Kino Lorber (Firm)

A STATE OF MIND follows two North Korean schoolgirls and their families in the lead up to the "Mass Games" — the biggest and most elaborate human performance on earth — and in the process reveals more of North Korea than ever before. Following on from the 2002 award-winning documentary The Game of Their Lives, VeryMuchSo productions was granted permission from the North Korean film authorities to make a second documentary: an observational...

Hilma af Klint was an abstract artist before the term existed, a visionary, trailblazing figure who, inspired by spiritualism, modern science, and the riches of the natural world around her, began in 1906 to reel out a series of huge, colorful, sensual, strange works without precedent in painting. The subject of a recent smash retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, af Klint was for years an all-but-forgotten figure in art historical discourse, before...

A young Egyptian filmmaker gains first-hand accounts of corruption and abuse within the security forces from Egyptian police officers. Narrated in English by the filmmaker, WHOSE COUNTRY? reveals not only why police injustice can be considered a leading cause of the 2011 Revolution but also how the perpetuation of injustice within the security force itself led to widespread dissatisfaction amongst the lower ranks. A fascinating look at how victimization...

Maya Deren is one of the most important American experimental filmmakers of all time. Along with being a filmmaker, Deren was a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer and photographer, and she brings all of these disciplines together in her dreamlike and ecstatic films. Stan Brakhage called Maya Deren “the mother of us all.” The history of avant-garde film is unthinkable without her.

In Lawrence, Kansas, 11 young volunteers undergo some of the nation’s most rigorous training to become volunteer counselors in a suicide hotline call center at Headquarters, a crisis center since the early 70’s, and legendary for its level of commitment through volunteer counseling. Learning how to listen with empathy and without judging proves harder and more taxing than the volunteers imagined, and mastering the skills necessary to save lives...

This documentary weaves the stories of patients with life-threatening illness, with the stories of the nurses who guide them as they make choices about how they want to live, how much medical technology they can accept, what they hope for and how that hope evolves. DEFINING HOPE focuses on palliative care, end of life issues, hospice care and what 'quality of life' really means. It offers a hopeful message about bringing power back to the patient...

BOATMAN is Gianfranco Rosi's account of a boattrip along the Ganges river, together with his helmsman Gopal. They pass tourists and Indians who are bathing, working or meditating. In a series of small portraits Rosi depicts life on and at the banks of India's sacred river.

This entirely African American-conceived and produced ensemble drama is the result of a collaboration of a pair of pioneering Black artists: writer Ishmael Reed and filmmaker Bill Gunn, who wrote and directed the underground classic Ganja & Hess and wrote the screenplay for Hal Ashby's The Landlord.  Originally intended to air on public television in 1980, it went unseen for many years; the original tapes have been carefully restored and the film...

In 1992 Professor Richard Davidson, one of the world's leading neuroscientists, met the Dalai Lama, who encouraged him to apply the same rigorous methods he used to study depression and anxiety to the study of compassion and kindness, those qualities cultivated by Tibetan meditation practice. The results of Davidson's studies at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, are portrayed in FREE THE MIND as they...

Although his influence on the history of photography has been nothing short of profound, Paul Strand (1890-1976) remains a curiously shrouded and paradoxical figure. While passionately devoted to humanity, he was happiest in the isolation of the darkroom. A pioneer filmmaker, (Manhatta, Native Land, Heart of Spain, The Wave), he found the process of collaboration painful. Strand established himself in New York in the 1920s as a master of light and...