In this provocative and perceptive portrait of teenage angst and nascent sexuality, a love triangle develops between three girls one summer in Paris. Marie, Anne and Floriane, all 15 years old, cross paths in the corridors at the local swimming pool, and love and desire make a sudden and dramatic appearance. The awkward Anne, the bad girl Floriane and the gawky Marie play an intense game of emotional chess as they wrestle with love, friendship and their desire for one another.
A true story, 18 year old Violette Nozière (brilliantly played here by Isabelle Huppert, 12-time César Award nominee for Best Actress) was condemned to death for patricide and attempted matricide in the 1930s, ostensibly to gain access to her parents’ meager assets in order to support her good-for-nothing lover. During the trial she alludes to incest committed by her father and accuses her mother of tacit consent. She also claimed that her real father, a wealthy and powerful man, refuses to acknowledge her because she was born out of wedlock. Violette offers a chilling portrait of French society and sexual morals in the early 20th century.
Narrated by Leonard Cohen, this two-part series explores ancient teachings on death and dying and boldly visualizes the afterlife according to Tibetan philosophy. A Way of Life documents the book’s acceptance and use in Europe and North America. Included is remarkable footage of the rites and liturgies surrounding and following the death of a Ladakhi elder as well as the views of the Dalai Lama on life and death. The Great Liberation observes an old Buddhist lama and a 13-year-old novice monk as they guide a deceased person into the afterlife. The passage of the soul is visualized with animation blended into actual location shooting. An additional short documentary, The Trap, explores Buddhist concepts of mutual respect, tolerance and cycles in the daily life of a North Atlantic fishing village.
In a wooded glade somewhere near San Francisco, The Workshop challenges the rules of modern society by pushing all boundaries of normal convention - especially the sexual ones! A group of people agree to take part in a 10-day ‘workshop’ led by spiritual leader Paul Lowe in their search for a higher personal truth. On day one they are told to introduce themselves and meet everyone else - completely naked! Searing emotional honesty, full nudity, experiments and sexuality and the exorcising of inner demons are the hallmarks of this groundbreaking and provocative documentary.
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Reviews
“One of the most talked about films at the [2007] Tribeca Film Festival
…an extraordinarily frank and thought-provoking sexual odyssey which,
with the right exposure and a healthy pinch of salt, could be a zeitgeist,
talking-point film along the lines of What the Bleep Do We Know or Shortbus.”
-Mike Goodridge, Screen International
“The breakdown of convention is a wild ride, as Morgan chronicles love
triangles, couples struggling with monogamy and a gay man having sex with
a woman for the first time-all on camera. Jealousy, both emotional and physical,
erupts within the flock. It’s an amusing and emotional adventure in sex, love,
betrayal, fear and joy until the workshop ends.”
- Aaron Krach, Tribeca Film
Brilliantly acted and sung by the internationally acclaimed South African theater company Dimpho Di Kopane (DDK), U-Carmen is a stunning adaptation of perhaps the world’s best-loved opera, Carmen. Re-imagined in the modern world of South African pool halls, bars, courtyards and barracks U-Carmen tells the story of a cigarette factory-worker, Carmen (Pauline Malefane), and her doomed love affair with a police sergeant. As the two grow more emotionally connected, their relationship escalates violently, culminating in a tragic conclusion of revenge and madness.
Women and Spirituality is the definitive series that explores the power of the sacred feminine in mythological, historical and cultural contexts. This trilogy investigates the relationship between women and spirituality from ancient times to the present. Goddess Remembered is a salute to 35 000 years of “pre-history,” to the values of ancestors only recently remembered, and to the goddess-worshipping religions of the ancient past. Burning Times is an in-depth look at the witch-hunts that swept through Europe just a few hundred years ago. In Full Circle authors, teachers, social activists and feminists explore manifestations of contemporary women’s spirituality in the Western world.
Women & Spirituality: The Goddess Trilogy Product Information
“…massive and beautiful film…” - Los Angeles Times
“…sets the record straight…” - The San Francisco Chronicle
Women & Spirituality: The Goddess Trilogy
Part 1
Goddess Remembered
This poetic documentary is a salute to 35 000 years of “pre-history,” to the values of ancestors only recently remembered, and to the goddess-worshipping religions of the ancient past. Goddess Remembered features Merlin Stone, Carol Christ, Luisah Teish, Starhawk, Charlene Spretnak, and Jean Bolen, who link the loss of goddess-centred societies with today’s environmental crisis. They propose a return to the belief in an interconnected life system, with respect for the earth and the female, as fundamental to our survival.
Part 2
The Burning Times
This beautifully crafted film is an in-depth look at the witch-hunts that swept through Europe just a few hundred years ago. False accusations and trials led to massive torture and burnings at the stake, and ultimately to the destruction of an organic way of life. The Burning Times advances the theory that widespread violence against women and the neglect of our environment today can be traced back to those times.
Part 3
Full Circle
In this stirring documentary, authors, teachers, social activists and feminists explore manifestations of contemporary women’s spirituality in the Western world. Drawing on the customs, rites and knowledge of the past, Full Circle envisions a sustainable future where domination is replaced with respect. At the centre of these discussions is a reverence for the Earth–a sacred circle which we must protect.
