Susan Margolin

Monk in Pieces

Visionary composer and performer Meredith Monk overcame hostile critics to become one of the great artists of her time. In her seventh decade of creativity, she ponders how her unique work can continue without her.

Obsessed with Light

Loïe Fuller, stage name of Marie Louise Fuller: the American actress and dancer trained in burlesque, circuses and variety shows who, in the 1890s, signed by the Folies Bergère of Paris, became a star. She was portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec, loved by the symbolists, the inspiration for Art Nouveau, in her shows she combined dance, spirals of fabric and light, reflected from behind or from below through the glass floor that she had created. She transformed into the "Fairy of Light", was taken up (especially in her Serpentine Dance) by Georges Méliès and Alice Guy and influenced René Clair's early films.

Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

This is not a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy. It is about a humane and groundbreaking masterpiece and the flawed but gifted people who made it. It is about a troubled era of cultural ferment, social and political change, about broken dreams and strivers, then and now. It is about an era that made a movie and a movie that made an era.

A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting

On October 27th, 2018, a gunman opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing eleven people as they prayed, in what would become the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. This documentary is a deeply personal portrait of the survivors, victims and family members, who share their harrowing first-hand accounts of the impact of the shooting on the community.

A Crime on the Bayou

A Crime on the Bayou is the story of Gary Duncan, a Black teenager from Plaquemines Parish, a swampy strip of land south of New Orleans. In 1966, Duncan tries to break up an argument between white and Black teenagers outside a newly integrated school. He gently lays his hand on a white boy’s arm. The boy recoils like a snake. That night, police burst into Duncan’s trailer and arrest him for assault on a minor. A young Jewish attorney, Richard Sobol, leaves his prestigious D.C. firm to volunteer in New Orleans. With his help, Duncan bravely stands up to a racist legal system powered by a white supremacist boss to challenge his unfair arrest. Their fight goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and their lifelong friendship is forged.

Love & Stuff

Seven months after helping her terminally ill mother during the end of her life in home-hospice, filmmaker Judith Helfand becomes a "new old" single mother at 50. Overnight, she's pushed to deal with her stuff: 63 boxes of her parent's heirlooms overwhelming her office-turned-future-baby's room, the weight her mother had begged her to lose, and the reality of being a half century older than her daughter.