Viking chieftains, flaming torches and outlandish costumes liven up a dark January day in Lerwick, Shetland, as the townsfolk celebrate 'Up Helly Aa'.
The traditional healers in the Swiss and French mountains.
When a Mongolian nomadic family's newest camel colt is rejected by its mother, a musician is needed for a ritual to change her mind.
This Traveltalk series short showcases the Mexico City police department's various units as they participate in a yearly festival. Included are a marching band, a parade of patrol cars, the motorcycle unit, equestrian unit, and the department's pistol team.
Adventurers, explorers and conquerors: the Vikings are considered the greatest heroes of the Middle Ages. Is this interpretation justified? In fact, they left a far darker and lesser-known mark on history: they were ruthless slavers, human traffickers and hostage-takers. „Victims of the Vikings“ is the first TV documentary to investigate this infamous and often horrifying aspect of the Nordic warriors.
Traditions during Easter holidays in the remote village of Grešnica. The film was a research project of the newly opened Ethnological Museum to preserve the disappearing customs at least on film for future generations.
The documentary focuses on the annual Mani Rimdu festival of Tibet and Nepal, an event which encapsulates the Himalayan Buddhist experience.
The Vikings were the most ferocious warriors of the Middle Ages. Especially fearsome were the select few who wielded a formidable weapon: a light, razor sharp, virtually indestructible sword with its maker's name, Ulfberht, inlaid along the blade.
The horses in Denys Colomb Daunant’s dream poem are the white beasts of the marshlands of the Camargue in South West France. Daunant was haunted by these creatures. His obsession was first visualized when he wrote the autobiographical script for Albert Lamorisse’s award-winning 1953 film White Mane. In this short the beauty of the horses is captured with a variety of film techniques and by Jacques Lasry’s beautiful electronic score.
The enigma of the personality cult is revealed in the grand spectacle of Stalin’s funeral. The film is based on unique archive footage, shot in the USSR on March 5 - 9, 1953, when the country mourned and buried Joseph Stalin.
State of Bacon tells the kinda real but mostly fake tale of an oddball group of characters leading up to the annual Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival. Bacon-enthusiasts, Governor Branstad, a bacon queen, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, members of PETA, and an envoy of Icelanders are not excluded from this bacon party and during the course of the film become intertwined with the organizers of the festival to show that bacon diplomacy is not dead.
Dr Janina Ramirez travels across glaciers and through the lava fields of Iceland to find out about one of the most compelling of the great Viking stories - the Laxdaela Saga. This hour-long film explores how the unique literary achievements of the Saga writers were possible at a time of such immense cultural, political and religious upheaval.
In Papua New Guinea, pig tusks and shell money are currencies which can buy most things. Henry Tokubak’s dream is to create the first bank where traditional money counts as legal tender.
In rural Kosovo, identical houses are built for family members working abroad, in the hope that they will one day return to settle in their old homeland.
How could the Cannes Film Festival become the biggest cinema event in the world? For 75 years, Cannes has succeeded in this prodigy of placing cinema, its sometimes paltry splendors but also its requirements of great modern art, at the center of everything, as if, for ten days in May, nothing was more important than it. This film tells how Cannes has become the largest film festival in the world by opening up to cinematic modernity while never forgetting that cinema remains a performing art, a popular art.
A documentary about Cairo Jazz Festival's Amr Salah and his struggle every year to bring people and arts together in a country where 70% of people are under 30 and the Officials do not care about culture too much.
Walt Disney said “We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.” Outside of Walt himself there are few people who have brought together and united more animators in the history of the genre than Craig "Spike" Decker and Mike Gribble, known to all as Spike & Mike. They created an animation festival that helped launch the careers of John Lasseter, Peter Lord, Will Vinton, Bill Plympton and Mike Judge to name just a few. Their Spike & Mike festival had an enormous impact on animation that was felt the world over. The festival was known as much for the breakthrough animation it presented as the outrageous antics of the founders.
SINOPSIS / SYNOPSIS Every year in Spain, some 16,000 Fiestas are organized, during which animals are used. Honoring the Holy Virgin and the Patron Saints, and with the blessing of religious and political authorities, entire towns -including children- are involved in celebrations of unbelievable cruelty. 60,000 animals are hence abused each year during these “Fiestas of Blood”.
A documentary recording the lives of Khon students in their last years of study. They spent six years under the rules of the military regime after the 2014 coup d’etat. The coup granted the regime power to change many things, especially education which became more focused on the monarchy and royal glorification instead of basic human values. While the world is becoming awakened to human rights, the military regime deems them against their own values. The shooting of the film began at the time of the king’s succession, shortly after which there was a great social awakening in Thailand. Meanwhile, the authorities used state violence and oppression in an effort to eliminate dissidents, even when they were just high school and university students.