Grasshopper Film (Firm)

The documentary explores the complexities of violence in schools by looking at the strategies employed to prevent it. The film observes the longstanding rituals that take place in and around American schools: homecoming parades, basketball practice, morning announcements, and math class. Unfolding alongside these scenes are a collection of newer traditions: lockdown drills, teacher firearms training, metal detector screenings, and school safety trade...

Filmmaker Travis Wilkerson investigates his great grandfather S.E. Branch's 1946 murder of Bill Spann, an African American man, in Dothan, Alabama, asking questions about the culture that allowed Branch to get away with the crime without any measure of punishment.

Part of absurdist comedy, a part deep-seated satire of contemporary Australia as experienced by the young and affluent, the show follows twenty-somethings Ray and Alice as they navigate a series of increasingly awkward and comedic situations, from limp romantic encounters to bungled opportunities for professional growth. Once they have tacitly buried their vague ambitions, all that remains are half-hearted attempts with equally indeterminate results....

Spanish-born filmmaker Antonio Mňdez Esparza follows-up his debut drama Aqu ̕y all ̀with another sensitive portrait of a struggling family. Stressed by her job in a diner, single mother Regina is raising her two children in northern Florida. When her fourteen-year-old son Andrew has another brush with the law, she worries he will wind up in prison like his father. Mňdez Esparza employs documentary-style realism in this snapshot of race, class...

During the economic boom of the 1960s, Europe's highest building is being built in Italy's prosperous North. At the other end of the country, young speleologists explore Europe's deepest cave in the untouched Calabrian hinterland. The bottom of the Bifurto Abyss, 700 meters below Earth, is reached for the first time. The intruders' venture goes unnoticed by the inhabitants of a small neighboring village, but not by the old shepherd of the Pollino...

In a gripping tale of best intentions gone wrong, leading Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean (Tuesday, After Christmas) follows a trio of well-meaning aid workers from Bucharest on a food delivery mission to the rural hinterlands of the Întregalde area of Transylvania. Guided off the beaten path by an elderly villager looking for a local sawmill, they find themselves trapped in an unfamiliar, dangerous place and facing the outer limits of their goodwill...

"Follows the efforts of the internationally recognized White Helmets, an organization comprised of ordinary citizens who are the first to rush towards explosions in the hope of saving lives ... the documentary draws us into the lives of three of its founders - Khaled, Subhi, and Mahmoud - as they grapple with the chaos around them and struggle with an ever-present dilemma: do they flee with their families or stay and fight for their country"--Container....

The oldest skate park in Santiago brings together teenagers from very different social and cultural backgrounds. Chola is young and vigorous and spends her days playing with balls that she throws to the pools in which skaters ride. Football is an old dog, but beautiful and energetic, that obsessively accompanies Chola in this game. As Football grows old and Chola is left alone, the juvenile stories confront viewers with the rawness of a youth that...

Lawrence Allestad and family were among the last of the traditional sheepherders of the American West. Under a public grazing permit that had been handed down in his Norwegian-American family for generations, Allestad was the final rancher to drive his herds into Montana's rugged Absaroka-Beartooth range north of Yellowstone to fatten on sweet summer grass. The family members and their hired hands conducted the drives much as their pioneer forebears...

Never before released in the US, Paulo Rocha’s debut feature THE GREEN YEARS, gloriously shot in black and white, is an extraordinary and haunting coming-of-age tale. Nineteen-year-old Julio heads to Lisbon from the provinces and gets a job as a shoemaker for his uncle Raul. But when he meets Ilda, a confident young housemaid who becomes a regular shop visitor, the two begin a tentative romance until the realities of the outside world come crashing...