Holes In My Shoes profiles the ultimate New Yorker, Jack Beers, and demonstrates the power and promise of the American Dream through the artfully-told, inspirational story of his life. The stuff that urban legend is made of, Beers represents everything good about New York – and America itself. His story reminds us that time and time again, American society has been resurrected from times of hardship through the sheer will of individuals who uplifted the nation through their common fight for survival – and prosperity.
Born to immigrant parents in a cold water tenement on the lower east side, Beers ascended from crushing poverty to the upper crust of society through determination, innovation and hard work. As a kid, Beers was known as “New York City’s Strongest Boy,” and flaunted his Herculean gifts in strong man acts in Coney Island and around the city in the 1920’s. After suffering an injury to his hand that prohibited him from performing, Beers became a cracker-jack steel worker and engineer and helped to build Radio City Music Hall, erected the Empire State Building spire and personally shortened World War II through his work on the Manhattan Project. Reinventing himself once again at middle age, Beers became a successful character actor and has appeared in over 200 feature films, including Tootsie and Plaza Suite. Throughout his long life, he beat terminal illness and shepherded his family through famine and feast, and at 94-years-old still rode his stationery bike three miles per day, cut down trees and mowed his five-acre-lawn on a tractor. Just before his passing early this year, Jack was acknowledged by Mayor Bloomberg for his indelible lifetime achievements and contributions to New York. This lovingly crafted documentary by David Wachs spans Beers’ life with incredible original and archival footage, photographs and penetrating interviews that chronicle the potential of the American dream and share one man’s abundant humanity with the world.
A truly motivational and richly entertaining story, the award-winning Holes In My Shoes is a timely film about how people can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and soar to success – even in the most desperate economic times.
Arab Labor is a raucous and irreverent critically acclaimed comedy series from Israel about Amjad, a Palestinian journalist and Israeli citizen in search of his identity. His personal quest for status and success as a journalist at a Jerusalem newspaper is foiled by the humiliating searches he endures everyday when he leaves his Palestinian neighborhood to commute to his job. In the midst of a walloping identity crisis, Amjad jockeys between two cultures as he tries to polish his image for his Jewish friends and colleagues while enjoying his own down-to-earth family life. The result is a comedy series that pierces the taboos of acceptable language and humor surrounding the prickly, long-standing status quo in which Palestinian and Jewish Israelis live side by side.
“Meet the Palestinian Seinfeld.”
-San Francisco Chronicle
“…groundbreaking and amazing…”
-Los Angeles Times
“It will tickle your funny bone, and maybe strike a nerve.”
-The Associated Press
“…a groundbreaking TV show…”
-The Chicago Tribune
“…barges through cultural barriers…”
-The New York Times
“It’s not really an Israeli version of Jerry Seinfeld, the Jewish American actor whose mother is a Syrian-Jew (making him my favorite Arab comedian, by the way). It’s more like the 1960s and 70s American TV sitcom, All in the Family, where race and race issues were ripped apart to make a social point.”
-Jerusalem Post
“…one of the most brilliant portrayals of the challenging life Arabs in Israel face every day… remarkably captivating… Episode after episode draws the viewer through the maze of conflicts that make of the reality of Arab-Jewish life in Israel…I urge you to get it. Not to laugh at the foibles of human tragedy, but rather to understand through the only medium that permits understanding in the emotion-charged Arab-Israeli conflict, humor.”
-The National Arab American Times Newspaper
Over 40 years ago, on October 9, 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara was executed by the Bolivian army, aided by the CIA. Guevara’s diary, a detailed, personal account of his futile 11-month attempt to foment revolution in Bolivia, is the basis of this moving portrait. Che’s relationship with the mysterious Tania, his betrayal by local peasants, his constant battle with asthma, and his distress at the death of his comrades is recounted. Interviews with Bolivians who met Che during these final days, coupled with narrations from Che’s actual diaries, testify to a man who embraced sacrifice for his ideals. This is an enlightening insight into the real history of a revolutionary icon.
“…moving…”
- The New York Times
“…a revealing glimpse into the revolutionary mindset.”
- Chicago Tribune
“…a compelling portrait.”
- Seattle Weekly
“An understated, stunningly effective portrait.”
- Chicago Tribune
WORKINGMAN’S DEATH is an unflinching portrait of the state of manual labor in the 21st century. In the Ukraine, a group of men spend long days crawling through cramped shafts of illegal coal mines. Sulfur gatherers in Indonesia brave the smoky heat of an active volcano and the treacherous trip back down. Blood, fire and stench are routine for workers at a crowded open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria. Pakistani men use little more than their bare hands to dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal. Steelworkers in China fear they could be a dying breed.
Today’s manual laborers are no longer celebrated with hymns of praise. WORKINGMAN’S DEATH provides a rare glimpse into the harsh treatment faced by manual laborers working half a world away.
“…the structure and tone of an epic historical poem…visually impressive…” -The New York Times
“Astonishingly powerful documentary about really, really hard work.” -Hollywood Reporter
“Essential viewing, this committed work restores worth and value
to those who, unseen and unheard, literally create our world.”
- TimeOut
Workingman’s Death DVD
Price:
$29.98
Item:
ALV-DV-9
Availability:
USA & Canada
Running Time:
122 minutes
Technical Aspects:
Dolby Digital, 16:9,
NTSC Region 0
Language:
English, German, Russian, Mandarin, with English Subtitles
The American Ruling Class is a morality tale set to music about two Yale students who seek their opportunities after graduation. Lewis Lapham, the renowned essayist, author and longtime Harper’s Magazine editor, conducts them through the corridors of power – Pentagon press briefings, the World Economic Forum, philanthropic foundations, Washington law firms, banks, the Council on Foreign Relations and New York society dinners. As they make their way, the real-life luminaries they meet become characters in a dramatic story about power, its responsibilities and abuses. The subject is our country’s most taboo topic: class, power and privilege in our nominally democratic republic.
Part Monty Python, part Michael Moore, The American Ruling Class is an entertaining clarion call for all citizens to consider who has power, how they acquired it, and most importantly, how they keep it.
“A guided safari through the tribal haunts of the power elite.” -Vanity Fair
“The American Ruling Class k.o.’d me..a remarkable and revelatory documentary
…an astonishing program”
-Studs Terkel
Introduced and Hosted by
Lewis Lapham
Featuring interviews with
Robert Altman
James A. Baker
Bill Bradley
Harold Brown
Hodding Carter III
William T. Coleman, Jr.
Walter Cronkite
Barbara Ehrenreich
Vartan Gregorian
Mike Medavoy
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Samuel Peabody
Pete Seeger
Lawrence H. Summers
Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr.
William Howard Taft IV
Kurt Vonnegut
Howard Zinn
PLEASE NOTE: FOR HOME USE ONLY. This film is not available from Alive Mind for educational institutions, public libraries and the non-theatrical market. Please contact BULLFROG FILMS.
