As India’s indigenous people join Hindu religious organisations, their gods are literally being broken. While conversion to Hinduism offers the allure of a better life, those who continue to follow their old ways have become ostracized by their communities. Their broken gods have lost the power to protect them from illness and scarcity.
Himalayan children, barely of school age, are sent to Buddhist monasteries to apprentice as young lamas. This film takes us along on the journey of three such children through daily rituals, games, a scripture contest, and festival preparations. On a winter holiday break, they return home and reunite with their families. Through the rare glimpse of this homecoming we see…
Poetry is immensely popular in Burma/Myanmar, a country emerging from years of dictatorship and isolation. In the past, poetry was a way to endure and resist tyranny. Today, there are more online poets than bloggers. The stories and poems in Burma Storybook circle around Maung Aung Pwint, the country’s most famous dissident poet alive today, as he waits for his…
This is the story of the last two Jews in Afghanistan. All the other Jews have left a long time ago. Isaac and Zabulon live alone in the abandoned synagogue…
For the past ten years, Zabulon and Isaac, the two remaining Jews in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, have been living in the courtyard of Kabul’s old synagogue. The elderly…
“There is nothing so strange in a strange land as the stranger who comes to visit it.”
When tourists journey to the furthermost reaches of the Sepik River, is it the indigenous tribes people or the white visitors who are the cultural oddity? This film explores the differences (and the surprising similarities) that emerge when “civilized” and “primitive” people meet.…
The Bunun is a High Mountainous tribe, inhabiting in the area of the Central Mountain Range. Most Bunun aborigines are skillful mountain climbers, and are sometimes called the “sherpas” of Taiwan. They have been often hired as guides even up until today. Although back in the early days their work was considered as porterage, assisting mountaineers in carrying their heavy…
Taiwan Premiere
The documentary Carving the Divine offers a rare and intimate look into the life and artistic process of modern-day Busshi – practitioners of a 1400 year lineage of woodcarving that’s at the heart of Japanese, Mahayana Buddhism.
The story opens as Master Koun Seki, the former apprentice of renowned Busshi, Kourin Saito, interviews a candidate applying to be…
A non-traditional road movie exploring a Moroccan perspective on the entwined relationship between Hollywood and The Arab World.
Casablanca Mon Amour is a modern road movie that encapsulates the more complex and fractured nature of living in a world where TV and wars compete for headlines and occupy imaginations. Using movies as a road map between yesterday’s Hollywood and today’s…
Four strings, a wooden box that has lived for 300 years. The cello is the most human-like of all musical instruments in shape, size and sound. A daughter searches for her father’s stolen instrument for a decade. An artisan looks for the best way to craft the perfect piece of wood. A soloist travels the world playing. A copyist recreates…
This road movie documentary follows mobile homes across the highway, connecting the grandiose vastness of the American West to the transitory nature of the homes and the tenuous life stories of their inhabitants. In fragmented stopovers, the film revolves around questions of home, belonging, and an American Dream that has become brittle.
The film, based on the concept and core idea of “tracing and finding,” and using the protagonist, Ronald ACFALLE’s dream of constructing a traditional canoe and sailing it to Taiwan as the main narrative, to unveil a period of time when the colonized Austronesian Che’lu (“Brothers” in CHamorro dialect) built and sailed canoes to the oceans, as a way to…
Chichester’s Choice follows filmmaker, Simonee as she investigates the life of her homeless father, Edgar Chichester who abandoned her at six years old. Twenty-three years later, Simonee journeys to the streets of Guyana and Brazil to find and reunite with her father in the hopes of forgiving and understanding him while coming to terms with who she is. It is…
Presents a series of scenes in which children of the same age in Bali and New Guinea respond to the mother’s attending another baby, the ear piercing of a younger sibling, and the experimental presentation of a doll. The Balinese mother handles sibling rivalry by theatrical teasing of her own child through conspicuous attention to other babies. The Iatmul mother…
A personal voyage, attempting to decipher the mystery behind migrant Thai workers’ warm and loving bonds with their children, based almost solely on telephone calls and letters.
The filmmaker, living in a Kibbutz and father to seven children, tries to understand the Thai workers’ inner conflicts, as they are caught between pressing economic pressures and emotional ties to their families…
The tribe living under the San-ying Bridge is charged with violation of the Water Act every year and will witness the powerful, which is rarely seen, execution of the government’s law enforcement that vacates even the shattered construction material after the demolition. On the other hand, the sand processing plant on the right side of the tribe grows bigger and…
In Haiti, many poor families are forced to give away their children. The children then go to live and work for other families as unpaid servants. This film follows the children throughout their day as they do all the housework and also interviews them where they speak freely for the first time on camera. The film also interviews the “aunts”…
Journey with Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol to the heart of the Amazon rainforest in search of the indigenous children she photographed fifteen years ago. Children of the Amazon invites you to see through the eyes of these inspiring, remarkably resilient people whose lives are transformed by a road carved through their forest home by an outside world. From Chief Amir…
In November 1993, Tian Feng, a first class composer from the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, arrived in Yunnan, and opened the Yunnan Minority Nationalities Institute of Traditional Culture.
Tian Feng proposed the prinicple of “seek authenticity and prohibit adaptations”. He wishes to start from this concept to save the music and dance culture with “classical
characteristics” (his words) from the…
“City of Memories” depicts the lives of elderly people living in a Taipei nursery home: their agony, longing and loneliness. Images of winterly Taipei, with its drizzling rain and gloomy sky, reflect these aged women’s fading mind. In the midst of all the suffering, the women’s ballad singing and story telling bring back the emotional memories of their love lives.…
Journey to the heart of the Amazon rainforest in the footsteps of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Sixty years after the renowned French anthropologist conducted his famous fieldwork among the Nambikwara, we return to find his memory alive and well among the tribesmen. Lévi-Strauss’ experiences in the Amazon forever altered his understanding of society. He describes this life-changing journey in his seminal work,…