DALAI LAMA RENAISSANCE
August 25 & 26
"A provocative, even enlightening film ... fascinating, ravishingly beautiful." –Montreal Gazette

At the edge of the millennium, the Dalai Lama of Tibet invited 40 of the West’s most innovative thinkers to his residence in the Himalayan mountains of Northern India to discuss the world’s problems and how we can solve them. The powerful, unexpected results was captured by an 18-person, 5-camera film crew. The resulting feature-length documentary includes gripping, beautiful footage asking questions and providing potential solutions for the future of humankind. The film is narrated by actor Harrison Ford and directed by the award-winning journalist Khashyar Darvich.

 

MAN ON WIRE
starts Wednesday August 27
"Exhilarating" –New York Times
"One of the most wildly entertaining docs in years … astonishes in every respect." –Variety

(Winner, Grand Jury Prize/Audience Award, 2008 Sundance Film Festival)
For the serious-minded, acrobatics might seem a frivolous pursuit. But raise the stakes to 1300 feet above New York City's cold, hard pavement and circus stunts become a matter of life—as in the kind that's lived to its fullest—and death. The French acrobat Philippe Petit thrilled the world when, after months of spying and planning, he snuck to the top of the World Trade Center, strung a high wire from the corner of one of the Twin Towers to the other, and then performed the world's greatest high wire walk. In revisiting Petit's story, director James Marsh has constructed a gorgeous, innovative, nail-biting and operatic celebration to the freest of free spirits, a hero who can't help but arouse our own sense of wonder and adventure. (U.K., 2008, 102m)

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
starts July 25
"Has the quality of a dream, at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach."

 

The great Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man) confirms his standing as poet laureate of documentary film with this visually stunning exploration of the Antarctic community of McMurdo Station, headquarters of the National Science Foundation and home to 1100 people during the austral summer. Over the course of his journey, Herzog examines human nature and Mother Nature, juxtaposing breathtaking locations with the profound, surreal, and oft-absurd experiences of the marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, and truck drivers who form a society as far away from society as one can get.
(U.S., 2007, 99m, 35mm, ThinkFilm)