Wandering Shadows

The Five Cities of June

The Five Cities of June is a 1963 American short documentary film directed by Bruce Herschensohn. This United States Information Agency-sponsored film details the events of June 1963 in five different cities. In the Vatican, the election and coronation of Pope Paul VI; in the Soviet Union, the launch of a Soviet rocket as part of the Space Race with the United States; in South Vietnam, fighting between Communists and South Vietnamese soldiers; in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States, the racial integration of the University of Alabama opposed by Governor George Wallace; and in Berlin, President John F. Kennedy's visit to Germany and Rudolph Wilde Platz. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Phantom Cowboys

Part time capsule, part folk song, Phantom Cowboys follows three teenage boys as they approach adulthood in vastly different parts of the United States. Moving fluidly between the deserts of California, the valleys of West Virginia, and the sugarcane fields of Florida, the film explores the lives of these young men during two formative periods - transitioning forward and backward in time over a span of eight years.

A Mountain Tale

When a young woman learns that her fiancé is cheating on her, she leaves her school and goes to remote village as a teacher. In the village where she goes, her unprecedented behavior disturbs some villagers. Complained about by the villagers, she is forced to justify herself to the inspector assigned to investigate the allegations against her.

Souten Ki Beti

Despite being in love with Radha, Shyam fulfils his father's dying wish and marries Rukmini and they manage to find a good balance as husband and wife. Whilst on a trip to a hill station, they meet a 5 year old girl who takes them to her home and exposes an unknown truth - the little girl Dolly is Shyam's own daughter by Radha. Rukmini rises to the occasion as a great woman and accepts and adopts Radha as a second wife of Shyam and Dolly as their daughter, without caring for society and the law. They live happily under one roof until Dolly falls in love with a high society advocate's son Amit. But society doesn't accept Dolly and charges her of being a illegal child and they must face both social and legal barriers as well as family turmoil in a fight to be together.

Secrets of the Dead - Shroud of Christ?

In a central part of Turn Cathedral is an elaborate, baroque shrine housing one of the Catholic Church's most precious and controversial artifacts: a 15-foot-long piece of cloth known as the Turn Shroud. Its surface bears, in faint shades of brown, the unmistakable image of a man. For its dedicated believers, known as the "Shroudies," this image is that of Jesus Christ himself, burnt onto the cloth upon his miraculous resurrection image from the dead. But the debate over the shroud's origins has raged furiously since its first documented appearance in Lirey, France, in the 1350s.

Looking for Mushrooms

LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-1967) is a psychedelic travelogue film that documents a series of “trips” through rural Mexico and urban America. Conner combined street views of San Francisco shot in the late 1950s with scenes of rural Oaxaca captured during his “mushroom-hunting” excursions between 1961 and 1962, when Bruce and his wife, Jean, were living in Mexico City. On at least one of these trips, the Conners were joined by Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor and soon-to-be leading proponent of psychedelic drugs. In 1996, Conner revised the film once again: he used an optical printer to expand its length from three to fourteen-and-a-half-minutes, and added a new soundtrack, Terry Riley's "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band," to create a more meditative, but no less hypnotizing, iteration of the mushroom hunt.

Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves

Province of Quebec, Canada, the Maple Spring, 2012. Driven by frustration and the desire to find a new life, Klas Batalo, Ordine Nuovo, Tumulto and Giutizia form a counter-cultural group, a radical cell guided by a deep hostility to the established order that they manifest through terribly ambiguous political expressions, Molotov cocktails and guerrilla tactics, seeking to sow mayhem in Montreal as a prelude to the overthrow of the government.

Arctic Crimes : L'aube Sans Réveil

Moscow

Continuing the exploration of the thin line between truth and performance, Eduardo Coutinho turns his attention to the drama generated during rehearsals for the Galpão Theater Company’s performance of Chekov’s The Three Sisters. As he shoots scenes from the play, Coutinho attempts to capture the very moment in which reality becomes fiction and vice versa—whether through the actors’ bodies and words or in backstage scenes of a performance that will exist only on film.