The dysfunctional Chinese justice system allows citizens with grievances against their local governments to petition the court to clear or correct their record. Yet in order to do so, the petitioners must travel to Beijing to file paperwork and wait an indefinite period to plead their case. Following the saga of a group of petitioners over the years of 1996 and 2008, Petition unfolds like a novel by Zola or Dickens. This was filmed surreptitiously from the point of view of the petitioners, and not the justice officials, the police, or those heavies sent by the municipalities.
The final entry in Michael and Johnny Mak's Long Arm of the Law series, Underground Express once again tells a story of gangsters versus police, focusing on the difference between how both factions act depending if they're coming from Hong Kong or Mainland China.
A highway is waiting to go through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China where Mao was from. Due to the high cost of construction, construction companies and migrant workers who live on road work rush to here like the tide. In the following four years, they root in this strange place for interests, paying sweat and blood, even their lives. With their arrival, local village and peasants are forced to change their lives. Many hidden interest lines and hidden rules about road construction of the nation are unveiled, together with the shocking truth and emerging secrets.
After a self-destructive lifestyle nearly kills her, tormented young Anne learns to open up and let go of her traumatic past through a new found passion for boxing.
The film consists almost entirely of an interview with the elderly He Fengming, recounting her experiences in post-1949 China.
In an effort to discover the depth of the country's polarization, four recent college graduates decide to travel across the United States gathering stories encompassing the spectrum of life in America. Their goal is to find the human stories behind the nation's social and political schism, proving that Americans are not tied together by political identity, geographical location or belief systems, but primarily by love, hope and dreams - universal truths.
Now in the Far North (i.e. Milan!), Alberto has accepted to manage a program for efficiency improvement in the Italian Post. He devotes all his time and all his energy to this noble task and neglects his wife Silvia, which of course annoys her beyond limits. Things do not fare much better in Castellabate where it is rather Maria, Matta's wife, who gets on his nerves by always blaming him for his lack of ambition. One day, due to a misunderstanding, Mattia is transferred to... Milan! And on whose doorstep does he land? Alberto's of course!
The Venice Hongwanji Buddhist Temple had an opportunity to take part in an episode of East of Main Street, an HBO documentary series that has been produced for the past three years to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This year’s episode, Milestones, focuses on how different groups of Asian Americans mark the milestones throughout their lives.
In a spoof of 1972's The New Scooby-Doo Movies, Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Inc. gang pick up a hitchiking Gary Coleman. Soon after, the Mystery Machine proceeds to break down (multiple times) leaving them stranded at a haunted castle owned by David Cross.
After a vampire leaves his native Balkans, he murders a Czech artist, assumes his identity, and moves in with the dead man's American cousins.
A documentary about unemployed people who bought fruit and vegetables at moderate prices at the wholesale market and sold these in the streets of Frankfurt. Since they had no permits they were constantly with their bulky carts on the run from the police. One part of the film was shot at the fairgrounds in front of the wholesale market. Newspaper and lottery ticket vendors, propagandists offering their ware for a few pfennigs, all convey the mood of a time when need made people inventive.
Realizing that she cannot take down Fisk alone, Sayen teams up with an underground resistance group with a plan to expose and end Fisk's unchecked plundering once and for all.
Gamera escapes from his rocket enclosure and makes his way back to Earth as a giant opal from New Guinea is brought back to Japan. The opal is discovered to have been an egg that births a new monster called Barugon. The creature attacks the city of Osaka by emitting a destructive rainbow ray from his back, along with a freezing spray capable of incapacitating Gamera.
In their third cinema adventure the Famous Five are searching for a pirate treasure...
Jesse becomes reunited with Willy three years after the whale's jump to freedom as the teenager tries to rescue the killer whale and other orcas from an oil spill.
The story of an ancient war that is reignited when a young farmhand unwittingly opens a gateway between our world and a fearsome race of giants. Unleashed on the Earth for the first time in centuries, the giants strive to reclaim the land they once lost, forcing the young man, Jack into the battle of his life to stop them. Fighting for a kingdom, its people, and the love of a brave princess, he comes face to face with the unstoppable warriors he thought only existed in legend–and gets the chance to become a legend himself.
