Documentary Film

With “bling-bling” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and the television program Empire’s unprecedented ratings run, it is difficult to believe that hip-hop culture remains in its relative infancy. Director Sacha Jenkins’s film, Fresh Dressed, goes back to hip-hop’s inception and examines the evolution of hip-hop culture, its rapid growth, and style influences. The result is a cinematic boom box, pumping out a string of little known facts and celebrity interviews aimed at schooling hip-hop fans and non-fans alike.

The Punk Singer Directed by Sini Anderson USA, 2013 One of the most energetic and iconoclastic aesthetic/political movements in the history of popular expression, 1970s punk nevertheless left many long-entrenched attitudes virtually undisturbed by its vitriolic passage. In some ways, the arrival of the hyper-aggressive “mosh pit” during the 1980s may even have exacerbated certain …

The movies have taught us a great many things. How to “meet cute”. How to sing in the rain. How to squint into the sun. How to keep an eye in the frame when a juicy tear’s on the way. But perhaps most of all, they’ve revealed the tremendous allure (and symbolic expressivity) of smooth criminality.

Free The Mind: Can You Rewire The Brain Just By Taking A Breath? Directed & Written by Phie Ambo Denmark, 2012 Neuroscientists have formed a pretty clear picture of what a healthy brain looks like — but what, if anything, can their methods tell us about a “healthy mind”? Is it even possible to quantify …