2025
This film takes you through the inspiring journey of Venezuela's Coro de Manos Blancas (White Hands Choir) while exploring their daily struggles and lives. Established in 1995 as part of Venezuela's El Sistema program, the White Hands Choir provides artistic opportunities for children, youth, and adults with disabilities, utilizing music for social development and inclusion.
1999
A vivid documentary portrait of Véra Bílá (1954-2019), a Gypsy singer acclaimed in the international music world. The film explores Romany culture and what it means to be part of a marginalized minority group. She was dubbed the Ella Fitzgerald of Romani music. The Czech singer enjoyed international success in the late Nineties when she was signed to the German record label BMG.
1985
The creative processes of avant-garde composer Philip Glass and progressive director/designer Robert Wilson are examined in this film. It documents their collaboration on this tradition breaking opera.
1988
The life and work of stage designer ADOLPHE APPIA, originator of the most profound agitations in contemporary theatre. Through the dynamic alternation of animated drawings and choreographies specially conceived for the film, we discover the steps of his artistic evolution.
1998
Narrated by Terence Stamp, this TV program documents the life and career of famed ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, through interviews with friends and colleagues and archive footage.
2023
Lift shines a spotlight on the invisible story of homelessness in America through the eyes of a group of young homeless and home-insecure ballet dancers in New York City and the mentor that inspires them.
2024
We follow two boy dancers who describe their relationship with dance and how they feel about being boys in a world that is seen as "feminine" from the outset, and that it is possible for men to have different values and different relationships with dance.
2021
A short documentary following Paulette Harwood, a 90-year-old former Radio City Music Hall Corps de Ballet soloist, as she teaches the final classes in a school she's run for sixty years.
2020
In the spotlight of global media coverage, the first transgender woman ever to perform as Don Giovanni in a professional opera, makes her historic debut in one of the reddest states in the U.S.
2019
The film traces Sam McKinlay’s early days as a punk skateboarder through his academic development as a conceptual artist into a highly esteemed noise practitioner whose work bridges the gap between the gallery world and the sleaze of exploitation film imagery. It documents the physical processes of his work and the distillation of visuals into sound, most notably addressing the appeal of abstraction—from the cheap effects of old monster movie makeup to the ‘masks’ created by the heavy cosmetic makeup of 1920s flapper culture and actresses like Pamela Stanford in Jess Franco’s Lorna the Exorcist (The Rita has albums or EPs named after several eurotrash actresses, including The Nylons of Laura Antonelli (2009) and Monica Swinn/Pamela Stanford (2016)).
With its four operas, seventeen-hour running time and months of rehearsal, Wagner's "Ring Cycle" is a daunting undertaking for any opera company. Jon Else goes backstage to show this rare event entirely from the point of view of union stagehands at the San Francisco Opera.
2017
A behind-the-scenes look at the of how the Paris Opera is run under the direction of Stephane Lissner.
