Sociology

The mid-life crisis of a husband and father who, on his 40th birthday, decides to revisit his punk-rock past by throwing an extravagant party in the presidential suite of the Drake Hotel - where he encounters his beautiful ex-girlfriend and former bandmates who have since moved on to bigger and better things.

In her signature serious-yet-quirky connect-the-dots style, Peabody Award winning filmmaker Judith Helfand takes audiences from the deadly 1995 Chicago heat disaster -- in which 739 people died, mostly black and in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, ties it back to the underlying man-made disaster of systemic structural racism and then goes deep into one of our nation's biggest growth industries -- Disaster Preparedness. Along the way she forges inextricable links between extreme weather, extreme disparity and the politics of "disaster," daring to ask: What if with a slight torque of the system and a re-frame of the terms disaster, preparedness and resilience we could invest in the most "vulnerable communities" now - instead of waiting for the next "natural disaster". COOKED is adapted from Eric Klinenberg's ground-breaking book, HEAT WAVE: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.

The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific Ocean in a balsawood raft in 1947, together with five men, to prove that South Americans back in pre-Columbian times could have crossed the ocean and settled on Polynesian islands. After financing the trips with loans and donations, they set off on an epic 101-day-long trip across 8000 kilometers, while the world was waiting for the result of the trip. The film tells about the origin of the idea, the preparations, and the events on the trip. The "Kon-Tiki" was named after the Inca sun god, Viracocha, and "Kon-Tiki" is an old name for this god. Heyerdahl filmed the expedition, which later became the Academy Award winning documentary in 1951, and he wrote a book about the expedition that was translated into 70 languages and sold more than 50 millions copies around the world. Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times, although most anthropologists now believe they did not. Anyway he proved that it was possible by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at that time. The trip took 101 days over 4,300 miles across the Pacific Ocean before the "Kon-Tiki" crashed onto the dangerous reefs outside Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. All crewmen survived, and the "Kon-Tiki" was taken back to Norway. She is now featured in the Kon-Tiki Museum.

A neurotic L.A. building contractor pushes his wife into entering into a three way sexual relationship. Unfortunately for him, his wife gets more out of it than he does and becomes a tigress seducing every female she meets including the contractor's secretary.

A privileged British family--mother, geologist father, adolescent daughter, small son--live in Sydney, Australia. While on a picnic one day, the sibling get stranded in the Outback by themselves, not knowing exactly where they are. They only have with them the clothes on their backs--their school uniforms--some meagre rations of nonperishable food, a battery-powered transistor radio, the son's satchel primarily containing his toys, and a small piece of cloth they used as their picnic cloth. While they walk through the Outback, they encounter an Australian boy who is on his walkabout, a rite of passage into manhood where he spends entire months on his own living off the land. Their largest problem is not being able to verbally communicate. The boy does help them to survive, but doesn't understand their need to return to civilization, which may or may not happen based on what the Australian boy ends up doing.

The Peanut Butter Falcon is an adventure story set in the world of a modern Mark Twain that begins when Zak (22), a young man with Down syndrome, runs away from the nursing home where he lives to chase his dream of becoming a professional wrestler by attending the wrestling school The Salt Water Redneck. Through circumstances beyond their control Tyler (32), a small-time outlaw on the run, becomes Zak's unlikely coach and ally. Together they wind through deltas, elude capture, drink whisky, find God, catch fish, and convince Eleanor (28), a kind nursing home employee with a story of her own, to join them on their journey.

Will (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), have lived off the grid for years in the forests of Portland, Oregon. When their idyllic life is shattered, both are put into social services. After clashing with their new surroundings, Will and Tom set off on a harrowing journey back to their wild homeland. The film is directed by Debra Granik from a script adapted by Granik and Anne Rosellini.