First-Run Features (Firm)

Documentary about Tai Chi and one of its great masters, Cheng Man-Ching, a man who brought Tai Chi and Chinese culture to the West during the 1960s. Featuring vintage archival footage, the film tells the story of his remarkable life and features Tai Chi as a martial art and a spiritual practice. Cheng Man-Ching performs his 37 Movement Form ; The Origin of Tai chi ; Medical science & Tai Chi: an interview with Peter M. Wayne, PhD, Harvard Medical...

After their award-winning collaboration in Wild Side, screenwriter Stephane Bouquet and screenwriter/director Sebastien Lifshitz come together again to create the sensual and meditative COME UNDONE, which explores a young boy’s homosexual awakening and the turbulence of first love. Taking place at a seaside town near western France, Mathieu (Jeremie Elkaim), a quiet 18-years-old spending the summer with his troubled family, meets the handsome and...

This New York Times Critics' Pick, filmed with vérité intimacy for nearly a decade, is a moving portrait of the Rainey family living in North Philadelphia. Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Christopher "Quest" Rainey, and his wife, Christine'a "Ma Quest" raise a family while nurturing a community of hip hop artists in their home music studio. It's a safe space where all are welcome, but this creative sanctuary can't always shield them...

Secret Society tells the story of Daisy, twenty years old and plump as a dumpling, and her adoring (and unemployed) husband Ken. Struggling financially, Daisy finds a job in a canning factory where she notices that her boss Marlene, radiant and heavy-set, grants special privileges to a group of equally chubby female factory workers. Soon Daisy learns that the women are part of a "secret society" of sumo wrestlers who are gaining strength and self-confidence...

Winner of 10 international awards, Death by Design is a guided tour into the invisible world of cells, told through a collage of metaphors and interviews with cellular biologists. State-of-the-art microcinematography is playfully intercut with parallel images from life at the human scale: a hundred lighted violins, imploding skyscrapers, Busby Berkeley musicals, Harold Lloyd antics and more.

One of the breakout hits of Spain's burgeoning low-budget filmmaking scene, Carlos Vermut's debut, Diamond Flash, instantly established the young filmmaker as a deft practitioner of the thriller genre. Vermut's follow-up, Magical Girl, employs a classic noir premise, taking his exploration of the darkest side of human nature to exhilarating new extremes. Luis (Luis Bermejo) is desperate to fulfill his terminally ill daughter's last wish: to own the...

In his lifetime, Thomas Merton was hailed as a prophet and censured for his outspoken social criticism. For nearly 27 years he was a monk of the austere Trappist order, where he became an eloquent spiritual writer and mystic as well as an anti-war advocate and witness to peace...Merton: A Film Biography provides the first comprehensive look at this remarkable 20th century religious philosopher who wrote, in addition to his immensely popular autobiography...

Talented art student Angelique is madly in love with Loic, a married cardiologist whose wife is expecting their first child. Things take a dangerous turn as Angelique grows less discreet in her affections and her attempts to separate the couple fail. Halfway through, this black comedy takes a dramatic turn and the film reverses perspective, showing the preceding events from Loic's (wildly different) point-of-view.

In this relentless thriller, French star Isabelle Huppert brings passion and courage to her portrayal of a hostage caught in a seemingly hopeless situation. At a beach resort in the Philippines, 20 guests are kidnapped by an Islamic separatist group fighting for their independence. French social worker Therese Bourgoine is among those taken to a jungle island, with the Filipino army in pursuit. As the captors and their hostages journey through dense...

Claire and Maurice have to take the whole family to Claire's father's funeral. This tightly knit family is not only composed of Claire's vegetarian son, Alex, who's secretly fond of Maurice's daughter, Lucie, the teenage rebel, but also Claire's brother, a poet living under his sister's roof; without forgetting young Prune, Claire and Maurice's daughter, who will develop a passion for the country's emblematic cows. They must all strive to get along...