Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
to
to
Exclude
Only includes titles with the selected topics
to
In minutes
to
1-25 of 25
- Tattoo Uprising is a sweeping overview of tattooing, from Biblical references and early Christian practices to the voyages of Captain James Cook and the ever-evolving image of the tattoo in the Western world.
- Over the course of four years, filmmaker Alan Govenar talked to over 60 people around the globe about the ever-evolving ways we think and feel about one of our most basic needs.
- Down in Dallas Town is a startling film about the shifting terrain of public memory sixty years after the murder of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Through interviews with people on the street and songs recorded to memorialize JFK in the mid-1960s, the film explores the impact of the assassination on issues in today's world, from lingering conspiracy theories to the proliferation of gun violence, homelessness, and the scourge of K-2. Personal narratives are juxtaposed with the sentiments articulated in blues, gospel, norteño, and calypso recordings to haunting affect. Especially poignant is the account of Mary Ann Moorman, who returns to the assassination site fifty years later and details the making of her Polaroid photograph of the fatal head shot that killed JFK as the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza. This new resonant film by Alan Govenar confronts ways we come to terms with the past through the power of storytelling, image-making, and a songbook that is largely unknown.
- Myth of a Colorblind France explores the extraordinary and sometimes difficult lives of Blacks in Paris from the 19th century to the present. For more than a century, African American artists, authors, musicians and others have traveled to Paris to liberate themselves from the racism of the United States. What made these African Americans choose France? Why were the French fascinated by African Americans? And to what extent was and is France truly colorblind? Alan Govenar's new documentary investigates these questions and examines the ways that racism has plagued not only Blacks fleeing the United States, but Africans and people of color in France today. The film explores the lives and careers of renowned African Americans who emigrated to Paris, including Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Beauford Delaney, Augusta Savage, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Lois Mailou Jones, and includes rare home movie footage of Henry Ossawa Tanner in Paris. Myth of a Colorblind France features interviews with Michel Fabre (author of a landmark biography on Richard Wright), psychoanalyst and jazz aficionado Francis Hofstein, poet James Emanuel, historian Tyler Stovall, filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris, graffiti artist Quik, hip hop producer Ben the Glorious Bastard, African drummer Karim Toure, and many more.
- Master Qi and the Monkey King explores the life and work of the preeminent master of Chinese Opera living in the United States. Qi Shu Fang was a household name in China due to her feature role in one of the Cultural Revolution Opera films, and traveled the world to show off her mastery of the art form. The film explores the reasons why Ms. Qi, her husband and a whole troupe of Chinese Opera performers have moved to the United States to transplant their art form to a foreign culture.
- A celebration of the cultures of the world living and thriving in the United States, Extraordinary Ordinary People is a music-fueled journey across America.
- Pichi and Avo, an acclaimed street artist duo from Valencia in Spain came to New York City to create a mural of the Homeric Hymn. Internationally renowned for their ability to create relationships between art, architecture, sculpture, space and social contexts Pichi and Avo show how they work in this short by Alan Govenar.
- Texas Style takes you to the competition culture of small-town Texas: to the parades, armadillo and frog jumping races, tobacco-spitting, cowchip throwing, steer lassooing and hog calling contests. Besides sampling the Barbecue and Chili cook offs, and visiting the local domino parlor and barbershop, we get to hear some of Texas' most remarkable fiddlers compete to the foot-stomping delight of their audience. Texas Style is an intimate look at rural Texas culture and the traditional fiddle music played on its back roads.
- The setting is simple, but the stories, songs, and poems of Osceola Mays are remarkable indeed. In them, the past is recounted with a reverent intensity that expresses the deeply felt emotions of three generations of black Texans. They are are a metaphor for the African-American struggle for survival and chronicle three generations of suffering and hope.
- An intimate and humorous look at the life and career of the legendary blues pianist Alex Moore, the first black Texan to receive a National Heritage Fellowship. Moore taught himself to play the piano by watching others and practicing whenever he got a chance. Directed by Alan Govenar, photographed and edited by Bruce Lane, produced by Documentary Arts, sound by Alan Govenar.
- In 1964, Mariepaul Vermersch and her parents, Maurice and Rose, arrived at the World's Fair site in Queens and set up a booth serving the popular street food from their home in Brussels, Belgium's capital.
- An entertainer for nearly seventy years, Al Howard, One Man Band, could be seen outside local businesses in his trailer singing and playing his instruments in Grand Prairie Texas.
- Since 1946, Lucien Mouchet has been making small-scale reproductions of carrousels and fairground scenes that existed in the past or are still in operation today.To date, he has created 48 carrousels; each is a functioning masterpiece that is constructed to be exactly 1/20 scale of the original.
- In the film You Don't Need Feet to Dance, African immigrant Sidiki Conde, having lost the use of his legs to polio at fourteen, balances his career as a performing artist with the almost insurmountable obstacles of life in New York City, from his fifth-floor walk up apartment in the East village, down the stairs with his hands and navigating in his wheelchair through Manhattan onto buses and into the subway. Sidiki struggles to cope with his disability and to earn a decent living, but he still manages to teach workshops for disabled kids, busk on the street, rehearse with his musical group, bicycle with his hands, and prepare for a baby naming ceremony, where he plays djembe drums, sings, and dances on his hands.
- The 1995 excavation of La Belle, buried beneath Matagorda Bay off the coast of Texas for more than three centuries, is among the most significant archeological discoveries in North America. This film tracks the process of the recovery of La Belle from the first dives to the dismantling of the hull and the conservation of thousands of artifacts.