The Real Losers Of The US-China Trade War(2021)

China Jam(en)

In their infinite quest for virgin big walls, adventurers Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll, Nicolas Favresse, Stephane Hanssens and Evrard Wendenbaum, head in September 2013 to a remote valley in the westernmost region of China. There, they found a fantastic 1200m vertical pillar, culminating at 5842m. They spent 14 days on the wall facing snow storms and harsh conditions to finally achieve this amazing ascent with some frost bites but never forgetting to have a lot of fun and to play unreal musical sessions.

Tunnel to Freedom(de)

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

Harvest(en)

Jenni has an ordinary life of simple patterns revolving around family and work. Her daily routine is seemingly unremarkable yet is of great interest to someone she doesn’t know—but who knows everything about her. Harvest is a thrilling and inventive depiction of the hidden value in mundane routines.

Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We?(en)

With the Doomsday Clock the closest it's ever been to midnight, Jane Corbin investigates the proliferation of nuclear weapons across the globe. She visits Los Alamos, home to the United States’ nuclear weapons development facility and the historic home of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project. In Scotland, she reveals the strategy behind Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and speaks to campaigners in Suffolk fighting against US weapons they fear will be based on UK soil. Jane also discovers how many of the global agreements and safeguards that have constrained the spread of nuclear weapons since the 1970s are breaking down. This is a story told by the scientists, investigators and diplomats who set the clock and have fought to ensure that the ultimate deterrent has not been used in over 70 years.

A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or: Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth(en)

Director Philip Haas and artist David Hockney invite you to join them on a magical journey through China via a marvelous 72-foot long 17th-century Chinese scroll entitled The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour (1691-1698), scroll seven . As Hockney unrolls the beautiful and minutely detailed work of art, he traces the Emperor Kangxi’s second tour of his southern empire in 1689.

Tragedy or Hope(en)

Contrasting radical mobs, anarchy, and 1960s counterculture with footage of American manufacturing and innovation, this film celebrates the concept of American exceptionalism and argues that anti-Vietnam War protesters were influenced by communism, atheism, and immorality. Set mostly in a university library, this political debate between a medical student, his 1770s ancestor, and a history professor is a sequel to the 1972 National Education Program film, Brink of Disaster! Two additional characters appear in this drama: a 19th-century steamboat captain, and the student’s grandfather - an early 20th-century automobile worker. The National Education Program at Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas created a variety of widely-distributed anti-communism films from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s.

DSKNECTD(en)

As clichés go, in 1999 the World as we knew it was about to change - and we'd been expecting it. Since childhood we'd been promised that the 21st century would bring us dramatic new technologies like flying cars and Utopian cities. Instead it bought us the smart-phone, social media, and virtual societies. And as it turns out these technologies began to transform society almost as dramatically as the moon colonies we'd been expecting. Now over a decade into the revolution, 'DSKNECTD' explores how digital communication technology is profoundly changing the way we interact and experience each other - for the good and for the bad.

Draussen bleiben(de)

From Harlem with Love(en)

Tensions between the USSR and the United States were high in 1959, with the seemingly constant threat of nuclear war. Then some unlikely ambassadors stepped forward to clear all that away: the Harlem Globetrotters. From Harlem With Love is the story of how a group of barnstorming basketball players traveled to the heart of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War and bridged a cultural gap many thought would stand forever.

10 Questions for the Dalai Lama(en)

How do you reconcile a commitment to non-violence when faced with violence? Why do the poor often seem happier than the rich? Must a society lose its traditions in order to move into the future? These are some of the questions posed to His Holiness the Dalai Lama by filmmaker and explorer Rick Ray. Ray examines some of the fundamental questions of our time by weaving together observations from his own journeys throughout India and the Middle East, and the wisdom of an extraordinary spiritual leader. This is his story, as told and filmed by Rick Ray during a private visit to his monastery in Dharamsala, India over the course of several months. Also included is rare historical footage as well as footage supplied by individuals who at great personal risk, filmed with hidden cameras within Tibet.

Rebellion(en)

As the 'one country two systems' policy in Hong Kong has slowly eroded, resentment among the territory's citizens has steadily grown. What began as a series of spontaneous protests against an extradition law in March 2019 has now escalated in to a full-blown popular uprising that shows no signs of abating. ABC Four Corners reports from the frontline of the action, capturing extraordinary footage of the growing tension and violence.

Koyaanisqatsi(en)

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

Eco-Hack!(en)

Conservation biologist Tim Shields sees urgency in the field and finds that traditional conservation practices are lacking when it comes to saving desert tortoise populations from ravens. He goes rogue, employing an arsenal of lasers, exploding model turtles, drones and desert rovers as a means of protecting the tortoise's dwindling numbers.

Crocodile in the Yangtze(en)

Crocodile in the Yangtze follows China's first Internet entrepreneur and former English teacher, Jack Ma, as he battles US giant eBay on the way to building China's first global Internet company, Alibaba Group. An independent memoir written, directed and produced by an American who worked in Ma's company for eight years, Crocodile in the Yangtze captures the emotional ups and downs of life in a Chinese Internet startup at a time when the Internet brought China face-to-face with the West. Crocodile in the Yangtze draws on 200 hours of archival footage filmed by over 35 sources between 1995 and 2009. The film presents a strikingly candid portrait of Ma and his company, told from the point of view of an “American fly on a Chinese wall” who witnessed the successes and the mistakes Alibaba encountered as it grew from a small apartment into a global company employing 16,000 staff.

Earth: Muted(zh)

Three farming families in Hanyuan, China, strive to give their children a good life in the midst of an ecological crisis, as widespread use of pesticides leads to a dramatic decline in bees and other pollinating insects in the valley.

Women 50 Minutes(zh)

A representation of queer and feminist imagery that was mainly shot in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, remote and developing areas in southwest China, and metropolitan cities like Beijing from 2000 to 2004 to document the social changes in contemporary China. The director sympathetically and erotically represents a variety of women, including women as laborers, women as prayers, women in the ground, women in marriage, and women who lie on the funeral pyre with their dead husbands. Her camera juxtaposes the mountains and rivers in old times, the commercialized handicrafts as exposition, the capital exploitation of the elders’ living space, and the erotic freedom of the young people in a changing city.

Camp Century: The Hidden City Beneath the Ice(de)

How in 1959, during the heat of the Cold War, the government of the United States decided to create a secret military base located in the far north of Greenland: Camp Century, almost a real town with roads and houses, a nuclear plant to provide power and silos to house missiles aimed at the Soviet Union.

CyberBaby(en)

In this video series an individual confronts fears and, through the process of confessing directly to the camera, transcends trauma. It is also about agin, longing, the delusions and misconceptions we are encumbered with as we mature towards self-awareness, and the masks we assume to deny or hide understanding. The tapes rupture, fracture, and use digital effects to mirror the psychological changes of the protagonist.

The Trader(ka)

A traveling trader provides a window into rural life in the Republic of Georgia, where potatoes are currency and ambition is crushed by poverty.

Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1(en)

A shocking political exposé, and an intimate ethnographic portrait of Pacific Islanders struggling for survival, dignity, and justice after decades of top-secret human radiation experiments conducted on them by the U.S. government.