Winner of the Prix Jean Vigo for the best French debut film, Serge Bozon’s LA FRANCE is “a WWI movie like none other” (NY Times). An intoxicating blend of wartime romance and brightly colored musical, the film depicts an original world “where Bresson meets the Beatles” (Variety).

French farm girl Camille (Sylvie Testud) is awaiting news of her husband (the late Guillaume Depardieu), who is fighting at the front. After she receives an enigmatic letter ending their relationship, she dresses up as a boy and joins a wandering regiment in search of her estranged love. Skirting the edges of battlefields, the platoon haunts the screen like shell-shocked specters, awakening for four uncannily beautiful musical numbers played on homemade string instruments. The tunes are disarmingly catchy 60s pop, an attempt to imagine utopia in the midst of hell.

A striking vision that reaches for the sublime amidst the dehumanizing horror of war, La France is a highly acclaimed work of art. With exquisite cinematography from Céline Bozon (Serge’s sister) and a tour-de-force performance from Sylvie Testud, it is a film “not to be missed” (Village Voice).

Educational Prices:
Educational with Public Performance Rights: $129.00

 
 
 
For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Following up his portraits of Hitler in Moloch (1999) and Lenin in Taurus (2001), Alexander Sokurov’s film is a mesmerizing tour of Emperor Hirohito’s final days in power during the waning moments of WWII.

Hirohito (Issei Ogata) wanders through his palace in a child-like state of denial. He spends his time studying marine biology and paging through a photo album of Hollywood stars. Hirohito’s patient chamberlain (Shiro Sano) encourages his isolation through banal daily rituals, which include “time for private thought.” But reality soon intrudes, as American soldiers overrun his manicured gardens and nightmare visions of Hiroshima invade his dreams. No longer a God among men, Hirohito is forced to kowtow to General MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who softly pushes the terms of the occupation and, even more dramatically, for the renunciation of Hirohito’s divinity.

One of the best movies released in 2009 (NY Times), The Sun is an elegantly constructed meditation on absolute power and how it dissipates the man who wields it.

Educational Prices:
Educational with Public Performance Rights: $129.00

 
 
 
For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Raul Peralta, a middle-aged criminal in 1970’s Chile, is obsessed the idea of impersonating Tony Manero, John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever. Every Saturday night, he unleashes his passion for the film’s music by imitating his idol and leading a small group of dancers as they perform at a bar in the outskirts of the city. His dream of being recognized as a successful showbiz star is about to become a reality when a Tony Manero impersonating contest is announced on national television. However, his obsession to reproduce his idol’s likeness and perfect his act drives him to commit a series of violent crimes and thefts, leading to shocking violence and murder.

Set during the tough social context of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, Tony Manero is an award winning thriller that Entertainment Weekly calls, “a dark, edgy movie.”

Educational Prices:
Educational with Public Performance Rights: $129.00

 
 
 
For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

How can you explain what’s happened to Italy in the age of its current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi? Videocracy is director Erik Gandini’s critically-acclaimed inquiry into the mercenary underbelly of the high-glitz, low-politics, skin-baring media culture promulgated by Berlusconi’s ownership of the majority of the country’s television stations — a powerful tool in shaping public opinion to his financial and political benefit. Approaching the material as both insider and outsider, Gandini (Gitmo: The New Rule of War) gains remarkable access to the opulent world of Berlusconi’s associates and the armies of willing wannabes that swarm around them, examining the key players (and their conflicted interests) and unveiling a modern Italy as both comedy and tragedy.

 
 
Educational without Public Performance Rights: $149.00
 

 
For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Official Selection: Venice Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival

An “unforgettable documentary” (New York Daily News), Crossing the Line is the “absolutely fascinating” (Hollywood Reporter) story of James Joseph Dresnok, a US Army private who in 1962 stunned the world by walking across the violently contested DMZ that cuts Korea in two and defecting to the communist North.

Taking full advantage of access granted by the government of North Korea, the “axis of evil’s” mysterious and feared rogue state, director Daniel Gordon (The Game of Their Lives, A State of Mind) combines historical footage with contemporary interviews to both uncover the Kim-Jong Il regime and end 44 years of secrecy and rumor by allowing Dresnok to tell his own story.

Despite spending more than half his life living, working, and raising a family in North Korea, “Comrade Joe,” as Western media dubbed Dresnok when he walked into infamy at the height of the Cold War, remains a man of eternally divided loyalties. From his appalling childhood in a rural 1950’s Virginia foster home, to interviews with his fellow GI’s, to “amazing footage” (New York Post) of Dresnok playing the villain in Kim-Jong Il’s personally produced propaganda films, Crossing the Line “makes an already compelling story even more so” (Hollywood Reporter) by intimately revealing a character “worthy of Werner Herzog’s delusional hero-victims” (New York Sun).

Grade Level: College and University
Subjects: Asian Studies, North Korea, Sociology, History
Copyright: © Alive Mind Education 2010
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 91 minutes + extras

Educational Prices:

Educational with Public Performance Rights: $189.00

 
 
 
 
For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

“Riveting.”
– Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times

“Astonishing… The sheer strangeness of (Comrade Joe) Dresnok’s experience makes this film absorbing; the glimpses of the North Korean way of life make it essential.”– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

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 film following two young gymnasts, 13 year old Pak Hyon Sun and 11 year old Kim Song Yun, and their families for over eight months in the lead up to the Mass Games — involving a cast of thousands in a choreographed socialist realism spectacular — the biggest and most elaborate human performance on earth.

