Documentary TV & Films

"Summer of Soul" won the award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2022 Academy Awards. The film is about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which included Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, and Sly and the Family Stone. At the time, the festival received little media coverage and was largely forgotten.

Filmmakers used forty hours of footage from the festival to create the film, which also examines why the festival was forgotten in favor of others such as Woodstock and Altamont.

2018's "Wild Wild Country" tracks the rise and fall of leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers, who came to be known as Rajneeshees. The Indian religious figure built a huge following in the late 1970s and established an 80,000 acre commune in rural Oregon. 

Rajneesh promoted a hedonistic lifestyle for his followers, arranged marriages, and participated in questionable financial and political practices.

FUN FACT

Jacques-Yves Cousteau's ship, Calypso, was immortalized in the 1975 John Denver song of the same name. 

"Aye, Calypso, the places you've been to
The things that you've shown us, the stories you tell"

Oscar Peterson was a Candian virtuoso jazz pianist who Duke Ellington once called "the Maharaja of the keyboard." Peterson released over two hundred recordings in his lifetime.

"Hearts of Darkness" is the highly acclaimed snapshot of the tremendous problems faced by director Francis Ford Coppola during the making of the 1979 Vietnam War epic "Apocalypse Now." 

"Hearts of Darkness" was filmed by the director's wife, Eleanor Coppola, and she enlisted two other directors to help structure the story and add additional interviews and content. Critic Gene Siskel called it the best film of 1991.