Cheri Gaulke’s “Acting Like Women” Chronicles 1970s L.A. Feminist Performance Art Movement

acting-like-womenA new documentary revisits The Woman’s Building, the Los Angeles feminist art space that became a proving ground for performance artists in the 1970s.

“Acting Like Women,” directed by feminist artist Cheri Gaulke, premieres at DOC NYC on November 18. The film is produced by Iambe Films, with Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner on board as executive producers.

Through interviews, archival footage, and her own story, Gaulke traces how a collective of women turned their bodies and voices into tools for activism. The documentary weaves personal history with the larger movement, following Gaulke’s path from daughter of a Midwestern Lutheran minister through the sexual revolution to her career as a performance artist, lesbian, educator, and mother of twins.

The film argues that California feminist performance art wasn’t a side story but central to the medium’s development. Interviews and footage of performances show what the era meant for women defining themselves then and now.

The premiere takes place November 18 at 6:45 PM at Village East by Angelika, 181-189 2nd Ave, New York.

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Animated Series Monkey King Adventures Hits 1 Million Views on GJW+

Monkey King Adventures, the first original animated series from streaming service GJW+, has surpassed 1 million combined views across its first six episodes, theme song, teasers, and trailers since its October 2 premiere.

The series adapts Journey to the West, the 16th century Chinese classic considered one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Season 1 follows Sun Wukong, a monkey born from a magical stone, on his rise to become the Monkey King. New episodes arrive weekly, with Episode 7 dropping November 6.

The milestone comes as Gan Jing Kids launched Kids Mode, a simplified viewing space where children can watch shows including Monkey King Adventures on their own. Kids Mode removes extra menus, notifications, and comment sections, using large picture-based icons to help young viewers navigate.

“With Monkey King Adventures on GJW+, we are going to great lengths to preserve the novel’s spiritual core and strive to give audiences a true version of this beloved classic finally restored to its rightful glory for new generations,” said Terry Wu, producer of the series.

Early viewer reactions have been positive. One viewer who watched the first two episodes with children from an after-school program wrote, “They were completely captivated, and so was I. The animation is stunning and beautiful, the story is gripping, and it carries positive messages.”

The 12-episode first season streams on GJW+ and Gan Jing Kids. The first two episodes are free to watch.

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Ellie Gravitte Directs Her Real-Life Family in Musical Feature “Get Happy” at Connecticut Home

A Connecticut family is shooting a musical feature film in their own house. Production is underway on “Get Happy”, the debut feature from writer/director Ellie Gravitte. The film stars her mother, Tony Award-winning actress Debbie Gravitte, her father Beau Gravitte, and other family members. Filming runs through November 9 in Redding, CT.

“I’d been waiting a long time for a ‘yes’ from big-name talent and financiers who were hesitant to take a chance on a first-time filmmaker,” Gravitte says. “This summer, I decided to stop waiting. So I wrote a film for my entire family to star in, and we’re shooting it in our house.”

The film follows the Williams family over a single day. When three adult children bring their significant others home for an annual gathering, musical performances, botched meals, and interpersonal dramas pile up.

The film features eight songs captured live on camera, including standards like “Get Happy” and “Fascinating Rhythm”, plus an original song, “No One Has It Worse”, written by Gravitte and Carlo Ladd.

The cast has more than a dozen Broadway credits between them. Debbie Gravitte won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical and a Grammy for “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway”. She’s currently on Broadway in “Just in Time”. Beau Gravitte spent a year in the national tour of “The Notebook” and has Broadway credits including “The Light in the Piazza”. Sam Gravitte made his Broadway debut in “Wicked” and later starred as Fiyero.

The production is raising funds through a Kickstarter campaign that ends November 20. Producers are Lavinia Jones Wright and Lindsey Formes of I Play Different Productions.

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Documentary Follows Paramedics Through a Year of Emergency Calls

into-the-unknownA new documentary puts a camera inside ambulances and emergency rooms across the country, following paramedics as they respond to calls that could be anything from a heart attack to a car crash.