Featured Experts
Donna Read is an award-winning producer, director and editor. Her credits include a television special called Temagami; a documentary on the life’s work of Marija Gimbutas, Signs out of Times; she won the best edited award at the Toronto International film festival in 1982 for Behind The Veil: Nuns. She received 8 awards for her three- part series Women and Spirituality. She was editor, associate director, and producer for Anatomy of Desire, which received a Juno award for best editing. Mask and Drum won first prize at the London International Film Festival. In 2003 she and fellow W&S expert Starhawk formed Belili Productions
Starhawk is one of the most respected voices in modern earth-based spirituality. She is also well-known as a global justice activist and organizer, whose work and writings have inspired many to action. Starhawk is best known as an articulate pioneer in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess
religion. She is a cofounder of Reclaiming, an activist branch of modern Pagan religion, and continues to work closely with the Reclaiming community. She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, and is deeply committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism
Charlene Spretnak is one of the many originators of the women’s spirituality movement. She is a cofounder of the Green Party movement in the United States. In 1989 Charlene Spretnak was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame in recognition of her writings on spirituality and social justice. In 2006 she was named by the Environment Department of the British government to their list of “100 Eco-Heroes of All Time” in recognition of her pioneering work in ecological thought, spirituality, and activism. She is a professor in the philosophy and religion program (in the Women’s Spirituality concentration) at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a graduate institute in San Francisco.
Carol Christ is a feminist, eco-feminist and a pioneer in the Goddess movement. Her essay “Why Women Need the Goddess” delivered at the Great Goddess Re-emerging Conference in 1978 has been reprinted scores of times. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale in Religious Studies. She has taught at Harvard Divinity School, Pomona College, Columbia University, San Jose State, and California Institute of Integral Studies where she currently is Adjunct Professor offering courses over the internet in the Women’s Spirituality Program. In 1987 she resigned a tenured position and moved to Greece where she became a citizen in 2002. She is trying to save the wetlands of her beloved island working with Friends of Green Lesbos and World Wildlife Fund–Greece.
MerlinStone became interested, in adulthood, in archaeology and ancient religions from her study of ancient art. She taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She spent a decade on research before writing the book published in the UK as The Paradise Papers and then in the U.S. as When God Was a Woman (1976). It describes her theory of how the Hebrews suppressed allegedly goddess-based religions practiced in Canaan and how their reaction to what she asserts as being the existing matriarchal and matrilineal societal structures shaped Judaism and, thus, Christianity. Another major work, Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood collects stories, myths, and prayers involving goddess-figures from a wide variety of world religions, ancient civilizations.
Luisah Teish is an author, storyteller, and priestess of the Ifa/Orisha faith from New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the founder and president of Ile Orunmila Oshun, and holds a chieftancy title in the Fatunmise lineage as head Oshun Priest in the United States. She is the Vice President of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, and the founder of the School of Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts Center in Oakland, CA. She is the author of several books on African religion. She has been on the faculty at University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, California, the Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, California, and she teaches at New College of California, John F. Kennedy University, the Montclair Women’s Cultural Arts Center, and Naropa. Her performances, lectures and workshops have taken her to Europe, Egypt, South America, New Zealand, Nigeria, Costa Rica, and across the United States.
Jean Bolen is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and recipient of the Institute for Health and Healing’s “Pioneers in Art, Science, and the Soul of Healing Award”. She brings an emphasis on the question for meaning and the need for a spiritual dimension in life to all aspects of her work, while also taking into account the powerful effects of archetypes within us and family and culture upon us. Her books are used as college and university texts in gender studies, women’s psychology, mythology, spirituality, east-west philosophy, and psychology courses.
After the fall of Communism, the plight of the Proletariat is rarely discussed. WORKINGMAN’S DEATH is an unflinching portrait of the state of manual labor in the 21st century. This award-winning documentary reveals the invisible face of workers from around the world. In the Ukraine, a group of men spend long days crawling through cramped shafts of illegal coal mines in order to scrape together enough coal to buy vodka. Sulfur gatherers in Indonesia brave the smoky heat of an active volcano and the treacherous trip back down while Western tourists snap pictures of the stunning landscape. Knee-deep blood, scorching fire and acrid smoke are routine for workers at a crowded open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria. Pashtun immigrants in Pakistan use little more than their bare hands to dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal and live in shanty towns constructed from the scrap. Steelworkers in China fear they could be a dying breed as capitalism erodes the foundation of communist ideology in the world’s fastest growing nation.
Today’s manual laborers are no longer celebrated with hymns of praise. WORKINGMAN’S DEATH provides a rare glimpse into the harsh treatment faced by manual labor around the world.
The sardonic epigraph for “Workingman’s Death,” the Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s glamorized documentary examination of hard physical labor, comes from Faulkner: work is “the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.”
Maybe so. But as Chekhov observed, “Man must toil, he must work in the sweat of his brow, whoever he is, and in this alone is encompassed the sense and the aim of his life, his happiness, his raptures.”
