STORY & PICTURES BY is the first documentary to take audiences behind the scenes of the new golden age of children’s picture books —a time when all children can see characters who look like them on the page; a time when creators come from diverse communities and backgrounds; and a time when instead of keeping the hard stuff out of stories for children, we put it in and provide context and counternarrative.

This is not a documentary about the making of Midnight Cowboy. It is about a dark and difficult masterpiece and the deeply gifted and flawed people who made it. It is about New York in a troubled era of cultural ferment and social change.

A half century after its release, Midnight Cowboy remains one of the most original and groundbreaking movies of the modern era. Set in a New York besieged by economic collapse, social unrest, and cultural ferment, the movie tells the story of two homeless loners who join forces out of desperation and struggle to survive. It features superb performances by Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, spirited direction by John Schlesinger, a brilliant screenplay by blacklist survivor Waldo Salt, and a memorable musical soundtrack. The result was the only X-rated film to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture and John Schlesinger’s win as Best Director over George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, Sydney Pollack and Costa-Gavras! It paved the way for a generation’s worth of gritty, New York-based movies with adult themes and complex characters.

The legend continues with the newly published Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic by Glenn Frankel, which has been optioned by Augusta Films. Award-winning filmmaker Nancy Buirski will write and direct. For an exclusive story on the film visit: Variety

PRODUCED BY: Nancy Buirski, Simon Kilmurry, and Susan Margolin

Renegades, rebels, pioneers… Mashrou’ Leila are indie-rock gods in the Arab world. But their fame comes with a price. A rare nuanced look into the LGBTQ politics of the Middle East, and a moving testament to the power of music, and the universal desire for freedom.

My Name Is Andrea is the story of controversial feminist writer and public intellectual Andrea Dworkin, who offered a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy with iconoclastic flair. Decades before #MeToo, Dworkin called out the pervasiveness of sexism and rape culture, and the ways it impacts every woman’s daily life.

Palawan appears to be an idyllic tropical island. Its powder-white beaches and lush forests have made it one of Asia’s hottest new tourist destinations. But for a tiny network of environmental crusaders and vigilantes trying to protect its spectacular natural resources, it is more akin to a battlefield. 

DELIKADO follows Bobby, Tata and Nieves, three magnetic leaders of this network, as they risk their lives in David versus Goliath-style struggles trying to stop politicians and businessmen from destroying the Philippines’ “last ecological frontier”. 

It is a timely film emblematic of the struggles globally for land defenders as they are being killed in record numbers trying to save natural resources from being plundered by corporations and governments. As the world faces its sixth-mass extinction and the climate emergency worsens,

It is also a unique expose of President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs’ in the Philippines, which has claimed thousands of lives and the International Criminal Court of Justice has said may amount to a crime against humanity. DELIKADO shows the drug war is used as a tool for politicians to control the levers of economic and political power. 

DELIKADO offers a story of courage and resilience to inspire others into action.

VIVA VERDI! offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of the celebrated opera singers and musicians living out their “third act” at Milan’s Casa Verdi retirement home built in 1896 by the most influential Italian opera composer of the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi. With aging bodies and timeless passion, these distinguished “guests of Verdi,” ranging in age from 77 to 103, prove age hasn’t dulled their love of music or relentless drive to create: They are still actively creating, performing and mentoring the 16 gifted music students from around the world who study and live among them.

Hu Xin and Simu are two young Chinese Millennials living in rural and metropolitan China respectively. As they navigate their own careers and family choices in a male-dominant world, they look toward the wisdom of Nushu - an ancient secret woman-only script.

A Decent Home addresses urgent issues of class and economic (im)mobility through the lives of mobile home par residents who can’t afford housing anywhere else. They are fighting for their dreams - and their lives- as private equity firms and wealthy investor buy up parks, squeezing every last penny out of the mobile home owners who must pay rent for the land they live on.

Looking at the complex relationship of hormonal contraception to women’s health and liberation, The Business of Birth Control features the stories of activists, doctors and scientists who are blowing the whistle on how hormonal birth control affects the mind and body. The film revisits the 1970’s Nelson Pill Hearings, where feminists disrupted the proceedings to demand informed consent and follows a courageous group of bereaved parents who are fighting to get warning labels on Yaz and NuvaRing fifty years later. 

And She Could Be Next, made by a team of women filmmakers of color, asks whether democracy itself can be preserved—and made stronger—by those most marginalized. While pundits obsess over the daily twists of an unraveling democracy, a game-changing transformation is happening at the grassroots.

Activists risk their lives to confront Russian leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his government-directed campaign to detain, torture and execute LGBTQ Chechens.

A chilling portrait of what happens when activism rattles the institutions of power.

Cannabis has been off-limits to doctors and researchers in the US for the past 80 years, but recently scientists have discovered its anti-cancer properties. Armed with only these laboratory studies, desperate parents obtain cannabis oil from underground sources to save their children from childhood cancers. “Weed the People” follows these families through uncharted waters as they take their children’s survival into their own hands. Some of their miraculous outcomes beget the unsettling question at the heart of the film: If weed is truly saving lives, why doesn’t the government want people to access it?

When Jennifer Laude, a Filipina trans woman, is brutally murdered by a U.S. Marine, three women intimately invested in the case–an activist attorney (Virgie Suarez), a transgender journalist (Meredith Talusan) and Jennifer’s mother (Julita “Nanay” Laude)–galvanize a political uprising, pursuing justice and taking on hardened histories of US imperialism.

A professor enters a cave and goes missing. Some of his students come looking for him and get trapped in the cave as well.

Past her prime and afflicted with a severe case of writer's block, a veteran songwriter finds new inspiration in a bird that takes up residence outside her home.

Lunch Hour explores the National School Lunch Program, childhood obesity, and our addiction to unhealthy foods. It shows what schools, parents, authors, doctors, politicians, celebrities, and chefs are doing to problem solve this issue and help save the children of America.