Means TV
At a time when five companies control the vast majority of US media and entertainment, and distrust of the media is at an all-time high, consumers are hungry for truly independent media and contextualizing content. A leading source of revolutionary entertainment and news, Means TV is a worker-cooperative entirely funded by its viewers and owned and operated by its workers. OVID is proud to share a selection of their films and series.
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Far Off Sounds Ep 8 - Fish & Synths
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • With Richard Kik • 2018 • 7 minutes
Richard Kik chooses, breeds, maintains, and studies the fish at Detroit's historic Belle Isle Aquarium, holding this gorgeous and fragile institution essentially on his shoulders. Richard is als...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 9 - IASOS
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 9 minutes
Iasos began receiving music in his head from another dimension when he was a college student in 1965. He called it 'Paradise Music', and it was unlike anything he had ever heard. These incoming signals, and his ef...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 10 - Dancers Without A Stage
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 5 minutes
Under a bridge near a train station in Jakarta, Indonesia, an outdoor nightclub is the last of its kind, keeping a traditional Sundanese artform called Jaipong alive. Jaipong, originally a village ritual associat...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 11 - Mister Moonbeam
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 11 minutes
On any given night, you may find yourself serenaded by a living mannequin on Sunset Blvd. A Gulf War veteran, motorcycle gang member, stockbroker, chimney sweep, inventor, musician, and brilliant performer, we ha...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 12 - Hollerin'
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 8 minutes
First held in 1969 in Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina, the annual National Hollerin’ Contest is a daylong celebration of Southern cultural heritage and preservation of an archaic means of long distance communicat...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 13 - The Space Lady
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • With Susan Dietrich Schneider • 2018 • 8 minutes
The Space Lady, aka Susan Dietrich Schneider, became a staple of the Bay Area outsider music scene through years of busking the streets out of necessity. Her ethereal, echo-laden a...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 14 - Microtonal Man
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 14 minutes
John Schneider won a 2015 Grammy for his album performing music composed by the midcentury genius Harry Partch, an American pioneer of microtonal music. Why has Schneider, a music theory professor and radio host,...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 15 - Huun Huur Tu- The Tuvan Masters
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 10 minutes
"Tuvan throat-singing", or khoomei, is an ancient pastime in the steppes of Tuva, a country nestled between Mongolia and Russia. For thousands of years, herders and farmers there have taught their children to sin...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 16 - The Good Doctors of Nima
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 16 minutes
We were invited to a fetish ceremony in the innercity of Accra, the capital of Ghana. What we found was animal sacrifice, ancestor communion, and some of the most tranced-out hypnotic drumming in the world.
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Far Off Sounds Ep 17 - Fantasies In Crystal
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 12 minutes
Three generations of artists make up Fantasies in Crystal, although one of them is dead. Erin Schneider and her father, the Grammy-winning musician John Schneider, perform hypnotic live music to a slideshow of cr...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 18 - Onyx Ashanti Programs Himself
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 13 minutes
Onyx Ashanti is a Detroit-based Afrofuturist living in a basement with only an extension cord from a nearby unit. When he's not traveling the world having sonic conversations about evolution and technology, he's ...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 19 - The Disappearing Bamboo Wind
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 14 minutes
There's this instrument called the "a'reng", played by the Pako people in Vietnam and Laos. It's one of the craziest most beautiful most perplexing musical instruments on Earth. We set off for Vietnam to try and ...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 20 - Cambodia, California
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 17 minutes
In Long Beach, CA, a late-blooming newlywed couple work to preserve the remnants of Cambodian music and literature left in the wake of the Khmer Rouge genocide, which they both escaped from in the early 1980's. W...
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Far Off Sounds Ep 21 - Marginal Consort, The Sound Of No Music
Directed by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Nick George • Documentary • 2018 • 14 minutes
The members of Marginal Consort met in art school in 1970's Japan. They create elaborate instrumental systems from household items and hardware-store treasures.
Once a year, Marginal Consort meets up to perfo... -
Good White People
Directed by Jarrod Cann & Erick Stoll • Documentary • 2016 • 16 minutes
In the Spring of 2001, the African-American community of Over-the-Rhine in downtown Cincinnati arose in protest after unarmed 19-year-old, Timothy Thomas, was killed by a white officer named Steven Roach. In the years follow...
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Meantime
Directed by Michael T Workman • Documentary • 2022 • 19 minutes
After Tim’s work-related stroke leads to troubling health complications, his son Michael returns home to Montana. As they spend the most time together since Michael’s childhood, they reckon with the past that haunts Tim.
Meanti... -
Preserving Worlds S1: Introduction
Directed by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil • Documentary • 2021 • 2 minutes
The members of Marginal Consort met in art school in 1970's Japan. They create elaborate instrumental systems from household items and hardware-store treasures.
Once a year, Marginal Consort meets up to perform. The... -
Preserving Worlds S1 Ep1: WorldsChat
Directed by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil • Documentary • 2021 • 14 minutes
WorldsChat is a social virtual world that was launched in 1994, and is still online today. Users can equip avatars and hang out in 3D spaces, conversing with each other over text-based chat. WorldsChat allowed users to...
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Preserving Worlds S1 Ep2: ZZT
Directed by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil • Documentary • 2021 • 28 minutes
In 1991, 21-year-old game developer Tim Sweeney launched a simplistic, already-outdated MS-DOS game that would become, entirely by accident, the most popular hobbyist game development tool of the 90’s.
ZZT's free, r... -
Preserving Worlds S1 Ep3: Myst Online
Directed by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil • Documentary • 2021 • 28 minutes
In the mid-2000’s, Cyan Worlds, creators of the massively popular adventure game Myst, released an ambitious online sequel that never caught on the way they'd hoped. Myst Online: Uru Live sought to translate the single...
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Preserving Worlds S1 Ep4: Doom
Directed by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil • Documentary • 2021 • 25 minutes
The first person shooter Doom launched in 1993 and quickly secured its place in popular culture. The game’s creators were unusually mod-friendly, and they set the game up so it was easy and legal for fans to create the...
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Preserving Worlds S1 Ep5: NeoHabitat
Directed by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil • Documentary • 2021 • 28 minutes
Habitat, the first ever graphical massively multiplayer online game, emerged on the Commodore 64 home micro computer in 1986. Because the game was the first of its kind, its developers tried a number of odd experiments...
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Preserving Worlds S1 Ep6: Second Life
Directed by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil • Documentary • 2021 • 30 minutes
Arguably the most well known social virtual world, Second Life started in 2003 and it’s still online today. The software is extremely flexible, and users are able to customize almost every aspect of the experience. The...
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Preserving Worlds S2 Ep1: RPG Maker - The Dream of the Engine
Directed by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil • Documentary • 2023 • 26 minutes
The illegally cracked and fan-translated version of RPG Maker was one of the most popular hobbyist game engines of the early 2000's. The creator of the cult classic Space Funeral shows us how RPG Maker's collage-like n...