Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets. Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy's power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.
« How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood ? » A tongue twister is a sentence with much alliterations and is complicated to pronounce. A tongue twister must be spoken quickly and repeated a few times. Langage breaks down between and meaning. This film is a linguistic game between sound and meaning and a portrait of the linguistic reality of Berkeley. Many American people recite tongue twisters in diffrent languages and/or in English as second language : German, Englsih, Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Mandarin, Korean, Croatian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Japonese, Farsi, Portuguese, Tagalog, Vietnamese.
The life and work of German political philosopher of Jewish descent Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who caused a stir when she coined a subversive concept, the banality of evil, in her 1963 book on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann (1906-62), held in Israel in 1961, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine.
Outraged by the latest bombing of Gaza, Palestinian queer activists Hamza and Walid recruit queer novelist Jean Genet to help them sabotage the Eurovision song contest in Jericho. Their method? Secure the collaboration of Buddy and Pedro, Toronto's famous gay penguins... The emergence of queer BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) as a dynamic Palestinian-led global movement is brought to vivid life through interviews and actions, opera and agitprop, protests and pranks. Recounting fifteen years of passionate activism in Toronto and worldwide, Photo Booth juxtaposes a surreal operatic narrative with documentary scenes that explore pride and pink-washing, gay soldiers and homo-nationalism, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and the accelerating weaponization of anti-Semitism.
Lazlo Pearlman is a conceptual artist, an activist capable of dinamiting our prejudices about sex and identity. What it seems to be a reflexion about lies in our sexual lives suddenly turns out to be a sharp discourse about gender theory and the continuous evolution of our identitiy. Fake Orgasm, first part of an ambitious multidisciplinary project about sexuality and identity, hits our minds and forces a change of perspective to reconsider some concepts we've been educated with and grown up with.
Does gender = sexuality? How does the family define gender roles? What are the dangers when society coerces gender norms? What deep-seated social fears are unleashed by those who flout those prescribed roles? What is New Gender Politics? These are just a few of the topical issues explored in the film. In addition, Butler covers a wide range of subjects, broaching not only controversial gender issues-including transsexuality and intersexuality-but also 20th century Jewish philosophy, AIDS activism, criticism of state power and violence, gay marriage, and anti-Zionism.
Through artistic manifestations, a group of LGBTQIA+ people performs public stagings that raise debates on issues of gender, social inequality and prejudice in the streets of downtown São Paulo. Messing with the popular imagination and providing debates, the artists explain their daily struggles to anyone who is interested in acquiring a new perspective on the most subtle layers of intolerance.
What if becoming doesn’t lead to an end, but instead is a process of being?
After years of right-wing assaults on higher education, attacks took a new form in 2023 and 2024 that has been described as the new McCarthyism. As students across the country organize protests against Israel's war on Gaza, decades-long taboos in academia around criticism of Israel-the "Palestine exception"-are shattered. This film features professors and students as they join calls for a ceasefire and divestment from companies that do business with Israel and face waves of crackdown from administrators, the media, the police and politicians. Scholars from diverse disciplines explain what is at stake in these protests and why so many young people identify with the Palestinian cause. The documentary unfolds as a story of college campuses as sites of both rebellion and repression, places where personal and collective histories converge in unexpected ways.
In 1949, philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir wrote the groundbreaking The Second Sex, launching a disruptive discourse on women’s oppression and second-class citizenship. This film dissects the origins and relevance of this bible of feminism, charting de Beauvoir’s fact-finding journey across the US to research her book. The timely and fascinating film honors de Beauvoir’s brilliance and limitations, connecting her revolutionary ideas to the pressing issues women face today.
