Weekend Watching 2016 | Alexander Street

Weekend Watching 2016

The Weekend Watching Bonanza is here! 

Designed to provide entertainment and support to you and your users during the December/January period, the Bonanza will provide free access to 33 titles for a whole month – so you can watch one of our favourite or seasonal titles every day for a whole month!

Put your Netflix subscription on hold and save your cash for more important and festive spending this month.

Access is available from the 8th December 2016 until the 9th of January 2017!

Simply click the titles below to watch the films.

If clicking the titles doesn’t give you direct access you can use the following username: weekend password: watching when prompted at the end of the preview. Or go directly to www.search.alexanderstreet.com/trial and use the username/password login.

Categories:

All our collections are available for free trials. We hope you enjoy them and would love to hear your thoughts!

 

Our Favourite Award Winning Documentaries

Off the rails

The remarkable true story of Darius McCollum, a man with Asperger’s syndrome, whose overwhelming love of transit has landed him in jail 32 times for impersonating New York City bus drivers and subway conductors and driving their routes.

District Zero

Moving story of Syrian refugees told through their phones and memory cards in new documentary previewed by Oxfam and the EU. From his mobile shop, a Syrian refugee, prints his customers' personal photos, making us get into their stories and life.

Unfolding Florence - The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst

In this spirited and highly original documentary, acclaimed director Gillian Armstrong reveals the many lives of one larger-than-life woman - flamboyant design pioneer, Florence Broadhurst.

Then the Wind Changed

One small Australian community’s difficult but inspiring recovery from devastating bush fires. For those who survived the Black Saturday fires, the years that followed would test them in ways they couldn’t have imagined.

Sosúa: Make a Better World

Award winning filmmakers Peter Miller and Renee Silverman interweave an intimate, behind-the-scenes portrait of a multicultural neighborhood with this little-known Holocaust story. Legendary theatre director, Liz Swados, together with Jewish and Dominican teenagers tell a moving story in musical.

The Brainwashing of My Dad

In Jen Senko’s award-winning new documentary, she seeks to discover why her WWII veteran father’s personality radically transformed from that of a non-political Kennedy Democrat to an angry right-wing fanatic after his discovery of Talk Radio and Fox News.

DSKNECTD: Is Technology Changing Us?

Since childhood, we’ve been promised that the 21st century would bring us dramatic new technologies, like flying cars and robots in every home. Instead, it brought us the smartphone, social media, and virtual societies. DSKNCTD explores how digital communication technologies are profoundly changing us and the world around us.

For the Life of Me: Between Science and the Law

Patricia was only diagnosed with cancer once it had already spread to her brain. She saw that the National Cancer Institute described marijuana as having cancer-fighting potential. With the grimmest of prognoses, she decided to try it. Shot over the course of a year, this film is a document of her own human drug trial.

Indie Game: The Movie

2012 documentary film by Canadian filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot. The film documents the struggles of independent game developers Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes during the development of Super Meat Boy, Phil Fish during the development of Fez, and also Jonathan Blow, who reflects on the success of Braid.

On Fathers and Sons and Love

'On Fathers and Sons and Love' is a heartwarming exploration of how the concept of masculinity is challenged and changed by fatherhood. It examines the lives of four generations of men and discusses the Harvard Grant Study of human development, considering how love and warmth are critical to the successful lifelong development of men.

Trashed With Jeremy Irons

Jeremy Irons sets out to discover the extent and effects of the global waste problem, as he travels around the world to beautiful destinations tainted by pollution. This is a meticulous, brave investigative journey that takes Irons (and us) from scepticism to sorrow and from horror to hope.

Shield and Spear

In the changing political climate of South Africa, a revolution is taking place as artists, musicians, and designers tackle issues of politics, race, and history. This film follows some of the most recognized artists in South Africa today, exploring what it means to live and work in the new democracy.

Rita Dove: An American Poet

This film, directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, explores the life of poet Rita Dove through interviews with the poet. In-depth interviews with Poet Laureate Rita Dove, combined with still images and clips from the Dove family’s home-movie collection, deliver a biographical sketch of one of America’s most celebrated poets.

Strapped 'n' Strong

In this jaw-dropping film we meet the Dutch branch of the Crips gang. Pulsating with a hip-hop soundtrack, this is a breathtaking mile-a-minute insight into the workings of the criminal mind. Each blistering second flirts between life, death, love and hate.

Testing Hope

In the impoverished black townships outside Cape Town, South Africa, everyone knows that the only way to improve one's life is to go to university and get a good job. And the only way to do that is to pass the challenging series of examinations known as Matric. This engaging film follows four students in Nyanga township in their last year of high school. Theirs is the first graduating class who entered school in 1994, the year apartheid ended.

The Agreement

Serbia and Kosovo 2011. The stakes are high. Watch history in the making in this tense political documentary. It’s a real life House of Cards when EU chief negotiator Robert Cooper has to settle an agreement on stable co-existence between Kosovo and Serbia.

Carbon Crooks

At the very end of 2012, the second part of Kyoto Protocol expired. All the countries that ratified the protocol have guaranteed that they will cut down on their carbon emissions and curb the greenhouse gasses. The question is: How did they do that?

