French Exit
“My plan was to die before the money ran out,” says 60-year-old penniless Manhattan socialite Frances Price, but things didn’t go as planned. Her husband Franklin has been dead for 12 years and with his vast inheritance gone, she cashes in the last of her possessions and resolves to live out her twilight days anonymously in a borrowed apartment in Paris, accompanied by her directionless son Malcolm and a cat named Small Frank—who may or may not embody the spirit of Frances’s dead husband.
Let Them All Talk
A celebrated author takes a journey with some old friends to have some fun and heal old wounds. Her nephew comes along to wrangle the ladies and finds himself involved with a young literary agent.
Golden Door
The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before to arrive to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.
Women & the Wind
Shot over the course of 30 days at sea, filmmaker Alizé Jireh documents the group’s voyage across the North Atlantic—from moments of stillness and calm to the chaos of storms and setbacks. With an observational approach and an eye for the emotional and physical rhythms of life at sea, Jireh captures not just the external landscape, but the internal shifts that come with navigating the vast unknown.
The Raft
In 1973, five men and six women drifted across the Atlantic on a raft as part of a scientific experiment exploring the origins of violence and sexual attraction. Nobody expected what ultimately took place on that 3-month journey. Through archive material and a reunion of the surviving members of the expedition, this film tells the hidden story of the project.
The Ra Expeditions
Ra [also known as The Ra Expeditions] is a 1972 documentary film directed by Lennart Ehrenborg and Thor Heyerdahl about the expeditions organised by Thor Heyerdahl in 1969 and 1970 in attempt to cross the Atlantic on papyrus boats. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Adventures of Joselito and Tom Thumb
Joselito lives with his grandmother in a fishing village. His father went to America long ago to make a fortune. One day, the boy decides to travel there to meet him. He takes courage and embarks on a fragile boat and miraculously is saved at sea by a vessel that leads him to Mexico where he meets Tom Thumb, a little newsboy who lives many adventures and helps him in the search.
Kon-Tiki
"Kon-Tiki" was the name of a wooden raft used by six Scandinavian scientists, led by Thor Heyerdahl, to make a 101-day journey from South America to the Polynesian Islands. The purpose of the expedition was to prove Heyerdal's theory that the Polynesian Islands were populated from the east- specifically Peru- rather than from the west (Asia) as had been the theory for hundreds of years. Heyerdahl made a study of the winds and tides in the Pacific, and by simulating conditions as closely as possible to those he theorized the Peruvians encountered, set out on the voyage.
Sacred Vessels: Navigating Tradition and Identity in Micronesia
A 1997 documentary by Micronesian scholar, Vicente M. Diaz, that follows a new generation of traditional outrigger canoe builders and navigators from Polowat, Central Carolines, Federated States of Micronesia, and Guam in their respective efforts to continue and resuscitate an ancient tradition of outrigger canoe carving and sailing in the late twentieth century. Like the motif of water that flows through the documentary and blurs lines between surface and depth, and between water, land and air, an indefatigable tradition and aesthetic of seafaring is shown to also challenge pat and problematic distinctions between past and present, tradition and modernity, indigenous and Christian religiosity and spirituality, that prevail in conventional understandings of Micronesian culture and history.
