Deep in the forests of Northern Italy resides the prized white Alba truffle. Desired by the wealthiest patrons in the world, it remains a pungent but rarified mystery. It cannot be cultivated or found, even by the most resourceful of modern excavators. The only souls on Earth who know how to dig it up are a tiny circle of canines and their silver-haired human companions-Italian elders with walking sticks and devilish senses of humor-who only scour for the truffle at night so as not to leave any clues for others. Still, this small enclave of hunters induces a feverish buying market that spans the globe. With unprecedented access to the elusive truffle hunters, filmmakers Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw (The Last Race, 2018 Sundance Film Festival) follow this maddening cycle from the forest floor to the pristine restaurant plate. With a wily and absurdist flare, The Truffle Hunters captures a precarious ritual constantly threatened by greed and outside influences but still somehow.
Henry Glassie has made a life out of studying folk artists and the marvels they create. Over the past 50 years, the renowned US scholar has traveled to five continents, conducting fieldwork with an obsessive thoroughness. Each project Henry Glassie undertakes requires at least a decade. Brimming with insights into the artistic impulse - and how every culture manifests its own standard of beauty and meaning - this poetic portrait of Henry Glassie doubles as a travelogue, taking us places Henry Glassie has embedded himself. In Bahia, Brazil, we meet Evidal Rosas, charged with reconstructing sacred statues for which there remain no record, and Rosalvo Santana, who meticulously sculpts from clay a magisterial saint flanked by cherubs. Captured with mesmerizing intimacy by director Pat Collins and cinematographer Colm Hogan, the process of these artists is awe-inspiring.
Follows the story of electronic music's female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.
The work, lives and personal journeys of two iconic American artists coalesce with creative combustion in this innovative dual-portrait documentary.
A candid, lyrical, intimate portrait of one family's struggle to transcend a fatal muscle wasting disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which in turn becomes an unlikely celebration of the disabled life, the life cut short by rare disease.