The film seems to want to dispute Faulkner. As it observes laborers from around the world going to hell and back, day after day, year after year, to eke out subsistence livings, you are struck by their exuberance, vitality, teamwork and satisfaction in discharging backbreaking duties with a minimum of complaint. The simple act of doing the work, no matter how dangerous, gives their lives structure and purpose; triumphing over fear adds to their sense of accomplishment.
When you’re totally immersed in the physical moment, there is no room left for ennui. At least that’s the romantic way “Workingman’s Death” likes to imagine hard labor. But tell that to all the oppressed union workers over the decades who have gone on strike for better wages and working conditions.
A film of few words but plenty of indelible images of people (mostly men) risking their lives with hardly a second thought, “Workingman’s Death” hopscotches to various work sites around the world. It is divided into chapters with portentous titles like Heroes, Ghosts, Lions and Brothers that evoke the Herculean labors of Alexsei Stakhanov, a legendary coal miner in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930’s who was mythicized for his superhuman productivity and is remembered at the beginning of the film.
Jumping to the present, “Workingman’s Death” visits Stakhanov’s latter-day descendants extracting what coal remains in the Donbass region of Ukraine, where he toiled 70 years earlier.
Squeezing their bodies into narrow crevices known as mousetraps, many no higher than 16 inches, the miners use chisels and pickaxes to dig coal out of these depleted mines.
After separating coal from rock, they haul their meager spoils out of the pit by hand in small wagons, and divide it up. Most use it to heat their homes. The little bit left over is sold for food. Without the coal, one declares, they would freeze to death.
The film’s next stop is a mine at the edge of a volcanic crater in Kawah Ijen, Indonesia, where the earth spits out molten sulfur in hissing yellow fumes that quickly harden into slabs.
Men toting bamboo baskets balanced on their shoulders descend a perilous mountain path into the infernal mist and return bearing 200-pound loads for the three-mile trek back up the mountainside.
The most disturbing stop on the tour is an outdoor slaughterhouse in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where goats are killed, skinned, cut into portions, cleaned and roasted.
The camera’s unblinking views of the bleating animals’ throats being slit, sending geysers of blood gushing onto the street, suggest a dispassionate nature documentary in which humans are the alpha species in the natural pecking order.
Next up are the Pakistani workers in the port of Gaddani who have traveled hundreds of miles from their mountain villages to dismember giant ships, using blowtorches to split them apart and sending great hunks of metal crashing into the water. The pieces are cut up and sold as scrap.
Although the work is extremely dangerous, they toil in an atmosphere of calm. What little leisure they have is devoted to saying Islamic prayers and eating food they cook for themselves.
“Workingman’s Death” doesn’t go into detail in any of these scenes. It lets the images (underscored by John Zorn’s industrial music) speak for themselves.
The movie has the structure and tone of an epic historical poem that begins in the past, moves into the present and in two final sequences speculates on the future.
The first, set in a Chinese steelworks in Angang, parallels the optimistic communal spirit there with the exalting of collective labor in the days of Stakhanov.
The second, in Duisburg, Germany, visits a shuttered steelworks that produced more than 30 million of tons of steel from 1903 to 1985. With the blast furnaces turned into an outdoor light show, it is now literally a museum piece.
In the film’s production notes, Mr. Glawogger wonders, “Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?” In this visually impressive but proudly unscientific hymn to progress, the answers are yes and yes.
Written and directed by Michael Glawogger; in Russian, Bahasa Indonesian, English, Ibu, Yoruba, Pashtu and Mandarin, with English subtitles; director of photography, Wolfgang Thaler; edited by Mona Willi and Ilse Buchelt; music by John Zorn; released by Lorber HT Digital. Running time: 122 minutes. This film is not rated.
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Much of the entertaining Hippie Masala consists of charming reminiscences from the quirky quartet (as well as a pair of voluble South African twins who’ve also taken up residence in India), backed by footage of their day-to-day lives. Recommended.
-Video Librarian November/December 2008
A poignant and serious meditation on human psychology, Protagonist is highly recommended. Editor's Choice.
-Video Librarian September/October 2008
Brilliantly filmed under fairly difficult circumstances, Living Goddess will definitely appeal to anyone with an interest in Eastern religions. Recommended.
-Video Librarian September/October 2008
Some believers will no doubt refuse to watch these conversations, while others may feel that their faith can only be strengthened by confronting the strongest arguments against it—and The Atheism Tapes definitely delivers the latter. Highly recommended.
-Video Librarian July/August 2008
Both as a lesson in law and as an entertaining personality profile, Pledge of Allegiance Blues is highly recommended.
-Video Librarian May/June 2008
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A true story, 18 year old Violette Nozière (brilliantly played here by Isabelle Huppert, 12-time César Award nominee for Best Actress) was condemned to death for patricide and attempted matricide in the 1930s, ostensibly to gain access to her parents’ meager assets in order to support her good-for-nothing lover. During the trial she alludes to incest committed by her father and accuses her mother of tacit consent. She also claimed that her real father, a wealthy and powerful man, refuses to acknowledge her because she was born out of wedlock. Violette offers a chilling portrait of French society and sexual morals in the early 20th century.
