Kike Like Me
With “Gentleman’s Agreement” as his jumping off point, Jamie Kastner asks who’s a Jew, and does it matter. He’ll answer the question, “Are you Jewish?” with a yes to see how people react. Brooklyn’s Hassidic community embraces him and gives him a bar mitzvah. He visits Pat Buchanan who ends their conversation abruptly when Kastner […]
Free Trade Is Killing My Mother
Shot from the hip on mini DV, and intercut with unusual protest footage dating from the Russian revolution to Berkeley in the ‘60s, the main narrative line of Free Trade is Killing My Mother is Guy and Jamie’s journey to find the Zen of the anti-globalization protest movement – What is it? Who owns it? […]
Djangomania
Djangomania is an hour-long documentary in which writer-director-narrator Jamie Kastner travels the globe to reveal the influence of the legendary Gypsy guitarist. In addition to finding his most avid fans and taking the viewers back to the place of Django’s roots, we also hear a lot of great music along the way, including an amusing […]
Recessionize! For Fun and Profit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvp1yjYXfNc Director Jamie Kastner sets off on a darkly comic road trip through California, Europe and Dubai, meeting people who manage to turn the world economic crisis into opportunity. They range from kids at Camp Millionaire, to Berlin prostitutes offering eco-discounts, to the owners of a French hotel promising a hamster experience. The present-day journey […]
The Secret Disco Revolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSviOtOMSxM An idiosyncratic black-comic journey into the moral-political-aesthetic soul (if indeed there is one) of disco, the world’s most frustratingly enduring pop form. Filmmaker Jamie Kastner investigates disco’s bizarrely clean modern incarnations (“Silent Disco,” “Baby Loves Disco,” “Spins and Needles” (disco knitting) meets revisionist historians (Peter Shapiro, author, “Turn The Beat Around” who claims disco […]
The Skyjacker’s Tale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ydbAhwJ4MI Ishmael Muslim Ali (formerly LaBeet) is the American convicted of murdering eight people on a Rockefeller-owned golf course in the US Virgin Islands. After years of trying to get his conviction overturned, he took matters into his own hands and hijacked an American Airlines plane full of passengers to Cuba on New Years Eve […]
Push
https://player.vimeo.com/video/324962587 PUSH is a documentary from award-winning director Fredrik Gertten, investigating why we can’t afford to live in our own cities anymore. Housing is a fundamental human right, a precondition to a safe and healthy life. But in cities all around the world, having a place to live is becoming more and more difficult. Who are the […]
There Are No Fakes
https://vimeo.com/325306666/0150996c0d A painting, thought to be the work of an iconic Indigenous artist, leads the rock star who buys it into the tragic and brutal world of an art forgery ring in Canada’s north.