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In case you’re not familiar with the story of the ants and the grasshopper, it goes like this. Ants are hard working, industrious creatures. In the winter, they work. In the summer, they work. This means that although there is less food available in winter, they have enough to live on all year round. by contrast, the grasshopper spends the summer playing and enjoying the sun. In the winter he has nothing. He turns to the ants, telling them that the summer was so lovely that he couldn’t help but waste his time. The ants agree to feed him, but warn him that if he doesn’t learn to to work in summer, there will come a time when he starves.

Raj Patel and Zak Piper’s documentary begins in Bwabwa, Malawi, where the bed of the Rukuru River is cracked and dry. Only in one place can water be extracted from a.

Back in 1993, Hollywood had the shot of a lifetime. A shot at an opportunity to change the movie industry forever. They had all the ingredients: the rights to the highest-selling Nintendo video game and an untapped market greedy for more content. But they missed. The arrow didn’t even hit the board.

Super Mario Bros. was meant to be the first of many video game movie adaptations but instead has been relegated to the attic of our consciousness, the door only to be flung open when used to uphold the...

This consciousness-raising documentary follows intelligent and infinitely patient farmer Anita in her efforts to change minds in her patriarchal village and beyond

This is about Malawian farmer Anita Chitaya and her efforts to change minds in her village and in the US. In Bwabwa, the village where she lives, intelligent and infinitely patient Anita has persuaded her husband to help her raise crops on their single acre of poor soil and help with the household chores that are usually considered women’s work, no small feat given years ago he saw it as his right to abduct her into marriage, thereby scotching Anita’s dream of becoming a nun. With friends and supporters, Anita is trying to convince her staunchly patriarchal male neighbour to follow her husband’s lead and help the women, especially since the hardscrabble farming they must do is getting even harder thanks to the climate crisis causing droughts and floods.

As with so many festivals, it’s easy to feel a little overawed when first glancing at the full program of films on offer at Sheffield DocFest (June 4-13).

Despite the challenges of programming during a pandemic, the Sheffield team has pulled together an impressive lineup of 78 features and 88 shorts in its films program.

Among the 55 world premieres are Oscar winner Steve McQueen’s 1981-set race relations series “Uprising,” “Leaving Neverland: Michael Jackson and Me” director Dan Reed’s latest “In the Shadow of 9/11,” Peabody Award winner Mark Cousins’ meditation on sight, “The Story of Looking,” and Nick Green’s biopic of the fugitive former CEO of Renault-Nissan “Carlos Ghosn: The Last Flight.”

It’s the second edition of DocFest to be led former DocLisboa director Cintia Gil, both of them realized during the pandemic.

Casting her eye over a lineup that has offerings from Senegal to Latvia,...

Exclusive: Following in the footsteps of fellow ballers like Kobe Bryant (Kobe Studios), Lebron James (SpringHill Entertainment), and Stephen Curry (Unanimous Media), NBA All-Star and Dwight Howard is getting into the film business. The Washington Wizards center, via Mansa Productions, has come aboard as an executive producer of Percy, an anti-gmo indie film starring Oscar-winner Christopher Walken, Christina Ricci, and Zach Braff.

Grasshopper + Marks Productions (Brewmaster) has also signed on as exec producers of the film, which is being directed by Clark Johnson.

Written by Hilary Pryor and Garfield L. Miller, the plot follows a small-town Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser (Walken) who challenges a major conglomerate when the company’s genetically modified (Gmo) canola is discovered in the 70-year-old farmer’s crop.

Additional cast includes Roberta Maxwell as Percy’s wife; Adam Beach as Percy’s neighbor, Alton Kelly; Luke Kirby as Percy’s son; Martin Donovan as the conglomerate’s lead lawyer,...