Mishpacha Miplastelina

Sam Schmidt lived out his boyhood dream as an IndyCar racer, winning races and earning the title of IndyCar "Rookie of the Year" along the way. That dream came to an abrupt end when Sam crashed into a wall at 200 miles per hour, leaving him a quadriplegic. Reengineering SAM pulls the curtain back and shows up close the serious implications of a life of paralysis on Sam and everyone around him. Sam's accident rendered him physically helpless, never being able to brush his teeth, much less drive again, until a dedicated group of some of the brightest minds today stepped up to build him a car that he could drive, using only his head. Through groundbreaking adaptive technologies, Reengineering SAM chronicles Sam Schmidt's inspirational road back to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and shows the promise of freedom and mobility for almost anyone confined to a wheelchair.

An examination of the how television news in the US has covered war from Vietnam to the present day

This short documentary tells the story of one of the world’s most difficult and bizarre sporting events: The Barkley Marathons. This 100-mile footrace and its 60-hour time limit force athletes to run, crawl and climb an elevation gain equivalent to two treks up Mt. Everest. In nearly thirty years, only fourteen runners, out of over one thousand participants, have finished The Barkley.

At the end of the 1960s, Vanesa’s parents fled the Franco-regime’s deep poverty to pursue their dream in the Netherlands. Working their blue-collar jobs for hours and hours, for over 45 years, their purpose was to return to Spain wealthy and comfortable. There, in a house full of Dutch porcelain and shiny gold, they can now finally rest. Vanesa was raised as Dutch, but still feels trapped in their expectant illusion, even with the distance between them. Torn between two homes, she starts to re-examine her past.

Appalachian Journey is one of five films made from footage that Alan Lomax shot between 1978 and 1985 for the PBS American Patchwork series (1991). It offers songs, dances, stories, and religious rituals of the Southern Appalachians. Preachers, singers, fiddlers, banjo pickers, moonshiners, cloggers, and square dancers recount the good times and the hard times of rural life there. Performers include Tommy Jarrell, Janette Carter, Ray and Stanley Hicks, Frank Proffitt Jr., Sheila Kay Adams, Nimrod Workman and Phyllis Boyens, Raymond Fairchild, and others, with a bonus of a few African-Americans from the North Carolina Piedmont.

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

A documentary video-essay that reflects on the feeling of belonging to a territory and its people.

The Thanet coast featuring boat rides, horses and family outings.

A short film about Pete Seeger and the birth of banjo music throughout the Southern United States.