A portrait of the writer and poet Steven J. Bernstein (aka Jesse Bernstein), one of Seattle's most celebrated and troubled voices. His angry, surprisingly fresh, lyrical writings are about sensitive souls, drifters and drug addicts, people alienated by a society that refuses to understand them. Bernstein was an integral part of the legendary Seattle rock scene of the late 80's and early 90s, and in 1991 was dubbed the 'Godfather of Grunge.'
Wild Combination is a visually absorbing portrait of the seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer Arthur Russell. Before his death in 1992, Arthur prolifically created music that spanned both pop and the transcendent possibilities of abstract art. Now, over fifteen years since his passing, Arthur's work is finally finding its audience. Wolf incorporates rare archival footage and commentary from Arthur's family, friends, and closest collaborators to tell this poignant and important story.
Filmmaker Sam Green, in collaboration with writer and editor Joe Bini, takes the stage with the legendary classical-music group Kronos Quartet to create a "live documentary" that chronologically unfolds the quartet's groundbreaking, continent-spanning, multi-decade career. Wildly creative and experimental in form, A Thousand Thoughts is a meditation on music itself-the act of listening closely to music, the experience of feeling music deeply, and the power that music has to change the world. Green narrates the piece live onstage while the Kronos Quartet performs the score, and a rich blend of archival footage, photos, and interviews with members of the Kronos Quartet – as well as longtime collaborators like Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Terry Riley, Tanya Tagaq, and Steve Reich – unspools on screen.
Marion Stokes secretly recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years from 1975 until her death in 2012. For Marion taping was a form of activism to seek the truth, and she believed that a comprehensive archive of the media would be invaluable for future generations. Her visionary and maddening project nearly tore her family apart, but now her 70,000 VHS tapes are being digitized and they'll be searchable online.
Futurists Martine and Bina Rothblatt commission an advanced humanoid AI named Bina48 to transfer Bina’s consciousness from a human to a robot in an attempt to continue their once-in-a-galaxy love affair for the rest of time.
Bayard Rustin was the organizer of the The Great March on Washington and one of the leaders of the civil rights movement. In the 1980s, Bayard adopted his younger boyfriend Walter Naegle to obtain the legal protections of marriage. In this intimate love story, Walter remembers Bayard and a time when gay marriage was inconceivable. He reflects on the little known phenomena of intergenerational gay adoption and its connection to the civil rights movement.
Documentarian Sam Green interprets our collective fascination with the Guinness Book of World Records as a profound need to try and make some sense of who we are by calibrating human experience and marveling at its outer contours. Green himself travels to various reaches of the Earth to collect original footage of record-holding people, places, and things-the tallest man, the woman with the longest name, the oldest living thing on the planet. He weaves into these original portraits a rich assembly of archival footage, his own live narration, and an evocative live soundtrack from the chamber group yMusic to create an indelible rumination on fate, human endeavor, and the nature of our existence on Earth.
