The Penn Libraries now offers access to two new streaming film and video platforms, Projectr EDU and Docuseek. Both platforms feature quality documentary and narrative films from a number of leading independent distributors, which enhances the number of acclaimed, engaging films available to members of the Penn community for on-demand viewing.
Projectr EDU is a brand-new streaming service that debuted last fall, in 2021. It features many diverse and underrepresented filmmakers, independent and international films, including celebrated, vibrant, lushly produced narrative and documentary films from the distributors Grasshopper Film, Canyon Cinema, and MTV Documentary Films. Grasshopper films also feature work of international auteur filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho, Claire Denis, Hong Sangsoo, and Pedro Costa. Notable films on the platform include the Academy Award-nominated film for Best Documentary Feature, Jessica Kingdon’s Ascension (2021), which showcases the modern-day “Chinese Dream.” The film is an essay film that explores consumerism, production, capitalist excess and waste, beginning with factory workers and ascending the social ladder from working class to middle class to the hedonistic elite. Critics have described the film as enthralling, engrossing, and alarming.
Another film available through Projectr EDU is the much-heralded Black Mother, a 2018 documentary by Jamaican-American filmmaker Khalik Allah, also known for his cinematography work on Beyoncé’s film and visual album Lemonade, takes the viewer on an earthy, immersive trip through contemporary Jamaica. The film showcases its Jamaican subjects through visual collages and voiceover, highlighting the country’s history, spirituality, and its people’s modern realities of impoverishment and struggle.
An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature from 2018, Last Men in Aleppo, from Syrian director Feras Fayyad, paints a picture of life during wartime in Aleppo, an ancient, culturally and strategically significant city in northwestern Syria. The film follows a non-partisan group called the White Helmets, or the Syria Civil Defense, which conducts medical evacuations and urban search-and-rescue missions with the ongoing conflict as a backdrop. While a huge portion of Aleppo’s population has had to flee the military strikes by forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad, Fayyad’s film depicts ordinary citizens who have stayed behind and work to protect others who have chosen to stay and live amid the chaos of a city under continuing attack.
Projectr EDU will provide access to well-made documentary and narrative films that offer colorful insight into world politics and social issues. It features films that traditionally have found a home in arthouse cinema venues and theaters devoted to presenting new world cinema. Records for films available via Projectr EDU are not yet in Franklin, but are coming soon.
Docuseek debuted as a platform in 2012, and additional participating distributors of independent, social-issue, and environmental films have come on board in recent years, creating an academic streaming video database with around 2,000 films from Bullfrog Films, Icarus Films, Kartemquin, KimStim, Film Movement, First Run Features, Women Make Movies, and more.
Some of the more popular films on the Docuseek platform include documentaries that may be of interest to students of business, law, political science, history, or anthropology, such as Hot Coffee (Susan Saladoff, 2011), The True Cost (Andrew Morgan, 2015), and Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa (Barbara Attie, Mike Attie, and Janet Goldwater, 2015).
Hot Coffee is a documentary that references the famous lawsuit Liebeck v. McDonald’s in which an 81-year-old woman spilled a to-go cup of coffee on herself that was so scaldingly hot that it caused third-degree burns. The film explores the media coverage of the case as emblematic of a justice system overburdened with frivolous lawsuits, and how the case is cited in discussions of legal reforms that would limit consumer litigation and corporate accountability.
The True Cost, a 2015 documentary by Andrew Morgan criticizes the apparel industry for fast fashion, consumer and media representations of the production and sales of clothing. It explores the effects that the garment industry has on the environment, in the countries where factories produce the clothing, and in the United States. Compared with decades past, the U.S. hardly produces any of the clothing that fashion chains now sell domestically. The impacts of the industry have serious environmental, labor, and social consequences in the countries home to the factories that manufacture the apparel. The film also explores how consumerism intersects with personal identity, yet leaves in its wake a huge stream of textile waste and pollution.
Docuseek also features an award-winning short film made in Philadelphia, Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa, which provides an inside view of an organization that helps women and teenagers who are struggling to find and afford reproductive health care.
These resources complement a range of streaming film and video platforms in the Penn Libraries online collections, platforms such as Kanopy, Swank Digital Campus, Academic Video Online, Film Platform, and Artfilms-Digital. We continue to explore opportunities to expand the number of on-demand or licensed films that are available for course use, individual research, or entertainment.
If there are films or streaming platforms that you would like to see made available by the Penn Libraries, please suggest a purchase or feel free to reach out to Cinema and Media Studies Librarian, Charles Cobine. The films discussed are listed below, along with other recommended films from Docuseek and Projectr EDU.
Filmography
Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa. Directed by Barbara Attie, Mike Attie, and Janet Goldwater, Attie & Goldwater Productions, 2019.
Ascension. Directed by Jessica Kingdon, XTR, Firelight Media, Field of Vision, Cinereach, Chicken & Egg Productions, The Sundance Institute, and San Francisco Film Society, 2021
Beyoncé, Lemonade. Directed by Kahlil Joseph and Beyoncé Knowles, cinematography by Chayse Irvin, Khalik Allah, Pär Ekberg, Santiago González, Malik Sayeed, Dikayl Rimmash, and Reed Morano. Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, 2016. CD. (AppleMusic | Spotify)
Black Mother. Directed by Khalik Allah, Cinereach, 2018.
Hot Coffee. Directed by Susan Saladoff. Produced by Susan Saladoff, Carly Hugo, Alan Oxman, and co-produced by Rebecca Saladoff, 2011.
Last Men in Aleppo. Directed by Feras Fayyad. Produced by Kareem Abeed and Søren Steen Jespersen.
The True Cost. Directed by Andrew Morgan, Untold Creative and Life Is My Movie Entertainment, 2015.
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