Maryte Kavaliauskas

This documentary shows a rare and intimate portrait of Hockney's private passion –- designing for the opera stage.

Three sectors of American society hit by recession in the mid-1980s: heartland farms, factory workers out of a job, and the new homeless. In Minnesota, 250 family farms are being repossesed each week; men and women talk about their farms, the nature of their bank loans, the onslaught of corporate farming, and their sorrow and despair. In cities where 3,500 jobs per day go overseas, unemployed workers contemplate their options. The newly homeless talk about the jobs they've lost, "Justice Ville" in Los Angeles (bulldozed by court order), and squatting in New York's abandoned buildings. A family living in a welfare hotel tells their story.

A short by and about Wim Wenders -- his life, work, thoughts, America, cinema.

Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály believed that music could be taught to children as readily as reading. The method he developed uses a child's own natural instrument, the voice. Beginning with simple musical intervals, the child progresses from folk tunes and children's songs to the complex notes and rhythms of composed music--from Bye baby bunting to Bach. [The film] is a look at the Kodály method of music training in public elementary schools in San Jose, California, and West Hartford, Connecticut. Ordinary children are shown in the film, but they exhibit extraordinary self-confidence, discipline, concentration, and an eagerness to learn. There is no such thing as failure in a Kodály classroom; in fact, the children are able to correct their mistakes themselves. Moreover, the children will bring much of 'how' they learn in their music lessons--counting and problem-solving, left-to-right progression, following directions--to their study of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Director 'Nicholas Ray' is eager to complete a final film before his imminent death from cancer. Wim Wenders is working on his own film Hammett (1983) in Hollywood, but flies to New York to help Ray realize his final wish. Ray's original intent is to make a fiction film about a dying painter who sails to China to find a cure for his disease. He and Wenders discuss this idea, but it is obviously unrealistic given Ray's state of health.

A photographer and her best friend are roommates. She is stuck with small-change shooting jobs and dreams of success. When her roommate decides to get married and leave, she feels hurt and has to learn how to deal with living alone.

Tom Ripley, an American who deals in forged art, is slighted at an auction in Hamburg by picture framer Jonathan Zimmerman. When Ripley is asked by gangster Raoul Minot to kill a rival, he suggests Zimmerman, and the two, exploiting Zimmerman's terminal illness, coerce him into being a hitman.