The Raft at Real Art Ways

In the summer of 1973, a young international crew of six women and five men embarked together on a most unusual sea voyage. They began a close-quarters trip across the Atlantic from Spain to Mexico on a free-floating raft christened the Acali.

The voyage was initiated by Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés, who proposed to use the group as guinea pigs in his investigation of the origins of violent conflict and dynamics of sexual attraction.

Contentious from the get-go and incorrectly labeled by the media as ‘The Sex Raft,’ the Acali mission took 101 days to reach its destination. Now, more than forty years later, the surviving crew members reunite to reenact and recollect their experiences, additionally illustrated with extensive 16mm archival footage from the voyage.

What results is a document of the thin line between science and cultism in the early ‘70s, a touching story of female camaraderie and, in the character of Genovés, an unforgettable portrait of oblivious, toxic masculinity.

Ends Thursday
90% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
A New York Times Critic’s Pick

This inspiring documentary chronicles the eight-year quest of John and Molly Chester as they trade city living for 200 acres of barren farmland and a dream to harvest in harmony with nature.

Through dogged perseverance and embracing the opportunity provided by nature’s conflicts, the Chester’s unlock and uncover a biodiverse design for living that exists far beyond their farm, its seasons, and our wildest imagination.

Featuring breathtaking cinematography, captivating animals, and an urgent message to heed Mother Nature’s call, The Biggest Little Farm provides a blueprint for better living and a healthier planet.

Click here to listen to the NPR Documentary of the Week (5/10/19) podcast about the film with Raphaela Neihausen and Thom Powers of NPR affiliate WNYC.

About the Farm
Apricot Lane Farms is a traditional foods farm started by John and Molly Chester, a husband and wife team, who left their jobs in Los Angeles to become farmers and pursue their dream vision of starting Apricot Lane Farms in 2011. Located 40 miles north of Los Angeles, the farm is dedicated to the mission of creating a well-balanced eco-system and rich soils that produce nutrient-dense foods while treating the environment and the animals with respect.

Apricot Lane farm residents include pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, guinea hens, horses, highland cattle, and one brown swiss dairy cow named “Maggie.” Many of which, you will meet in The Biggest Little Farm. The land consists of Biodynamic Certified avocado and lemon orchards, a vegetable garden, pastures, and over 75 varieties of stone fruit.

From the filmmaking team behind the highly-acclaimed documentary The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years, Pavarotti lifts the curtain on the icon who brought opera to the people.

Academy Award winner Ron Howard puts audiences front row center for an exploration of The Voice…The Man…The Legend. Luciano Pavarotti gave his life to the music and a voice to the world.

This cinematic event features history-making performances and intimate interviews, including never-before-seen footage.

96% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes

Ollie (Tessa Thompson) is a reformed drug runner in an economically depressed small town in North Dakota, who was caught coming back from Canada with medicine for her terminally ill mother and has been toeing the line ever since.

After her mother dies, Ollie’s sister Deb (Lily James) shows up on her doorstep with a hungry child and an unplanned pregnancy.

Ollie can only see one viable option: quickly raise money to pay back the bank and hold onto their mother’s home, so Deb can raise her family safely away from her abusive ex. But to do that, she’ll need to return to the dangerous way of life she thought she’d left behind.

Writer/director Nia DaCosta won Tribeca Film Festival’s 2018 Nora Ephron Award for this emotionally-charged small-town modern Western about two women in rural America. Their sister bond, beautifully exemplified by the authentic and lived-in relationship between Tessa Thompson’s Ollie and Lily James’ Deb, is what keeps them connected but can also tie them down.

Held Over for Saturday & Sunday

Hailed as “the Michelangelo of yoga” and considered to be one of the most important masters in the world, B.K.S. Iyengar is credited with bringing the ancient art of yoga to the modern masses.

Born in Southern India 100 years ago, the legendary guru is the founder of Iyengar Yoga, a form of Hatha known for its rigorous mental and spiritual focus.

Filmed before he passed away in 2014, this intimate portrait centres on Iyengar’s legacy and teachings, while illuminating the life-changing holistic methods at the core of his practice.

Whether you’re a seasoned devotee or simply looking for self-care motivation, this profound film is bound to steer you on the path to mindfulness.

A New York Times Critic’s Pick
100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes

Known as “the artist among architects,” Luis Barragán is among the world’s most celebrated architects of the 20th century.

Upon his death in 1988, much of his work was locked away in a Swiss bunker, hidden from the world’s view.

In an attempt to resurrect Barragán’s life and art, boundary redefining artist Jill Magid creates a daring proposition that becomes a fascinating artwork in itself—a high-wire act of negotiation that explores how far an artist will go to democratize access to art.

Narrated by Jodie Foster, this documentary tells the story of the first female filmmaker, Alice Guy-Blaché. It explores the heights of fame and financial success she achieved before she was shut out from the very industry she helped create.