A State of Mind provides a rare glimpse into what is one of the world’s least known societies. North Korea is sealed off from outside influences. It borders China and Russia to the north, and to the south there is a 4km wide impenetrable border with South Korea. The country follows its own communist ideals, a strict philosophy known as the Juche Idea wrapped around the worship of the Kim dynasty – Kim Il Sung, their Eternal President who died in 1994 but remains Head of State, and his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, known as the General.

The crew began filming in February 2003 with unique access to the two families’ day to day life from home, at work in the city and countryside — a remarkable insight into a part of North Korean society never before allowed. As their Korean minder explained “you have to understand, no one has ever been allowed to see, let alone film, what you are witnessing.”

Western eyes, for the very first time, have a unique insight into North Korean society, its people, its way of life, and its total devotion to their leader and ruler, Kim Jong Il.

Grade Level: College and University
Subjects: Asian Studies, North Korea, Sociology
Copyright: © Alive Mind Education 2010
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 94 minutes + extras

Educational Prices:

Educational with Public Performance Rights: $179.00

 
 
 
 
For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

“93 unblinking minutes of insight into the lives and minds of the people living in North Korea. One of the last locked-down communist dictatorships.”
-The Los Angeles Times

“The Mass Games are performed for the sole satisfaction of Kim Jong-Il, North Korea’s generalissimo. A Stalin with less self-doubt, Kim gave Gordon and Co. what the director called “unparalleled cooperation” to make a movie about the games, apparently believing, in his arrogance, that they actually would. What Gordon created instead - with the extraordinary cinematography of Nick Bennett, and the first-rate editing of Peter Haddon - is a portrait of the power of power.”
- New York Newsday

A uniquely delicate and moving road movie, Barking Water uses the weathered and beautiful backdrop of rural Oklahoma to tell the story of Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman), a proud Native American attempting to reconnect with his estranged family. Released from the hospital, but still very ill, he hits the road with his ex-lover Irene (Casey Camp-Horinek), who acts as Frankie’s nurse but refuses to offer forgiveness for his past indiscretions. But the journey really begins as they travel through the sun-dappled Oklahoman country to reunite with his daughter and grandchild, encountering various eccentric personalities, from motor-mouthed nephews to a philosophical pot-smoking loner, along the way.

With its nuanced vision of Native American life, its rich, pastoral cinematography, and the deeply felt performances of Whitman and Camp-Horinek, director Sterlin Harjo has created a film that cements his place as one of the vital voices in American Independent cinema today.

Grade Level: College and University
Subjects: Culture, Native American Studies
Copyright: © Alive Mind Education 2010
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 78 minutes

Educational Prices:

Educational with Public Performance Rights: $249.00
For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Alexander Sokurov’s Moloch, a Russian-German co-production takes place in the spring of 1942. Originally titled “The Mystery of the Mountain,” the film opens with an astonishing shot of a naked Eva Braun (Elena Rufanova) cavorting on the precipice of Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps. Hitler is portrayed by Leonid Mosgovoi and the focus of the characters over the course of a single day is not an attempt at psychology but rather a portrait of the people living in an elaborate theater of war, shot in part in the original fortress. There are no sounds of battle but an eerie beauty and surreal graininess to the film that shows that the only thing that Hitler has on his mind is winning: “If I win, everyone will worship me. But if I lose, even the lowest nobody will use me as a doormat.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

$249.00

Public Library Price (does not include public performance rights): (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
$129.00

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!
 

---

 

---

Alexander Sokurov continues his brilliant investigation into the lives of dictators with the “engrossing, supremely assured” (Village Voice) The Sun. He has followed up his portrait of Hitler in Moloch (1999) and Lenin in Taurus (2001) with this mesmerizing tour of Emperor Hirohito’s final days in power during the waning days of WWII.

Hirohito, played by Issei Ogata (Yi Yi) with “an impish wit” (Variety), wanders through his palace in a child-like state of denial. He spends his time studying marine biology and paging through a photo album of Hollywood stars. His patient chamberlain (Shiro Sano) encourages his isolation through banal daily rituals, which include “time for private thought.” But reality soon invades, as American soldiers overrun his manicured gardens and nightmare visions of Hiroshima invade his dreams. No longer a God among men, he is forced to kowtow to General MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who softly pushes the terms of the occupation and, even more dramatically, for the renunciation of his divinity.

One of the best of 2009 (NY Times), The Sun is an elegantly constructed meditation on absolute power and how it dissipates the man who wields it.
“fascinating…terrific.”
-The New York Times

“It is the profoundest and aesthetically most satisfying of his excursions into biography, films in which his preoccupation with dreams serves what may be his real interest: history.”
–Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Review of Books

“…staggering and brilliant.”
-TimeOut NY

“One of the best films of the year.”
-Art Forum

“…engrossing, supremely assured…”
-Village Voice

Grade Level: College and University
Subjects: Culture, History
Copyright: © Alive Mind Education 2010
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 115 minutes

Educational Prices:

Educational with Public Performance Rights: $249.00
 
 
 
Educational without Public Performance Rights: $129.00
 
 
 

Note: Please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 800-562-3330 if you need further assistance.

 
 
 
 
For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

With gorgeous stop-motion animation and enlightening interviews, Mythic Journeys seeks to reclaim the power of myth, which is the reservoir of human wisdom. The filmmakers gained access to Deepak Chopra and other spiritual leaders for a rich and stimulating dialogue, which is woven in with the astonishing puppetry of Brian and Wendy Froud (The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth). Using the voices of Tim Curry (Rocky Horror Picture Show), Mark Hamill (Star Wars), and Lance Henriksen (Alien), the beautiful animated sequence tell the story of a sorcerer, a king, and a talkative corpse, which acts as a fascinating parable on morality and the limits of perception. Mythic Journeys is thought-provoking, as well as entertaining, and skeptics and believers alike will find it refreshingly inspirational.