Fisher Stevens produced The Cove, the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary about dubious Japanese dolphin-hunting practices, and his latest film takes him back into familiar waters. Stevens co-directed the newly-released doc Mission Blue, spending the last four years trekking around the world—from the Galapagos Islands to the Chesapeake Bay to the Great Barrier Reef—with unstoppable oceanographer Sylvia […]
Autumn and Yuji are surfers who fell in love on the beach of Motoyoshi, a beautiful spot in Japan above Sendai where northern and southern currents meet. A month after Motoyoshi was hit by a tsunami in 2011, triggering a nuclear disaster at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the two made a startling decision […]
Three years ago, Jennifer Brea, then a PhD student in political science, was struck down by what appeared to be a severe flu. It turned out to be the beginning of a long illness — including neurological dysfunction and extreme exhaustion — that she has yet to recover from. Discovering that the medical community did […]
What is the effect of violence on a life’s narrative? TED Fellow and photojournalist Jon Lowenstein has lived in the South Side of Chicago for about a decade — first working as a teacher, photographer and community liaison at an elementary school and subsequently engaging with his African American neighbors to document life in this […]
Negin Farsad’s new documentary, The Muslims Are Coming!, churns hilarity out of a not-so-funny subject: Islamophobia. The film follows Farsad, a TED Fellow, and a group fellow Muslim-American comedians (Dean Obeidallah, Aron Kader, Preacher Moss, Kareem Omary, Maysoon Zayid and Omar Elba) as they tour the United States and hold comedic interventions to show conservatives, […]
Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize story may soon be coming to a theater near you. Today during the TEDGlobal 2013 session “Exquisite, Enigmatic Us,” curator Chris Anderson named British director Jerry Rothwell as the winner of the first annual Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award. Rothwell earned a $125,000 grant to follow Sugata Mitra over the next 18 months as he builds […]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oe_pwKgbTU “We use images like a weapon to fight for social causes,” says a man in the trailer for INSIDE OUT: The People’s Art Project, a new documentary that airs on HBO tonight. The doc tells the story of JR’s INSIDE OUT, a global art project in which anyone, anywhere, can send the artist a […]
By Marianna Torgovnick Some documentaries show us the strange, the exotic and the unfamiliar; others make us feel anew about something so everyday, we barely thought about it before. Some of my favorite TED Talks are built around great documentary films, like Deborah Scranton’s chilling “War Tapes” and Nathaniel Kahn’s moving search for “My Father, the Architect.” Last week, […]
Last night at SXSW, William and the Windmill was awarded one of the festival’s top two honors, taking home Grand Jury Award for Documentary Feature. The film tells the story of TED Speaker William Kamkwamba, who has come to be known by the title of his memoir, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. At age […]
William Kamkwamba built a windmill out of spare parts to provide electricity for his family in rural Malawi, after seeing a similar design in a library book. It’s an incredible story — one that set TEDGlobal 2007 ablaze. Now, Kamkwamba is the subject of a new documentary, William and the Windmill, which makes its world […]