FBI agent Malcolm Turner goes back undercover as Big Momma, a slick-talking, slam-dunking Southern granny with attitude to spare! Now this granny must play nanny to three dysfunctional upper class kids in order to spy on their computer hacked dad.
In a series of long interviews, 12 prime ministers talk about their experience in the upper echelons of power. The function of prime minister, torn between the president and the parliament, appointed without necessarily being elected but responsible for everything, is at the center of debate. With the exception of Jacques Chirac (1974-1976 and 1986-1988), deliberately left out because of his image as French President, those who governed France for the past 35 years agreed to discuss the exercise of power, as seen through archive footage, but also how they experienced it personally. Filmed in the same studio and sitting in the same chair, 12 French prime ministers talk freely about their time in office, from their appointment until their resignation.
This is the unlikely story of 21 ministers and prime ministers who have crossed or are crossing the french Fifth Republic today. Twenty-one politicians who, from one day to the next, find themselves at the head of a ministry by the grace of a President of the Republic and his Prime Minister. The formation of the government, conflicts of attribution, reshuffles, rumours of appointments, evictions, casting errors: it is all the capricious backstage of the games of power examined here under the angle of confidence and which sheds light on the prestigious but unknown function of minister. An original and instructive political saga on the reality of those who hold or have held this prestigious position.
Tomáš Etzler worked for seven years as a foreign correspondent in China. He came to know a country that was developing at an admirably fast pace, was swayed by its energy, and for a moment believed that modernity could bring about political change as well. Before long, it dawned on him that many people would continue to be severely punished, and the regime would still keep most of the nation in a state of indecision and ignorance. Without neglecting that face of China today, Etzler chose to tell a story of hope in his personal documentary. Using the example of an orphanage for disabled children, he shows that the answer to collectivist brutality and ruthlessness can be mutual assistance, tolerance and empathy.
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.
My father was a landowner’s son and an ex-Kuomintang Air Force pilot, who remained in mainland China after 1949. For survival, he tried to transform himself from a man of the ‘old society’ to a man of the ‘new society’. As his son, I started investigating his ‘history before 1949’, which he had kept away from me. This film documents the process of my investigation over twenty years.
A documentary that examines the issue of forced live organ harvesting from Chinese prisoners of conscience, and the response - or lack of it - around the world. It's happened before: governments killing their own citizens for their political or spiritual beliefs. But it’s never happened like this. It’s happened so often that the world doesn’t always pay attention.
Fall Of The Republic documents how an offshore corporate cartel is bankrupting the US economy by design. Leaders are now declaring that world government has arrived and that the dollar will be replaced by a new global currency.
An inside look at China working towards the goal of becoming a superpower by the year 2000 via education as the key to modernization. Filmed in Peking, on a rural commune in central China, and in the industrial northeast region, Jack Reynolds interviews Vice Premier Fang Yi and the president of Peking University, as well as students, workers, and peasants.
Previously unreleased material outlines the campaign against Bill Clinton's presidency, from his days in Arkansas up to his impeachment trial.
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.
Based on three different places, the film portrays the infractions to which people living in modern day China are subjected due to rapid developments: in the deceptively idyllic Yangshuo in the rainy south; in the apocalyptic coal mining site of Wuhai in the parched north; and in Chongqing, the urban behemoth on the Yangtze River. The protagonists give their accounts of the unsurmounted past, the precarious present and their tentative steps into the future. The film thus paints a complex image of the mental state of the people in this complicated country.
Dan Snow, Dr Alice Roberts and Dr Albert Lin investigate a series of earth-shattering discoveries at a mighty tomb guarded by the Terracotta Warriors in China.
A cable system designed by controversial Chinese company Huawei Technologies enables communication between an expert and a machine. Time succumbs to space in a "New Cold War" played out in technological materials.
Its hard to explain the full depth and breadth of the depravity of the pharmaceutical industry, the medical research industry, and the federal government. This film does a pretty good job. Hang on to your hat. The model for modern biological warfare was "discovered" during the conquest of the Americas and has been repeated over and over again.