Guy-Blaché started her career as a secretary to Léon Gaumont and, at 23, was inspired to make her own film called La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy), one of the first narrative films ever made.

After her filmmaking career at Gaumont (1896-1907), she had a second decade-long career in the U.S., where she built and ran her own studio in Fort Lee, N.J. Over the span of her career, she wrote, produced or directed 1,000 films, including 150 with synchronized sound during the ‘silent’ era.

Her work includes comedies, westerns and dramas, as well as films with groundbreaking subject matter such as child abuse, immigration, Planned Parenthood, and female empowerment. She also etched a place in history by making the earliest known surviving narrative film with an all-black cast.

Green has dedicated more than eight years of research in order to discover the real story of Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) – not only highlighting her pioneering contributions to the birth of cinema but also her acclaim as a creative force and entrepreneur in the earliest years of movie-making.

Green interviewed Patty Jenkins, Diablo Cody, Ben Kingsley, Geena Davis, Ava DuVernay, Michel Hazanavicius, and Julie Delpy – to name a few–who comment on Guy-Blache’s innovations. Green discovered rare footage of televised interviews and long archived audio interviews which can be heard for the first time in Be Natural.

100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes
Based on the book by Sean B. Carroll.

Beginning in the 1960s, a small band of young scientists headed out into the wilderness, driven by an insatiable curiosity about how nature works. Immersed in some of the most remote and spectacular places on Earth—from the majestic Serengeti to the Amazon jungle; from the Arctic Ocean to Pacific tide pools—they discovered a single set of rules that govern all life.

Now in the twilight of their eminent careers, these five unsung heroes of modern ecology share the stories of their adventures, reveal how their pioneering work flipped our view of nature on its head, and give us a chance to reimagine the world as it could and should be.

94% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes

Ten years after the passing of his wife and creative partner, Jeanne-Claude, Christo sets out to realize The Floating Piers, a project they conceived together many years before.

Boasting uncensored access to the artist and his team, Walking on Water is an unprecedented look at Christo’s process, from the inception through to the completion of his latest large-scale art installation, a dahlia-yellow walkway atop Italy’s Lake Iseo that was eventually experienced by over 1.2 million people.

The film takes the viewer on an intimate journey into Christo’s world amid mounting madness – from complex dealings between art and state politics to engineering challenges, logistical nightmares, and the sheer force of mother nature.

Captured through breathtaking aerial views and fly on the wall camerawork, we watch the artist’s vision unfold, and get to know the man chasing it.

Click here to listen to the NPR Documentary of the Week (5/17/19) podcast about the film with Raphaela Neihausen and Thom Powers of NPR affiliate WNYC.

Click here to listen to an interview with Christo from 2016, talking about The Floating Piers, from Boston NPR affiliate WBUR.

Directed by Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo) & André Singer

The documentary, filled with archive materials and based on three long interviews, provides incredible access to, arguably, the world’s greatest living politician.

Now 87 and battling illness, the visionary Mikhail Gorbachev, former General Secretary of the U.S.S.R, has mellowed and slowed down. Still, gently but resolutely, he is pushing towards his goals.

Herzog, as on-screen interviewer, does not disguise his affection, celebrating Gorbachev’s three remarkable accomplishments: negotiations with the U.S. to reduce nuclear weapons; cessation of Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. All of this in six years!

One German diplomat sums up Gorbachev’s approach: “The process went so quickly that… opponents were overcome by the reality of the situation.”

Herzog and Singer remind us of the drastic and unforeseeable way the world changes.

Chronicling the extraordinary rise of one of the most colorful and controversial religious movements in American history, Hail Satan? is an inspiring and entertaining new feature documentary from acclaimed director Penny Lane (Nuts!, Our Nixon).

When media-savvy members of the Satanic Temple organize a series of public actions designed to advocate for religious freedom and challenge corrupt authority, they prove that with little more than a clever idea, a mischievous sense of humor, and a few rebellious friends, you can speak truth to power in some truly profound ways.

As charming and funny as it is thought-provoking, Hail Satan? offers a timely look at a group of often misunderstood outsiders whose unwavering commitment to social and political justice has empowered thousands of people around the world.

“It will make you feel as if you’ve seen the face of God.”
– Rolling Stone

99% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes

The never-before-seen documentary presents the live recording of Aretha Franklin’s album Amazing Grace at The New Bethel Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles in January 1972.

By 1971, Aretha Franklin was known as the Queen of Soul. In the culmination of five years of chart-topping hits, she and her producer, Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, decided her next recording would take her back to the music of her youth, to the world of American Gospel music.

Amazing Grace would turn out to be an elegiac moment in American musical history as well as a salute to the gospel heritage that had transformed American music in the 1960s.

Forty-seven years later, this film is a testimony to the greatness of Aretha Franklin and a time machine window into a moment in American musical and social history.

