Europe

Prison Valley, a multimedia prison reform project, tells the tale of Fremont County, Colorado: a tiny patch of the Southwest packed with 13 prisons and a local economy that revolves around the incarceration of 7,735 people—many of whom are the county’s own residents.

As an “ad man by day," filmmaker Michael Creagh had been “tinkering with ideas and scripts” for several years before acting on his dream. His debut film The Crush tells the story of an eight-year-old boy (played deftly by Creagh's son) in love with his teacher. When the boy's gift of a toy ring is outdone by an engagement ring, he plots his revenge against his nemesis.

Kung fu zombies are rarely catalysts for film festivals. Rather, they’re the stuff of cult canons and film student fever dreams. Rarely seen together, the two B-movie genre standards are a mother lode of midnight movie possibility and it’s amazing more filmmakers haven’t mined it.

Stuck in a dead-end job and worried he'd never make it as a filmmaker, Lee Kazimir decided to take Werner Herzog's advice. Legendary filmmaker Herzog had once said in an interview that he believed the best way to become a filmmaker would be not to practice filmmaking but to walk -- say, from Madrid to Kiev.

As a young girl, Hope Dickson Leach dreamed of becoming a painter. She attended boarding school in England from the ages of 9 to 17 and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. But after interning for the likes of Mario Kassar and Todd Solondz, she convinced Columbia University's film department to give her a chance.

Since its first broadcast in 1992, Arte has become the most innovative television programmer in Europe. Its attraction is due to a creative programming philosophy unhampered by commercial considerations. Apparently simple issues are presented in depth from original perspectives and, conversely, complex matters are made comprehensible without undue simplification.