A sever earthquake shattered the modest living in this small village in the middle of Taiwan. In order to rebuild their ruined elementary school and transform it into an ecological forest school to fit the natural environment, villagers of Neihu, the small, undeveloped village, stand up to fight their war with the great and advanced National Taiwan University.
Being the…
The Golden Triangle on the borders of Thailand, Laos and Burma is well known for its cultivation of opium, but when Swiss filmmaker PeA Holmquist returns to the area 30 years after first visiting he finds that many of the fields are now planted with Chrysanthemums. Holmquist visits the Hmong villages he knew more than three decades ago to find…
Travelogue and ethnography meet in this comedic ghost story about a Canadian Jew wandering through an African culture where “the dead are not dead.” Embarking on a road trip across Cameroon’s most joyous funeral celebrations, the foreigner befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors.
In 1997, Pu-u Akuyana resigned from an advertising firm in metropolitan Taipei, to seek a new life as she returned to her hometown Laiji Community. Putting academic training she received in the fine arts to use, Pu-u embarks on a creative journey. Pu-u pays attention to the future of Laiji Community. She consults the elders on how to fabricate useful…
A tribute to the syncretism of cinema and the power of imagination, Ghanaian Video Tales introduces the exciting and unique genre of African horror movies – and the filmmakers behind it. Since the early 1990s video technology has deeply changed the African media world. Easy handling and affordable cost of production have enabled filmmakers to tell their own stories for…
An average of 400 children are born in Nicaragua every day, 100 of them to adolescent mothers.
This documentary narrates the lives of three such adolescents. None of the three had planned to be a mother at such an early age. We sought them out and followed their lives for several months, learning about their families, their stories of love,…
Designed as a road movie, ‘Gnawa Music – Body and Soul’ is a musical and human odyssey in the heart of Gnawa music in Morroco. From Tanger to Essaouira passing by Tamesloht, Marrakech, Sale, the film takes us, body and soul, beyond the music to experience the splendor of a universal message which went through time to celebrate life.…
When the expensive copper leads are stolen from the Lin’s family in Kaohsiung, everyone starts to panic and wants to catch the thief. Even the grand daughter, who hardly comes home, becomes a member of the squad. To her surprise, though, the family is asking deities to help the family look for the leads and the thief. After the weird…
Golden Scars presents an intimate portrait of the realities facing young musicians in Cuba, offering an exclusive look into the unique stories of two young rappers born in Santiago de Cuba. They are neither blood brothers, nor the best friends in the world. What they have in common is a passion for an expressive urban culture that gives voice to…
Gongbo is an ordinary peasant living in Tibet whose life is simple and plain. He works, provides for the whole family and raises children. Just like anyone else living in the world, Gongbo has to sustain various pressures from the life, such as his expectation of another son after his wife’s bearing six daughters consistently, his anxiety for the debt…
This film depicts the Gonya festival among the Tamang ethnic group in the Kathmandu valley of Nepal. The celebration for Gonya revolves around the performance of the bonbo, an equivalent for the more universal term “shaman” in Tamang culture. The film consists of three parts: The first part shows how the Gonya is incorporated within the overarching tradition of Janai…
Marguerite Harrison, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack travel through Asia Minor to reach a tribe of nomads in Iran known as the Bakhtiari. They follow the tribesmen on their 48-day trek across deserts, rivers and mountains to reach a summer pasture for their flocks. There are hardships and conquests for the 50,000 tribesmen leading their 500,000 animals across…
Guided by ayahuasca chants, Green River. The time of the Yakurunas is a poetic journey into the depths of the Amazon. The film explores the perception of time in three small villages intertwined by the flowing waters of the Amazon river, immersing the viewer in a landscape inhabited by shamans and archetypical societies.
This hybrid narrative depicts the bodies of…
GREEN TEA AND CHERRY RIPE tells the story of six Japanese women who married Australian servicemen after the Second World War, their efforts to build new lives in Australia and the challenges they faced in an alien land. In 1945 Japan was a bombed-out nation in ruins, its people living in poverty. Precious kimonos were exchanged for rice. Australia was…
We, the hijras, are born neither man nor woman. We are born somewhere in the middle. Our name was mentioned in Sanskrit texts, more than a thousand years ago. It evoked beauty, bravery, and straightforwardness. I try to act as a good guru towards my daughters, I want to teach them how to live properly. It’s not enough to only…
Soon after dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American military began looking for an “appropriate” place to test its nuclear weapons. They chose the Marshall Islands—tiny atolls in the mid-Pacific-for a number of reasons. The United States had recently taken these islands from Japan, they were a long way from America and they were populated by a…
This film is a visual journal on fear and courage, loss and gain, and illness and healing in life. It is also a conversation between daughter and father, as well as a reflective monologue on the memory of hope and sorrow. After her father got cancer, the director learned to use the camera to record her father’s struggle. They went…
An epic drama on cross-cultural marriages between Thai women and Danish fishermen, co-directed by Janus Metz (Armadillo, True Detective, Borg Vs Mc Enroe). Over a decade the directors follow four couples as they struggle to find a way out of poverty and loneliness and see their children grow up to heap the seeds or pay the price of their mothers…
A warm small town named Tung-Shih where live a crowed of brave people goes very hardly through the disaster of big earthquake on 21st September in 1999.It’s possible to chose or not to remember or forget all about the deep sorrows, disaster details and tears. Hi violin-playing boy! Do you know your music has spread all the ruins of small…
Hey Jimmy is a short documentary about ‘Black Jimmy,’ a black Taiwanese drag queen. The piece considers the socio-cultural complexities of the protagonist’s mixed parentage. A contemporary urban narrative, the documentary incorporates animation to create affectionately comical insight.