Into the Unknown follows EMS crews in Santa Barbara, Sparks, Denver, Baton Rouge, and Crozet over the course of a year. Director Tom Putnam, who made the firefighter documentary Burn, captures the split-second decisions, physical danger, and emotional weight that come with the job.

The film features paramedics Dr. Richard Carmona, Pat Coyle, Heather Edwards, Nicole Jagers, Niki Johnson, Anthony Judkins, Anne Kellogg, Trevor Oakley, John Tinsley, and Jenn Vazquez.

Executive producers include Steve Buscemi and Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe, who played paramedics on the 1970s show Emergency! Mantooth and Tighe say the documentary is a tribute to the real professionals whose work helped inspire that series.

“Behind every uniform is a human being navigating trauma, loss, exhaustion, and the immense responsibility of making split-second decisions under extraordinary pressure,” according to the filmmakers.

Into the Unknown opens on digital platforms December 4.

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IMDb Adds Michif as Official Language, a First for Métis Cinema

IMDb just made history for Indigenous filmmakers. The platform officially added Michif to its list of recognized title languages, giving the Métis language the same structural standing as English or French.

The update comes after years of advocacy led by Métis filmmaker Jordan Waunch, whose anti-western series Shadow of the Rougarou is now the first production credited with Michif as an official title language on the site. Set during the 1885 North-West Resistance, the series features dialogue in Michif, Cree, and Chinook Wawa, weaving a dark story of survival rooted in oral tradition.

“For a long time, Michif has been absent from the systems that catalogue and classify screen work,” Waunch says. “Seeing it recognized on IMDb gives our language a visible place in the global record of cinema.”

He credits the milestone to Elders and Language Keepers including Stella Erasmus Johnson, Bruce Dumont, Don Campbell, Theodore Starr, Lisa Shepherd, Douglas Robertson, and Ray G. Thunderchild.

But the work isn’t done. Waunch says the next step is getting IMDb to recognize distinct Michif dialects and other Indigenous languages still left off the platform.

Shadow of the Rougarou was backed by the Indigenous Screen Office, Creative BC, the Bell Fund, and APTN. The series streams now on APTN+.

This matters because language preservation starts with visibility, and for indie Indigenous creators, that means showing up in the same databases as every other film.

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Abramorama Acquires Ballet Documentary “Make Work” for North American Release

Abramorama has picked up North American rights to “Make Work,” a documentary that follows four choreographers as they develop new ballets at the New York Choreographic Institute.

The film comes from directors Linda Saffire and Adam Schlesinger, whose previous work “Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan” premiered at the New York Film Festival and was released by Netflix. Their credits include two Emmy nominations and Schlesinger produced “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” which won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance.

“Make Work” opens in theaters March 5, 2027. It premiered at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival and screens at DOC NYC.

The documentary goes inside rehearsal studios at the New York Choreographic Institute and New York City Ballet, tracking choreographers Harrison Ball, Sarah Foster-Sproull, Caili Quan, and Houston Thomas as they create original work during two-week residencies. The film shows the process before a ballet reaches the stage: experimentation, collaboration, and the work that gets abandoned along the way.

“We wanted to sit in the room while a ballet is being born, when ideas are fragile, when dancers and choreographers are taking real risks together, and when failure is part of the process,” Saffire and Schlesinger said.

Adrian Danchig-Waring, now artistic director of the New York Choreographic Institute, produced the film and took his final bow as a New York City Ballet principal dancer on October 18, 2026, after 24 years with the company.

The film also includes reflections from choreographers Kyle Abraham, Lar Lubovitch, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky, Pam Tanowitz, and Christopher Wheeldon on their creative practices and George Balanchine’s influence on ballet.

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Brazilian Broadcast Demo Shows Two Signals Can Share One Frequency

Researchers just pulled off something that could change how TV broadcasts work. At a symposium in Brazil this summer, a team showed they could decode a weaker broadcast signal while canceling out a much stronger one on the same frequency, in real time.

The demo happened at the IEEE International Symposium in João Pessoa in July. Mackenzie Presbyterian University ran the test using tech from labs in Spain, China, Korea, and Canada. The weaker signal they decoded was 37 decibels below the stronger one, a huge power gap.

