Kanopy (Firm)
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
This intimate documentary follows Danny Meyer, one of America's preeminent restaurant owners, over a 12 year span as he struggles to open not one but two ambitious restaurants next to New York's Madison Square Park. Tabla and Eleven Madison Park, if successful, will join Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern as the jewels in Meyer's crown. We follow the restaurateur and his team as they experience gut-wrenching construction delays, missed deadlines,...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
In fall 2006, former DJ, point guard and teacher turned first-time principal, James O'Brien, opened a small public high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where 1/3 of residents live below the poverty line and the graduation rate is 40%. With infectious optimism, O'Brien and his team of eight undertook an unconventional approach and ambitious mission: Create a school with an arts-oriented curriculum that also emphasizes self-development, community...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Anthropological in scope, sensuous in detail and emotionally resonant throughout, Foreign parts is an exemplary social record of Willets Point, an industrial graveyard of scrap heaps and auto shops in Queens, New York, that is scheduled to be demolished and redeveloped. Filled with scrapyards and auto salvage shops, lacking sidewalks or sewage lines, the area seems ripe for urban development. But Foreign parts discovers a strange community where wrecks,...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
The collector explores the 46-year career of Allan Stone, the famed New York City gallery owner and art collector. Producer and director Olympia Stone reveals her father's compulsive collecting genius while telling the parallel story of his lifelong journey through the art world from the 1950s to 2006. Viewers are taken on an extraordinary path inside one man's obsessive submersion in art and its influence on the artists, art dealers and family members...
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
In a country where 58% of African American 4th graders are functionally illiterate, The Lottery uncovers the failures of the traditional public school system and reveals that hundreds of thousands of parents attempt to flee the system every year. The Lottery follows four of these families from Harlem and the Bronx who have entered their children in a charter school lottery. Out of thousands of hopefuls, only a small minority will win the chance of...
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
The African Burial Ground: An American Discovery is a fascinating four part series that focuses on the history of the African American experience in New York, urban archaeology, and social activism. Part One - The Search, explores the search and discovery of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. It examines the archeological dig that resulted in unearthing the remains of some 400 African men, women and children. Part Two - a History, presents...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
When thousands of people concerned about growing economic inequality gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York City on September 17, 2011, there was little indication that they would fundamentally transform American political debate and ignite a full-scale national and global protest movement. But within a year, the Occupy Wall Street protestors had done just that.This powerful collection of short films, made by Occupy protestors on the ground, tells...
8) Men at lunch
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
New York City, 1932. The country is in the throes of the Great Depression, the previous decade's boom of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants has led to unprecedented urban expansion, and in the midst of an unseasonably warm autumn, steelworkers risk life and limb building skyscrapers high above the streets of Manhattan. In Men at lunch, director Seán Ó Cualáin tells the story of "Lunch atop a Skyscraper," the iconic photograph taken during the...
9) Stages
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
Stages is a moving and surprisingly funny vérité exploration of the unexpected power of the simple act of storytelling. In New York City's oldest community center, a group of older Puerto Rican women and inner-city youth come together to create an original play out of the stories of their lives. Weaving together themes of immigration, identity, aging and coming of age, Stages offers an intimate portrait of an unlikely ensemble, transformed by the...
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
Iris Baez, a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, never meant to become an activist. Kadiatou Diallo never meant to leave her home in Africa and move to the U.S., to fight for justice for her son. Doris Busch Boskey, a Jewish woman from the suburbs, never thought she'd become a spokesperson against police brutality. This film profiles three women from very different walks of life who find themselves united to seek justice after their sons are unjustly killed...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
An astonishing documentary about a man who overcomes his disability one day at a time, Alan Govenar's new film reveals the extraordinary life of African immigrant Sidiki Conde. Sidiki lost the use of his legs to polio at age fourteen. Today, he balances his career as a performing artist with the almost insurmountable obstacles of day-to-day life in New York City. From his fifth-floor walk-up apartment, he traverses down the stairs on his hands and...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Architect Yoshio Taniguchi, revered in his native country of Japan for the design of consummately minimal museums, won the much-coveted commission to expand and renovate the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1997. Opened in 2004, the serenely elegant complex of taut, smooth glass, aluminum, and granite planes plays off the international style vocabulary of the original museum building, designed in 1939 by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone....
13) Daddy don't go
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
This film captures two years in the lives of four disadvantaged fathers in New York City as they fight to defy the odds against them. And the odds are real - men living in poverty are more than twice as likely to become absent fathers than their middle-class peers (U.S. Census Bureau). DADDY DON'T GO is a tough but tender journey that aims to illuminate the everyday struggles of disadvantaged fathers. Alex, Nelson, Roy and Omar shatter the deadbeat...
14) Brooklyn matters
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
Brooklyn Matters reveals how a few powerful men tried to tilt the Brooklyn landscape in favor of big real estate at the expense of urban livability. Disregarding time-honored urban planning principles and manipulating a desperate need in the African-American community for jobs and affordable housing, they pushed their own interests forward--luxury housing and a 20,000 seat sports arena. The film poses vital, timely questions that are relevant to cities...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Even during the Great Recession of 2008, one new apartment house in New York City continued to set the bar for real-estate prices: 15 Central Park West. Designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, the lavish, limestone-clad structure from 61st to 62nd streets is arguably one of the most luxurious residential buildings to rise in the city in decades. Stern deliberately evokes the grand era of New York apartments designed in the 1920s and 1930s, especially...
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
The Central Park five, a new film from award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, tells the story of the five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park in 1989. The film chronicles The Central Park Jogger case, for the first time from the perspective of these five teenagers whose lives were upended by this miscarriage of justice.
17) Homegoings
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
Through the eyes of funeral director Isaiah Owens, the beauty and grace of African American funerals are brought to life. Filmed at the Owens Funeral Home in Harlem and the rural South, director Christine Turner's Homegoings takes an up-close look at the rarely seen world of undertaking in the black community, where funeral rites draw on a rich palette of tradition, history and celebration. It reveals the special status of undertakers in the community;...
18) Made in Brooklyn
Pub. Date
1993.
Description
The compelling stories of factories that flourish in Brooklyn, NY, challenge the notion that manufacturing is dead in America. Workers reveal how their jobs bring not only regular pay checks, but meaningful relationships, enhanced self-esteem, and pride in themselves and their products. Made in Brooklyn has lessons about the economy for the entire nation.
19) All this panic
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
Shot over a three-year period with unparalleled intimacy and access, ALL THIS PANIC is a feature length documentary that takes an intimate look at the interior lives of a group of teenage girls as they come of age in Brooklyn. A potent mix of vivid portraiture and verite, we follow the girls as they navigate the ephemeral and fleeting transition between childhood and adulthood. ALL THIS PANIC is a meditation on the mysterious, often painful, yet ultimately...
20) The Aggressives
Pub. Date
2012.
Description
A favorite of the film festival circuit, The Aggressives is an insightful look at the little explored, yet highly dramatic subculture of lesbian women who identify as men. This fascinating documentary features intimate and revealing interviews with six aggressive women. The Aggressives range in masculinity but do not aspire to be men. Nor are they "drag kings." They have found an unexplored loophole in society's gender tapestry and this film seeks...