In the 70s, skateboarding was widely seen as a fad of the 1960s that had all but died out, except for a handful of committed fans in California. But that began to change with the emerge of the Z-Boys, a team of teenaged skateboarders who emerged from a decaying urban community in Santa Monica, CA.Hard-core surfers who sought to translate the hot-dogging stunts of world-class wave riders onto t
When the film- maker Roger Graef approached me last year to make a film about the rise and fall of Detroit I had very few preconceptions about the place. Like everyone else, I knew it as the Motor City, one of the great epicentres of 20th-century music, and home of the American automobile. Only when I arrived in the city itself did the full-frontal cultural car crash that is 21st-century Detroit b
This Swedish madman, the mysterious unidentified Ghost Rider, is supposed to be in his fifties, owns a Mitsubishi dealership, has a professional black racing bike that can top 280km (before tuning) and sets off around Stockholm at unbelievable, dangerous, suicidal, breakneck speeds, weaving traffic with millimetres to spare, while being filmed via POV cameras on his bike and additional crew member
The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for bodies only
This 15 minute documentary tells the story of Denis Smith, professional light painter. Two years ago, Denis was in a high pressure sales job, struggling with drink, debt and depression. His family life was suffering, so he needed to make changes to his life before all was lost. He moved to Australia and soon discovered light painting, a unique form of photography which allows for vibrant and surre
The world is undergoing a very turbulent evolutionary process. As the very fabric of our society crumbles, a new paradigm is unfolding all around us founded on unconditional love, joy and mutual respect for all life. The question is, how do we join it?There are many paths up the spiritual mountain, for each of us the journey will be unique. Yet we are all influenced in very similar ways as we pa
In December of 2010, I spent some time with urban historian Steve Duncan making our way through the underground of New York City. Starting in the Bronx and ending at the Atlantic Ocean in Jamaica Bay, Queens, our idea was to make our way from one end of New York City to the other through its myriad tunnel networks. In the process, I knew we’d also be exploring New York City’s past – making our way
Claude Lanzmann directed this 9 and a half hour documentary about the Holocaust without using a single frame of archive footage.He interviews survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis (whom he had to film secretly since though only agreed to be interviewed by audio). His style of interviewing by asking for the most minute details is effective at adding up these details to give a horrifying portrait of
This 80-minute documentary focuses on the growing "wealth gap" in America, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 27-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune. Johnson, who cut his film teeth at NYU and made the Emmy®-nominated 2003 HBO documentary Born Rich, here sets his sights on exploring the political, moral and emotional rationale that enables a tiny perce