"The Arc of Oblivion" explores a quirk of humankind: in a universe that erases its tracks, we humans are hellbent on leaving a trace. Set against the backdrop of the filmmaker's quixotic quest to build an ark in a field in Maine, the film heads far afield - to salt mines in the Alps, fjords in the Arctic, and ancient libraries in the Sahara - to illuminate the strange world of archives, record-keeping, and memory.
From New York City to the farmlands of the Midwest, there are 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., yet one dish in particular has conquered the American culinary landscape with a force befitting its military moniker—“General Tso’s Chicken.” But who was General Tso and how did this dish become so ubiquitous? Ian Cheney’s delightfully insightful documentary charts the history of Chinese Americans through the surprising origins of this sticky, sweet, just-spicy-enough dish that we’ve adopted as our own.
A series of lyrical vignettes illuminates the stories of Maine's seafolk, those whose lives and livelihoods are inextricably connected to the ocean. This atmospheric film shows the beauty, intimacy, and uncertainty that coastal dwellers face in rooting their lives in the ocean, particularly as human actions — from overfishing, to aquaculture, to warming seas — confront Maine and its people with profound change.
The future was now at the 1939 World’s Fair – and it is still awesome. From the perspective of the 21st century, it’s hard to imagine what a marvel the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair would have been to its visitors. Still living in the heavy shadow of the stock market crash of 1929, the many people who flocked to the big exhibition found not only bounteous luxuries such as free Coca-Cola, but the unveiling of unthinkable new technologies that promised that a better world lay ahead. Using sparkling, rare, colour film footage – itself a brand-new technology at the time – the US director Amanda Murray mines the memories of several people who attended the New York World’s Fair in 1939.
Deep in the hills of Appalachia live a mysterious tri-racial people known as Melungeons. For years, the community around Vardy Valley in northeastern Tennessee suffered discrimination and marginalization because of their mixed-race heritage; many left the steep ridges vowing never to return. But in the past several years, Melungeon pride has surged, and the valley is calling many of its children home to to reclaim their roots and explore their murky past: are Melungeons somehow descended from shipwrecked Portuguese sailors, or the lost colony of Roanoke? This short film chronicles a community's attempts to tell a story that some would rather leave untold.
BLUESPACE explores the terraforming of Mars and the waterways of New York City. As scientists develop strategies for warming and colonizing the frigid red planet, waterfront dwellers here on Earth grapple with the legacies of pollution and the specter of rising seas. The science fiction-infused film probes the limits of human engineering and yields unusual perspectives on an increasingly watery planet.
