Kaboodle is a diverse series of 32 animated and live-action stories in varying length that encourage imagination, stimulate creative play and encourage exploration of values and issues. Kaboodle follows a narrative exploration with the stories and activities in each episode focusing on a different aspect of the narrative, in both literature and screen stories. Many of the Kaboodle stories have been adapted from popular children's books.

Set in 1917 in a small Australian outback town and against the backdrop of a nation at war, Let the Balloon Go is a poignant story of a boy and his family. Young John Sumner has contracted polio and wears a leg brace. He also suffers mild epilepsy. While his brothers fight in the war overseas, John fights a much more personal battle - the battle for his own freedom. His over-anxious mother is afraid to let him play games and climb trees like other children. But John makes a determined effort to break free of his mother's domination and to win respect as an individual. With best mate Wombat the dog in tow, he causes mischief about town and proves he is capable of high adventure. Along the way we meet the pompous Police Constable Baird, bumbling Acting Fire Chief Gifford, and the town eccentric, Major 'Tiddly' Fairleigh, all caught in hilariously comic situations. Based on the novel by world-renowned author Ivan Southall, this story of letting go is straight from the heart of Australia.

An advanced race of giant lobsters from outer space land on Earth "sunny side up," but no one knows why. An utter failure of communication with these galactic crustaceans catapults the world towards Armageddon bisque! World peace is at stake! What can save us? A little straight talk, perhaps? With tongue planted firmly in cheek, director and writer Janet Perlman untwines the classic 1950s B-movie motif to weave a thoroughly madcap, animated parable pitting the virtues of clear language and good communication against bafflegab evil-doers. Does a contract have to be unreadable? Must political speeches be meaningless? Can assembly instructions be self-evident? Dire consequences await the foolhardy practitioners of Orwellian doublespeak and just plain gobbledygook. Beware to all contract contortionists, purple prosaists and speech spinners. The jig is finally up. Resistance is futile!

There is a growing buzz around the potential for science and technology to create significant "human enhancement" applications, such as bionic limbs, improved memory or cognition, or the ability to choose specific characteristics for our offspring. The possibilities stir the imagination and excitement of many, while for others the rhetoric and current research into human enhancement signals alarms of a new eugenics. And yet, for most non-scientists, this sounds like the realm of science fiction, a world awash in mystery and misunderstanding. Featuring disability studies scholar Dominika Bednarska; disability justice educator Patty Berne; exoskeleton test pilot Fernanda Castelo; bionics engineer Hugh Herr; NPR radio host John Hockenberry; biochemist and ability studies scholar Gregor Wolbring; robot scientist Rodney Brooks; futurist Jamais Cascio; bioethicist and policy advocate Marcy Darnovsky; brain-computer interface study participant Tim Hemmes; philosophy professor Cressida Heyes; transhumanist James Hughes; reproductive rights advocate Sujatha Jesudason; disability lawyer Silvia Yee. With cameo performances by some of the world's leading integrated dance companies, featuring disabled and non-disabled dancers and artists, including the Anjali Dance Company, Antoine Hunter (of Sins Invalid and Urban Jazz Dance Company), AXIS, Candoco, Dancing Wheels, GIMP, Kounterclockwise, Lisa Bufano, Marc Brew, Remix Dance Company, and Sue Austin/Freewheeling. Through a dynamic mix of verité, dance, archival and interview footage, Fixed challenges notions of normal, the body and what it means fundamentally to be human in the 21st century. Awards: Harris Jury Prize for Best Film, Cincinnati ReelAbilities 2015 Best Feature Documentary, Picture This FIlm Festival 2014 Keynote at the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Association Annual Conference 2014 Keynote at 2nd Annual Conference on Governance of Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy, and Ethics 2014 Exploratorium 2014 Keynote at Future Past: Disability, Eugenics & Brave New Worlds, SFSU 2013 Academia Film Olomouc 2014 Institute for the Future Ten Year Retreat 2014 NY Reel Abilities Film Festival 2014 Ethnografilm Festival, Paris 2014 Reel Work May Day Labor Film Festival 2014 Keynote at Society for the Study of Nanoscience & Emerging Technologies, Northeastern 2013 United Nations Association Film Festival 2013 Cyborg Ethics Film Festival, Edinburgh 2013.

This historical satire, based on Heinrich Mann's world-famous novel, Der Untertan, is ranked by film critics among the 100 Most Significant German Films of all time. In Mann's biting critique of conservative Wilhelmine Germany, written during WWI, Diederich Hessling learns an important lesson for an ambitious man: one must first serve power to gain power for oneself. From then on, his modus operandi is to bow to superiors and kick underlings.

From cinema-vérité pioneers Albert Maysles and Joan Churchill to maverick moviemakers like Errol Morris, Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield, the world's best documentarians reflect upon the unique power of their genre in this comprehensive and eye-opening two-disc box set. Featuring interviews with 38 directors and 163 film clips from classics such as Grey Gardens and The Thin Blue Line, as well as recent work like Darwin's Nightmare and Touching the Void, Capturing Reality explores the complex creative process that goes into making non-fiction films. Deftly charting the documentarian's journey, it poses the question: can film capture reality?. System requirements: Adobe Flash Player.

