Celluloid Ceilings

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent more than a decade studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity and shame. With two TED talks under her belt, Brené Brown brings her humor and empathy to Netflix to discuss what it takes to choose courage over comfort in a culture defined by scarcity, fear and uncertainty.

In the spring of 2016, for the first time in 54 years, Ariane Mnouchkine entrusts her troupe, the Théâtre du Soleil, to another director. Robert Lepage then embarks on the creation of Kanata, a work that imagines the meeting of Europeans with First Nations people in Canada over two centuries. Lepage au Soleil: The origin of Kanata shows how, the 36 comedians from 11 different countries, discover in their own stories astonishing resonance with those of the natives. How, inspired by the cosmopolitanism of comedians, Robert Lepage tries to get them to talk about their own stories through those of the natives. The documentary plunges into the heart of a theatrical creation in search of universality turned upside down by a media scandal even before its premiere.

ŽIŽEK! trails the thinker as he crisscrosses the globe, racing from New York City lecture halls, through the streets of Buenos Aires, and even stopping at home in Ljubljana, Slovenia. All the while Žižek obsessively reveals the invisible workings of ideology through his unique blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and critique of pop culture.

The tiny village in the far north of Sweden called Ensamheten (Solitude) has sixteen inhabitants. They all share an unusual passion - armwrestling.

Three children living in a displacement camp in northern Uganda compete in their country's national music and dance festival.

The earliest surviving celluloid film, and believed to be the second moving picture ever created, was shot by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince using the LPCCP Type-1 MkII single-lens camera. It was taken in the garden of Oakwood Grange, the Whitley family house in Roundhay, Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire (UK), possibly on 14 October 1888. The film shows Adolphe Le Prince (Le Prince's son), Mrs. Sarah Whitley (Le Prince's mother-in-law), Joseph Whitley, and Miss Harriet Hartley walking around in circles, laughing to themselves, and staying within the area framed by the camera. The Roundhay Garden Scene was recorded at 12 frames per second and runs for 2.11 seconds.

After casting painter and video artist Mania Akbari as the central figure of his groundbreaking Ten (2002), and then witnessing her outstanding debut as a feature film director in 20 Fingers (2004), Abbas Kiarostami urged her to direct a sequel to the film. In Dah be alaveh Chahar (10 + 4), though, circumstances are different: Mania is fighting cancer. She has undergone surgery; she has lost her hair following chemotherapy and no longer wears the compulsory headscarf; and sometimes she is too weak to drive. So the camera follows her to record conversations with friends and family in different spaces, from the gondola she had famously used in her first feature to a hospital bed.

Mayan Renaissance is a feature length film which documents the glory of the ancient Maya civilization, the Spanish conquest in 1519, 500 years of oppression, and the courageous fight of the Maya to reclaim their voice and determine their own future, in Guatemala and throughout Central America. The film stars 1992 Nobel Peace Laureate and Maya Leader Rigoberta Mencu Tum. All of the images, voices, expert commentary and music in the film come directly from Central America, the heart of the Mayan World.

The film sought to portray a relatively unknown and isolated rural world and, through a highly politicized discourse, affirmed the genuineness of “folk culture.” Representative of the new documentary film movement that developed in Portugal after the revolution, the movie encouraged the local retrieval of the Caretos tradition. A ritual that seemed to be doomed by the conjoined impact of emigration, the colonial war and the crisis of agriculture was thus brought back to life. - Paulo Raposo

Romania. Seven years in the life of a family of believers, struck by the illness of a little girl suffering from spina bifida pass before the camera, with a polluted town scarred by unemployment serving as a background.