Featuring a cast of prominent musicians and artists, and some virtuoso performances, the film captures five days in the life of one shop in the heart of Greenwich Village that remains resilient to an all-too-quickly vanishing way of life.

Imagine the Sound brings together interviews and performances with the prime innovators of the once controversial free jazz movement of the 60s. The first feature documentary by Ron Mann (Grass, Comicbook Confidential) is an eloquent tribute to a group of highly celebrated artists that helped forge the avant-garde jazz of the 1960s. Critic and film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum has said Imagine the Sound "may be the best documentary on free jazz that we have." The film features articulate interviews and dramatic performances by pianists Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, tenor saxophone Archie Shepp, and trumpet player Bill Dixon.

Maverick. Auteur. Rebel. Innovator. Storyteller. Rambler. Gambler. Mad man. Family man. Director. Artist. Robert Altmanʼs life and career contained multitudes. This father of American independent cinema left an indelible mark, not merely on the evolution of his art form, but also on the western zeitgeist. ALTMAN, Canadian director Ron Mannʼs new documentary, explores and celebrates the epic fifty-year redemptive journey of one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of the medium. The very term "Altmanesque" has come to denote a cinematic style characterized by dark humor, chaotic choreography, overlapping and sometimes murky dialogue, multi-layered storylines, iconoclastic characters, omniscient cinematography, and a seat-of-the-pants ensemble approach to imagining and crafting a film. With the late director himself acting as guide, ALTMAN takes the audience on an expansive and revelatory road trip through the highs and lows of this uncompromising visionaryʼs life and career. With its use of rare interviews, representative film clips, archival images, and musings from his family and most recognizable collaborators, Mannʼs ALTMAN is a dynamic and heartfelt mediation on an artist whose expression, passion and appetite knew few bounds.

Combining rare and often hilarious archival footage with interviews, Twist chronicles the evolution of rock and roll dance. From the time when moving hips marked you as a social degenerate, to a time when shaking your "thing" became the dance-form that rocked the world.

Years in the making...Ron Mann's much-anticipated documentary presents a humorous and surprisingly balanced history of recreational MARIJUANA use in the late 20th century. Those who remain pure will see the degradation you've been missing. Those who have succumbed to temptation will learn how a nice person like yourself became a dangerous criminal. Marijuana is the most controversial drug of the twentieth century. Smoked by generations of musicians, students and workers to little discernible ill effect, it continues to be reviled by the vast majority of governments around the world. With his new film, Grass, veteran filmer Ron Mann brings his impeccable historical facility and story telling skills to recount how a relatively harmless drug has been demonized for decades. With a rueful yet incisive script, deft editing and an impressive soundtrack featuring original songs by Mark Mothersbaugh and a veritable pot-pourri of tunes ranging from the Swing Era's "Reefer Man" through Dylan's "Rainy Day Women" to the hippie lament "One Toke Over The Line," Ron Mann's Grass boasts extraordinary production values. Funny yet political, Grass charts the terrible loss in imprisoned lives and billions of dollars wasted fighting a drug that refuses to go away.

Called the "Woodstock of Poetry" by American Film, and "Dazzling" by the Los Angeles Times, Poetry in Motion is an unprecedented anthology of twenty-four leading North American poets who sing, chant, anything but "read" their work. The result is a celebration of poetry's ancient oral tradition. And an energetic demonstration that verse is alive and thriving in the media-blitzed age.

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.

GO FURTHER explores the idea that the single individual is the key to large-scale transformational change. The film follows actor Woody Harrelson as he takes a small group of friends on a bio-fuelled bus-ride down the Pacific Coast Highway. Their goal? To show the people they encounter that there are viable alternatives to our habitual, environmentally-destructive behaviours. The travellers include a yoga-teacher, a raw food chef, a hemp-activist, a junk-food addict, and a college student who suspends her life to impulsively hop aboard. We see the hostility these pilgrims encounter, and watch as their ideas are challenged from within and without. We meet an entrepreneur who runs a paper company that does not harm trees; an organic farmer who believes Nature is his partner; a man who teaches environmental activists to use humour as a strategic weapon. And throughout, we see Harrelson test his belief that the transformation of our planet begins with the small personal transformations that are within the grasp of each and every one of us, after which... we'll go further.

I see a new world. Do you see it? If you listened to the city back in 1984, here's what it told you: there are dark days coming, and the only way to survive them is by being rich. Made during the re-election year of Ronald Reagan, the election year of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and the very beginnings of the shattering saving and loan scandal that would come to look like candy store shoplifting a generation on, Ron Mann's rare early non-documentary movie is like a downtown artist's poster collage of DIY urgency: from the opening sequence, in which the poet/punk Jim Carroll rises like Lazarus from his hospital bed and takes to the streets with a vertical IV drip and a message about better days, to the ensuing satirical depiction of a corporation coldly deciding to cut the unprofitable heart out of the city it calls home, the movie plays as fearless, street-art inspired pastiche: part experimental polemic, part political cartoon, part video art installation, part performance prank. Just as Jim Carroll passes through its ominous depiction of a ruined Toronto, so does bp nichol, P.J. Soles, the late Jack Layton, Barry Callaghan, the Spoons' Sandy Horne and fellow activist-documentarist Peter Wintonick. All kinds of people urging us to listen. And all these years later and it's still pissed off. Just as it should be.

Directed by renowned Canadian filmmaker, Ron Mann, it features a reunion concert with the original 5 members i.e. Jim Cuddy, Greg Keelor, Bazil Donovan, Bob Wiseman and Cleave Anderson! Also includes twelve historic performances; an appreciation written by Paul Quarrington; two brand new songs; and even burning Snowmen!

From the award-winning director of COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL and GRASS comes TALES OF THE RAT FINK, Ron Mann's wildly inventive bio about Renaissance man Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, who engineered a shift in mid-twentieth century culture with his customised cars, "monster" T-shirts and America's alternative rodent - "Rat Fink".

Mushrooms - we put them on our pizza and steaks and in our soups and salads, we marvel at their variety and are sometimes repelled by their grotesque beauty when encountering them in the bush. And yeah, some have even sampled their more exotic possibilities and asked the question: "Do mushrooms come from a far away planet?" Still, others have asked: "Can mushrooms save the planet?" The world of fungi and their integral relationship with the health of the planet have only recently been appreciated. The oldest and largest living organisms recorded on Earth are both fungi. And their use by a new, maverick breed of scientists and thinkers has proven vital in the cleansing of sites despoiled by toxins and as a "clean" pesticide among many other environmentally-friendly applications. Inspired by a chance conversation with fellow filmmaker and mushroom buff Jim Jarmusch, Mann set off to the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival in Colorado. It was there he encountered the unique sub-sub-subculture surrounding fungi that includes an unlikely assortment of nerds, nuts, hipsters, tripsters, artists, chefs, musicians, foodies, foragers, and seekers all paying homage to the mighty mushroom. Know Your Mushrooms follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi. Combining material filmed at the Telluride Mushroom Fest with animation and archival footage along with a neo-psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS opens the doors to perception, takes the audience on a longer, stranger trip and delivers them to a brave new world where the fungi might well guide humanity to a saner, safer place... with extra cheese...Consumer Warning: Don't Go Into The Forest Without This Movie!