Listen to the story behind the film, and background on Aretha and her life, with veteran producer Joe Boyd, who was at the concert, on the Front Row radio show on the BBC at THIS LINK. The Amazing Grace segment begins at 21:14.

A contemporary retelling of Colin Thiele’s classic Australian tale.

‘Storm Boy’ has grown up to be Michael Kingley, a successful retired businessman and grandfather. When Kingley starts to see images from his past that he can’t explain, he is forced to remember his long-forgotten childhood, growing up on an isolated coastline with his father.

He recounts to his grand-daughter the story of how, as a boy, he rescued and raised an extraordinary orphaned pelican, Mr Percival. Their remarkable adventures and very special bond has a profound effect on all their lives.

Based on the beloved book, Storm Boy is a timeless story of an unusual and unconditional friendship.

From director Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Say You’re Sorry)

When Steve Bannon left his position as White House chief strategist less than a week after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017, he was already a notorious figure in Trump’s inner circle, and for bringing a far-right ideology into the highest echelons of American politics.

Unconstrained by an official post — though some say he still has a direct line to the White House — he became free to peddle influence as a perceived kingmaker, turning his controversial brand of nationalism into a global movement.

THE BRINK follows Bannon through the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States, shedding light on his efforts to mobilize and unify far-right parties in order to win seats in the May 2019 European Parliamentary elections.

To maintain his power and influence, the former Goldman Sachs banker and media investor reinvents himself — as he has many times before — this time as the self-appointed leader of a global populist movement.

Keen manipulator of the press and gifted self-promoter, Bannon continues to draw headlines and protests wherever he goes, feeding the powerful myth on which his survival relies.

One-Time Showing: Monday, April 8 | 7:15 PM
Post-Film Talk with Director Erik Bloomquist

Adam Weppler (The Cobblestone Corridor) stars as Seth, a young man invited to spend a weekend at the Connecticut mansion of his long lost millionaire half-brother Richard (Nicholas Tucci, You’re Next).

With the help of his enigmatic live-in girlfriend Abby (Catherine Corcoran, Terrifier), Richard leads Seth down a psychosexual rabbit hole wherein luxury and temptation are intermingled with treachery and taboo.

Long Lost was filmed in Connecticut.

In this poignant and carefully composed portrait of six service dogs and their owners, renowned documentary filmmaker Heddy Honigmann explores the close bond between animal and human.

From an 86-year-old blind woman who has never seen her canine companion to an autistic young boy who relies on his dog to know when he’s upset, they share stories about the critical role these animals play in their lives. The wife of a war veteran suffering from PTSD explains that the guide dog Mister is probably the reason they’re still together.

Honigmann questions the owners in her characteristic way — respectfully and with genuine concern rooted in a deep trust — about what the animals mean to them.

Buddy is an ode to the fighting spirit of the main characters and a loving portrait of the deep bond between man and dog.

98% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes

A tragicomedy initially set in the jianghu-criminal underworld-setting, ASH IS PUREST WHITE is less a gangster movie than a melodrama.

With a three-part structure, it begins by following the quick-witted Qiao (Tao Zhao) and her mobster boyfriend Bin (Fan Liao) as they stake out their turf against rivals and upstarts in 2001 postindustrial Datong before expanding out into an epic narrative of how abstract forces shape individual lives, and continues Jia Zhangke’s body of work as a record of 21st-century China and its warp-speed transformations.

This is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fourth completed feature since he was officially banned from filmmaking.

Well-known actress Behnaz Jafari is distraught by a provincial girl’s video plea for help–oppressed by her family to not pursue her studies at the Tehran drama conservatory.

Behnaz abandons her shoot and turns to filmmaker Jafar Panahi to help solve the mystery of the young girl’s troubles.

They travel by car to the rural northwest where they have amusing encounters with the charming folk of the girl’s mountain village.

But the city visitors soon discover that the protection of age-old traditions is as generous as local hospitality…

100% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes

The newly restored I Am Cuba is ravishing and surreal — the improved visuals and the single-language soundtrack allow viewers to experience the film’s extraordinary cinematography, sound editing, and narrative power.

The film was started only a week after the Cuban missile crisis and turned out to be something quite unique — a wildly schizophrenic celebration of Communist iconography, mixing Slavic solemnity with Latin sensuality.

The plots feverishly explore the seductive, decadent (and marvelously photogenic) world of Batista’s Cuba — deliriously juxtaposing images of rich Americans and bikini-clad beauties sipping cocktails poolside with scenes of ramshackle slums filled with hungry children and gaunt old people.

Using wide-angle lenses that distort and magnify and filters that transform palm trees into giant white feathers, cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky’s acrobatic camera achieves wild gravity-defying angles as it glides effortlessly through long continuous shots.

But I Am Cuba is not just a catalog of bravura technique — it also succeeds in exploring the innermost feelings of the characters and their often desperate situations.