Filmed as the GDR crumbled, this somber, finely drawn portrait of life in East Berlin depicts a young architect whose life and goals are strangled by communist dogma represented by the older generation. One of the first fiction films to deal with both the GDR and unification period. Daniel feels like a stranger in his own land. His architectural plans for a new development have been rejected for not complying with standardized designs. His colleagues increasingly leave Daniel to himself. Even Daniel's wife, Wanda, is despondent; like so many others, she wants to move to the West and take their daughter. Daniel is left to wonder what happened to his country and its people. A bitter cinema drama.

Graham Gussin creates art in an almost bewildering variety of media: film, sound, installation, events, photography, text, painting and more. The key early work Savannah (1990) features a wooden plaque and a wall light, while the production of the ambitious film projection Remote Viewer (2002) involved a trip to Iceland and the services of someone with telepathic ability. Underpinning all of his subtle, witty, often disarmingly beautiful work is a number of consistent concerns and influences: landscape and the notion of the sublime, science fiction cinema and Romanticism, place and movement. Made alongside the most comprehensive exhibition of Graham Gussin's work to date, at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery in 2002, this video profile showcases many of the artist's works, including films and projections such as Beyond the Infinite (1994) and Spill (2000) which plays so productively with time, space and perception.

On the eve of her 70th birthday, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood set out on an international tour criss-crossing the British Isles and North America to celebrate the publication of her new dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood. Rather than mount a traditional tour to promote a book's publication, Atwood conceived and executed something far more ambitious and revelatory-a theatrical version of her novel. Along the way she reinvented what a book tour could (and maybe should) be. But Atwood wasn't selling books as much as advocating an idea: how humanity must respond to the consequences of an environmentally compromised planet before her work of speculative fiction transforms into prophesy. Atwood's odyssey is now captured in Ron Mann's new film, In The Wake of the Flood. Rendered as a fly-on-the-wall cinéma vérité, In The Wake of the Flood mixes new footage, archival materials and evocative animation in featuring Atwood on the road and at home as an aging but buoyant literary rock star spreading a message of warning and hope as she staged and participated in the novel production. In each community she visited, Atwood joined volunteer performers in a loose-knit, grass roots production drawn from the text of her novel. With its mystical, Blakean overtones, Atwood's theatrical dusplay acts as a neo-pagan ritual that seeks to shake the human race into an awareness of the fragile natural world and our vital connection to it. To bring her novel into a live setting, Atwood collaborated with Los Angeles composer Orville Stoeber to write a new style of devotional music influenced by the related genres of country ballads, gospel, jazz and folk. Each performance included a cast of local readers and singers taking the roles of different characters in key scenes from the novel. The events were primarily staged in cathedrals, adding a grand visual element to the proceedings and a layer of ceremonial gravitas. From Edinburgh and London to New York City, Toronto and Vancouver, Atwood emerges as an earthy sentinel whose rare sensibility is always in the foreground: a life and art coalesced into a unity of medium and message.

A real life story of murder, secrets and sexuality, set in the art world of the 50's and 60's, Theme: Murder takes the viewer on an immersive journey into the struggles and frustrations of living with an unsolved homicide. The filmmaker was nine years old in 1968 when her father, the Boston art dealer Hyman Swetzoff, was beaten and left to die in his home. Martha's search to make sense of her father's unsolved murder frames an wide-ranging inquiry into attitudes toward victims and survivors of homicide, the price of homophobia, and the problematic relationship between families and law enforcement. Includes interviews with crime fiction author James Ellroy and the Boston Cold Case Squad. "A stirring piece of cinematic humanism...The mix of the personal and universal makes Theme: Murder a prime example of the first-person moviemaking that's long been a Boston tradition is such films as Ross McElwee's Sherman's March, Robb Moss' The Tourist, and Jeanne Jordan and Steve Ascher's Troublesome Creek. " - Paul Sherman, Boston Herald

Ed Emshwiller started out as an abstract expressionist painter and an award-winning science fiction illustrator before becoming a major figure in avant-garde cinema and the experimental film movement of the 1960s and '70s. Eventually a highly respected video artist and dean at the School of Film/Videoo at the California Institute of the Arts, Emshwiller was always looking for ways to push the boundaries of film and video. He was a pioneer of computer-generated video and combining technology with art. Many of his films, including Relativity, Totem, Film with Three Dancers, and Thanatopsis received screenings and awards at New York, Cannes and other major film festivals worldwide. About the Screening Room series. In the early 1970s a group of idealistic artists, lawyers, doctors and teachers saw an opportunity to change commercial television in Boston and the surrounding area. It would require years of litigation up to and including the Supreme Court, but the case was won and the Channel 5 licence was given to WCVB-TV. Screening Room was one of several programs offered in an effort to provide alternative television viewing. The idea behind Screening Room was to give independent filmmakers an opportunity to discuss their work and show it to a large urban audience. Nearly 100 ninety-minute programs were produced and aired between 1973 and 1980. Screening Room was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, who at the time, was Director of Harvard's Visual Arts Center and Chairman of its Visual and Environmental Studies Department. His own films include Dead Birds (1964), and Forest of Bliss (1986).