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Three Provocative New Documentaries

Email for screening links & more info:
Marc Mauceri | marcm@firstrunfeatures.com

The Celluloid Bordello
A documentary by Juliana Piccillo
86 minutes, color, 2021

Since the dawn of cinema, sex workers have served as muses to movie-makers. From white slavery pictures (The Girl Who Went Astray, from 1900), to iconic rom-coms (Pretty Woman) and indie hits (Tangerine), hookers, hustlers, call girls, street walkers and strippers have been staples of the silver screen. Cinematic sex workers are punchlines, cautionary tales or fantasy figures. They are brutalized, killed off, sometimes rescued and almost always represented as if no sex worker is in theater.

Even in recent documentaries such as Born Into Brothels or Tricked, reality is distorted by filmmakers (almost always non-sex workers), who are determined to show trauma, violence and pathos rather than the resilience, successes, and thriving communities that are the norm for many sex workers.

The Celluloid Bordello brings sex workers to the theater. With equal parts historical overview, critique, and homage, this eye-opening film lets real life dommes, escorts, porn stars and hustlers tell you which films they love and which they hate, which get it right and which miss the mark, and, most importantly, how perpetuating stereotypes in media affects real peoples' lives.

A Life's Work
A documentary by David Licata
90 minutes, color, 2019

What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? Fifteen years ago, filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this universal question.

The subjects include Jill Tarter, Director of the SETI Institute, who has been involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since the 1970s; David and Jared Milarch, father and son tree farmers and co-founders of the Champion Tree Project, who clone old-growth trees to combat climate change; gospel music archivist Robert Darden, who founded the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, an organization that is trying preserve at-risk recordings from the black gospel music tradition; and Paolo Soleri, controversial architect behind Arcosanti, a town designed to test his theories about housing an overpopulated planet.

We discover what inspired them to begin, what obstacles they face, what drives and sustains them, and how they measure success of an endeavor they will not live to see completed. But most of all we discover that their lives really aren’t that different from everyone else’s: who hasn’t gazed at the stars and wondered if we are unique, nurtured a plant, sought ideal shelter, fell in love with a song and couldn’t wait to share it with someone? And who among us will truly see our work finished before we leave this earthly plain?

Royalty Free:
The Music of Kevin MacLeod

A documentary by Ryan Camarda
91 minutes, color, 2021

One composer, thousands of songs, millions of videos, and billions of views: Kevin MacLeod is the world’s most-heard living composer...who nobody’s heard of. His music reaches more people on a daily basis than every cable, broadcast, and network in western media combined.

Royalty Free brings to life this remarkable musician, who has released thousands of his songs "royalty free," allowing anyone to use his music for no charge, from the biggest Hollywood studios down to grandmas making cat videos. The film delves into the digital audio revolution, which allows one person with a synthesizer to become an entire orchestra. This 'democratization of music' has enabled great creativity, but has also threatened the livelihood of analog musicians, from recording artists to orchestra and Broadway musicians.

Ultimately, the film is about the value we place on creative work in our society, and how the evolving landscape of technology influences our consumption, production, and distribution of the work itself.

 
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