The story of how Dr. Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Shakur, along with fellow Black Panthers and the Young Lords, combined community health with radical politics to create the first acupuncture detoxification program in America in 1973 – a visionary project eventually deemed too dangerous to exist in America.
Taiwan Premiere
Within a few months, the Kutupalong refugee camp has become the biggest in the world. Out of sight, 700,000 people of the Rohingya Muslim minority fled Myanmar in 2017 to escape genocide and seek asylum in Bangladesh. Prisoners of a major yet little publicized humanitarian crisis, Kalam, Mohammad, Montas and other exiles want to make their voice heard. Between poetry and nightmares, food distribution and soccer games, they testify to their daily realities and the ghosts of their past memories. Around them, the spectre of wandering, waiting, disappearing. In this place almost out of space and time, is it still possible to exist?
In April 1961, John Kennedy is America’s new President, the Cold War heats up in Berlin and nuclear bombers are deployed from bases in arctic Canada. In Kapuivik, north Baffin Island, Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dog team as his ancestors did when he was born in 1900. When the white man known as Boss arrives at Piugattuk’s hunting camp, what appears as a chance meeting soon opens up the prospect of momentous change. Boss is an agent of the government, assigned to get Piugattuk to move his band to settlement housing and send his children to school so they can get jobs and make money. But Kapuivik is Piugattuk’s homeland. He takes no part in the Canadian experience; and cannot imagine what his children would do with money.
At the dawn of the first millennium, the arrival of a mysterious shaman upsets the natural balance in a community of nomadic Inuit, resulting in the murder of the camp’s leader. Years later, power in the community begins to shift when the tribe’s two best hunters — the brothers Amaqjuaq, the Strong One (Pakak Innuksuk), and Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (Natar Ungalaaq ) — innocently provoke the new chief’s son, Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq). After Atanarjuat wins the hand of Oki’s promised wife, the beautiful but flirtatious Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu), in a head punching duel, Oki vows revenge.
When Oki and his friends attempt to kill the brothers in their sleep, Atanarjuat miraculously escapes, running naked for his life across the spring sea ice and eluding Oki with supernatural assistance. He is taken in and nursed back to health by an elderly couple who fled the cursed tribe years earlier. With their guidance and assistance, Atanarjuat regains his spiritual strength, avenges his brother’s death and brings harmony back to the tribe.
Kalsang Dolma, a young Tibetan refugee living in Quebec, crosses the Himalayas. Into “the largest prison in the world,” she carries a video message recorded by the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama. Families gather around the tiny screen, transfixed, and for one of the first times, the voice of this fragile people under the yoke of suffering reaches us from across the distance.
This film was shot without the knowledge of the Chinese authorities, using small digital cameras, during nearly a dozen secret forays into Tibet between 1996 and 2004.