Wawata Topu: Mermaids of Timor-Leste

This is a film about four generations of fisherwomen striving to make a living in the coastal village of Adara. Their underwater dancing takes place in a context of rapid social change, where the generalization of the formal education, the progressive consolidation of western moral values and the potential openness of more attractive livelihoods not linked to the sea, seem to be forging a social negotiation of the household economic strategies initiated by the oldest generation during the 50's.

 

Concerto: A Beethoven Journey

Award-winning filmmaker Phil Grabsky is renowned for bringing some of the world's most important and dazzling art exhibitions onto the big screens of cinemas across the globe. Also famous for his In Search of ... classical music documentaries, he has now returned his lens - and microphones - onto the world of classical music with the release of Concerto - A Beethoven Journey.

Tomorrow We Disappear

Tomorrow We Disappear chronicles the last days of Kathputli, the mysterious hand-built artist colony first discovered in Salman Rushdie's iconic Midnight's Children. Hidden in the alleyways of New Delhi, a community of magicians, acrobats, and puppeteers approach their looming eviction to make way for a modern skyscraper. Bound together by tradition and impending gentrification, this captivating film allows us to experience a culture’s magic and wonder before it’s gone.

Best Kept Secret

Janet Mino has taught her class of young men with autism for four years. When they all graduate, they will leave the security of the public school system forever. Best Kept Secret follows Ms. Mino and her students over the year and a half before graduation.

Ellen Degeneres: All Of Me

In this inspirational docu-drama we examine the highs and lows of the woman who puts the "C" in comedy

 

Seasonal Viewing

Cunnamulla

Cunnamulla, 800 kilometres west of Brisbane, is the end of the railway line. In the months leading up to a scorching Christmas in the bush, there's a lot more going on than the annual lizard race. Directed by Dennis O'Rourke, Cunnamulla is an astonishingly honest portrait of life in an isolated community in outback Queensland Creativity struggles against indifference, eccentricity against conformity.

Christmas at Moose Factory

This short animation by acclaimed First Nations filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin creates a charming study of life at Christmas time in Moose Factory, an old settlement mainly composed of Indian families on the shore of James Bay. Composed entirely of children's crayon drawings and narrated by a little girl, the film illustrates incidents big and small with childish candor, conveying to the viewer a strong sense of being there.

Global Santa Claus

Whether it’s the North Pole or the Southern hemisphere, the Far East or some exotic place, no one escapes the jolly round men in red who pop up in our lives every year at the same period. Who really are all these Santas? From Colorado to Dubai, from Abidjan to Norway, we meet the passionate Santas. Not to be taken all too seriously!

A Calcutta Christmas

Exasperating, exhilarating, Calcutta, the locals call it the city of joy. It’s 50 years since it won independence from Britain but wander through this city and you’ll see evidence of its colonial past. Hidden away in the center of the city is a home for elderly Anglo-Indians. Every year they celebrate Christmas as a holiday that holds a special promise and connection to family that have moved away to other countries.

Fiesta in the Yucatán: Maya Traditions

Each year on January 6, pilgrims travel to the ancient Maya city of Tizimín in the Yucatán peninsula to celebrate Epiphany. The festival of the Day of the Kings combines pre-Columbian and modern themes, all of them gilded with the touch of the Mayas.

Matzo & Mistletoe

Filmmaker Kate Feiffer was six years old when her father told her she was Jewish. Since she celebrated Christmas and never attended synagogue, this information came as a surprise. In Matzo & Mistletoe, Feiffer interviews a fascinating cast of characters, and uses archival footage, illustration, and clips from television shows and movies to ponder the paradox of American secular Judaism. Matzo & Mistletoe features interviews with Ms. Feiffer

Play, Jankunú Play - The Garifuna Wanaragua Ritual of Belize

The Garifuna are a Central American people of West African and Native American descent. One of their most popular rituals is wanaragua, a three-fold system of masked Christmas processionals commonly called Jankunú. This ritual is a unique blend of African, European, and Native American (Arawak and Carib) art traditions in which social and cultural identities are expressed through music, dance, and costume.

 

Global Cuisines - Get Creative with Food

French Food Safari, Episode 5

In this episode, we travel to Lyon and get swept up in the fun of eating in the local bouchons – relaxed eating houses which have existed for hundreds of years, starting as canteens for the local silk factory workers.

Faces of Italy, Episode 18

All the delights of Italian cuisine are on the weekly menu in this tasty show, teaching how to cook delicious, easy and affordable classic Italian recipes, hosted by Chef Kevin and co-hostess Morgan and Janine. In this episode, we make an Italian peasant soup and Italian quiche.

Destination Flavour, Episode 5

Adam tries the award-winning Holy Goat cheese and discovers Alla Wolf-Tasker’s Russian food heritage in Central Victoria; Renee spends a revealing day with Peter Kuruvita on Sydney Harbour; while Lily is treated to a stunning kaiseki menu as a personal guest of the Japanese ambassador in Canberra.

Food Safari Series 4, Episode 9

Journey into the world of Danish food – from the land of forests and fairytales, snow and schnapps, here’s a cuisine crafted for the cold, some dishes dating back to the days of the Vikings, others like the open sandwich smørrebrød are modern and elegant, and the pastries are divine.