Directing
The gritty world of New York City street booksellers is exposed in a remarkable story that chronicles their lives and loves and their unique perspectives on life. Made on location at the sidewalk book tables of New York by a fellow street bookseller, 'BookWars' explores the other side of the book tables along the streets of the Village, on the Lower East Side, along 6th avenue, and elsewhere in New York City. See the Mayor, the University and the NYPD try to shut them down!
Documentarian Ross McElwee originally set out to make a travelogue of sorts tracing General William T. Sherman's infamous scorched-earth march through the Confederacy in the latter stages of the Civil War. Instead, haunted by a recent breakup with a girlfriend, McElwee ends up documenting his progress -- or lack thereof -- in starting a new relationship. His journey then becomes one of self-reflection and self-discovery rather than a historical/sociological exploration.
Shot over the course of 18 months in New York City's Lower East Side, METHADONIA sheds light on the inherent flaws of legal methadone treatments for heroin addiction by profiling eight addicts, in various stages of recovery and relapse, who attend the New York Center for Addiction Treatment Services (NYCATS).
They speak the same language, share a similar culture and once belonged to a single nation. When the Korean War ended in 1953, ten million families were torn apart. By the early 90s, as the rest of the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, Koreans remain separated between North and South, fearing the threat of mutual destruction. Beginning with one man's journey to reunite with his sister in North Korea, filmmakers Takagi and Choy reveal the personal, social and political dimensions of one of the last divided nations on earth. The film was also the first US project to get permission to film in both South & North Korea.
Children Underground follows the story of five street children, aged eight to sixteen who live in a subway station in Bucharest, Romania. The street kids are encountered daily by commuting adults, who pass them by in the station as they starve, swindle, and steal, all while searching desperately for a fresh can of paint to get high with.
Documentary about the life of Michelle Maren.
This short film, made with my friends and filmmaking partners, Michel Negroponte and Alex Anthony, was commissioned by PBS's innovative TV Lab in 1980. The three of us saw Kazem Ala, an Iranian student and political exile, briefly interviewed on a local cable access show in Austin, Texas and were very moved by his story. We spent a month filming his day to day life in Houston, during the Iranian-American hostage crisis of 1980. The film was meant to describe in subtle ways what it is to be a political exile in times of political crisis. PBS found it to be a little too subtle, and declined to air it nationally, but the film was televised on various individual PBS outlets, and seeing it recently, I was struck by how, a generation later, we're still dealing with this same situation - the clash between Islam and the West. The Presidents and Ayatollahs may have changed, but politically, things are still at crisis level. - Ross McElwee
A haunting, visceral exploration of addiction and one contemporary man's fearless and determined quest for healing and redemption through the ancient wisdom of the Bwiti and their 'magical' plant, Iboga. For those seeking a path out of darkness, this film is not to be missed.
A herd of shaggy Belted Galloway cattle is delivered to a neighboring pasture in the Catskills and instantly inspires a new film. The filmmaker’s growing fascination with the complex forces that propel the animals through one season to the next leads him to reflect on the modern idea of animal personhood. The cows graze and chew their cud, new calves are born, the mothers diligently safeguard their offspring, while the bull dominates the herd.
In a lab somewhere on the Lower East Side, a team of scientists and engineers are designing a robot named W.I.S.O.R.; a futuristic, subterranean robo welder that, being able to withstand temperatures of 300 degrees and navigate through the snaking, hundred-mile long world of buried steam pipes beneath Manhattan, will repair the rapidly decaying century-old system. New York's little known or understood underground steam pipes provide the necessary heat and hot water for everything from Chinese laundries and Turkish baths to the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. A thousand engineering hours behind a schedule and way over budget, Honeybee Robotics, W.I.S.O.R.'s creators, are worried. They argue, discuss God, baseball, and technology and ultimately lead us into a futuristic world originally thought impossible in this eerie, stranger than fiction tale set in the city beneath the city.
Focusing on three residents of Cape Canaveral, Florida this film puts forward the thesis that a decline in NASA's space program after the moon landings has left the local community impoverished.
Michel Negroponte, a documentary filmmaker, meets Maggie one day in Central Park. Maggie claims to be married to the god Jupiter and the daughter of actor Robert Ryan. Michel gets to know Maggie over the next couple of years, and attempts to use her often outlandish stories as clues to reconstruct her past.
“For most of my life, New York City has been my home. In the 1960s, when I was a teenager, I was inspired by the street photography of Gary Winogrand, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, and Lee Friedlander, who captured the unmediated energy of city living in their work. I do not take still photographs, but I have spent years roaming the streets with video and digital film cameras aiming to catch those fleeting moments that define the essence of my hometown”