Why does this matter? Spectrum is expensive and limited. If stations can overlap geographically on the same frequency without interference, that opens up room for local content and more efficient networks. It’s a big deal for the next-gen ATSC 3.0 standard.

Madeleine Noland, president of ATSC, says the demo shows how broadcast tech is evolving beyond traditional TV. Brazil’s been pushing hard on this, with pilots running in Brasília, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro.

The work proves that international collaboration can move lab experiments into real-world use. For indie creators and small broadcasters, more efficient spectrum could mean more access and opportunity.

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New Doc Exposes the Cutthroat Rise of SoulCycle and the Billion-Dollar Spin Class Empire

The boutique fitness boom wasn’t all good vibes and motivational playlists.

SPIN WARS, a new documentary from director Philip Byron, digs into the messy, billion-dollar rise of indoor cycling studios like SoulCycle, Flywheel, and Peloton. The film premiered at Tribeca and pulls back the curtain on an industry built on ambition, betrayal, and what Byron calls “toxic sweat.”

It’s a high-energy look at how spinning went from niche workout to cultural phenomenon, and the ugly side of “mind, body, soul” branding that came with it. The doc features Katie Couric, comedians Heather McMahan and Mary Beth Barone, author Jill Kargman, and creators Brandon Kyle Goodman and Anna Roisman.

Byron co-wrote the film with James Thayer and produced it alongside Jillian A. Goldstein.

SPIN WARS releases this December. For an industry that sold empowerment and community, the real story behind the scenes is a lot sweatier than anyone let on. Independent filmmakers continue proving that the best stories aren’t always feel-good ones.

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Sean Ono Lennon Makes Directorial Debut With Fashion Doc About threeASFOUR Collective

Sean Ono Lennon is stepping behind the camera for the first time with “threeASFOUR: FULL CIRCLE,” a documentary about three designers who’ve been challenging the fashion world for over 25 years.

The film follows Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil, the trio behind avant-garde fashion collective threeASFOUR. They’ve built a cult following by creating clothes inspired by natural forms and pioneering techniques. Their work has landed in global museum exhibitions and on the backs of Björk and Chloë Sevigny.

But acclaim doesn’t pay the bills. The doc shows the constant struggle to survive in an industry obsessed with commerce when you’d rather focus on creativity and collaboration. It’s a moving portrait of artists trying to make it on their own terms.

Lennon co-directed with Brian C. González, who also handled cinematography. Jenny Golden wrote and edited the film, with Beth Levison producing.

“threeASFOUR: FULL CIRCLE” opens at New York’s Film Forum on November 13 before rolling out nationwide this fall.

For independent creators fighting to balance art and survival, this one hits close to home. It’s a reminder that even designers with museum shows and celebrity fans still face the same battle, staying true to their vision when the system wants something easier to sell.

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Jazz Trumpet Legend Marcus Belgrave Gets His Due in New Doc

Marcus Belgrave made his professional debut at 12. He performed with Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, and Motown’s Funk Brothers. He mentored generations of musicians and helped shape Detroit’s jazz scene. But chances are, you’ve never heard of him.

A new documentary, AND DAMN, HE COULD PLAY, aims to change that. The film makes its world premiere at DOC NYC this November, celebrating the unsung trumpet player who left his mark all over American music.

Directed by Emmy winner Timashion Jones, the 91-minute portrait traces Belgrave’s journey from prodigy to educator. Mentored by trumpet icon Clifford Brown, Belgrave became a guiding force himself, teaching and inspiring jazz luminaries like Geri Allen, Kenny Garrett, and Regina Carter. He was also a key figure in Tribe, Detroit’s groundbreaking arts collective.

The doc features archival performances and interviews with Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Don Was, Sheila Jordan, and techno pioneer Carl Craig, among others. Narrated by Wendell Pierce, it’s written by Jones and producer Brad Torreano.

It’s a tribute to an artist who never chased the spotlight but shaped the sound of everyone around him. For anyone who cares about jazz history or the creative ecosystems that keep music alive, this one matters.

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