective girlfriend Laurel Hester both battle to secure Hester's pension benefits after she was diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Welcome to the whimsical world of professional mermaiding, where people's passion for swimming in fins has exploded into a half-billion-dollar industry.

What happens when the health guru of your town — the one guy who got everyone to love sprouts — is killed in a sudden accident? For his grieving widow Beth, navigating life without Sproutman isn't easy, especially because her fitness freak neighbors can’t stop imitating him. Inspired by true events, Sproutland follows Beth as she navigates the constant reminders of her deceased husband — in the local juice bar, in the yoga studio, and at home with her son. As Beth forges a path she neither expected nor wanted, she learns that life can hold despair and joy at the same time.

Generation Startup takes us to the front lines of entrepreneurship in America, capturing the struggles and triumphs of six recent college graduates who put everything on the line to build startups in Detroit. Shot over 17 months, it's an honest, in-the-trenches look at what it takes to launch a startup. Directed by Academy Award winner Cynthia Wade and award-winning filmmaker Cheryl Miller Houser, the film celebrates risk-taking, urban revitalization, and diversity while delivering a vital call-to-action-with entrepreneurship at a record low, the country's economic future is at stake.

The Collector of Bedford Street is a 2002 documentary film about director Alice Elliott's neighbor, Larry Selman, a community activist and fundraiser who had an intellectual disability. When Larry's primary caregiver becomes unable to care for him, his New York City neighborhood community rallies together to protect his independent lifestyle by establishing an adult trust fund in his behalf. The film was nominated for the 2002 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

THE FLAGMAKERS is a film about the unexpected people who make the American flag and invites us to ask the question: who is America and who is the American flag for?

Admission Possible follows high-achieving, first-generation college applicants from a single NYC public high school as they strive to secure a future once unimaginable for their immigrant families.

This documentary film captures the stories of people across five different countries engaged in a fight against the same common enemy-LDL cholesterol (LDL-C). It shows their struggles, reveals their fears, and tells true stories of courage-taking a condition that too often goes unnoticed and making it felt.

Lieutenant Laurel Hester is dying. All she wants to do is leave her pension benefits to her life partner - Stacie, so Stacie can afford to keep their house. Laurel is told no; they are not husband and wife. After spending a lifetime fighting for justice for other people, Laurel - a veteran New Jersey detective - launches a final battle for justice. Knuckle-biting, dramatic Freeheld chronicles a dying policewoman's bitter fight to provide for the love of her life.

In his early twenties, Sam Cagnina, oldest son of a Mafia hit man, meets Steven, a handsome 19-year old college student and they fall in love. Then, after a few years Sam offers Steven a "visionary" idea. What if they could find a woman who would fall in love with both of them and agree to live in a "trio" relationship? They spend the next 7 years dating and looking for that special woman. Finally, they meet Samantha, a young, struggling actress. THREE OF HEARTS explores this very unique trio union as they negotiate their living arangements, fall in love and open one of the hottest wellness centres in New York City. Everyone who comes in contact with them is never quite sure how the relationship works. But the one thing which seems certain is their love for each other.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first Minister of Digital Development and the world’s first transgender minister, faces a 50% chance of waking each morning due to a congenital heart condition. Her life mirrors Taiwan's transformation from a brutal martial law island to a beacon of transparency in the digital age.

When Dian was six years old, she heard a deep rumble and turned to see a tsunami of mud barreling towards her village. Her mother scooped her up to save her from the boiling mud. Her neighbors ran for their lives. Sixteen villages, including Dian's, were wiped away, forever buried under 60 feet of mud. A decade later, 60,000 people have been displaced from what was once a thriving industrial and residential area in East Java. Dozens of factories, schools and mosques are completely submerged under a moonscape of ooze and grit. The cause? Lapindo, an Indonesian company drilling for natural gas in 2006, unleashed a violent, unstoppable flow of hot sludge from the earth's depths. It is estimated that the mudflow will not end for another decade. Shot over the course of six years, GRIT bears witness to Dian's transformation from young girl to a politically active teenager as she and her mother launch a resistance campaign against the drilling company.

Every third Monday of the month, two bold, brassy sisters open the doors of their Long Island hair salon to women diagnosed with cancer. As locks of hair fall to the floor, women gossip, giggle, weep, face their fears, and discover unexpected beauty.

Documentary filmmaker Cynthia Wade is trying to get her divorced parents to talk to each other, but that is the last thing they want to do. Nothing ever seems to work out the way Wade hopes it will. At least she has a job (calling out Bingo numbers), a loving family (although her father's new wife is just a few years older than Wade), and a social life (if answering an emergency hotline on a Saturday night counts). So what if her sister gets all of the dates and her father is finally getting the son he always wanted? Wade is armed with her camcorder, and the result is a honest and painfully humorous video diary that captures a changing American family in the 1990s.

This feature length documentary takes the viewer into the gray zone of the national animal welfare system where quality-of-life issues take center stage.

At 31, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick faces an impossible decision: remove her breasts and ovaries or risk incredible odds of developing cancer. Armed with a genetic test result that leaves her vulnerable and confused, she balances dreams of having her own children with the unnerving reality that she is risking her life by holding on to her fertility.

Deep in the forest of Overland Park, Kansas little gnomes made a home. But how did they get there? Experience the feel-good story of paying it forward, one tiny magical house at a time.

Arsenic-laced water has poisoned a 15 year old boy from a small, rural village in Cambodia.