
Naercio Menezes

10
8.0Through the youthful portraits of some of the most terrible dictators of the 20th and 21st centuries, this documentary examines the origins of tyranny. Is a dictator the product of a family, social and historical context?
6.7Forensic experts scan Pompeii’s victims to investigate why they didn’t escape the eruption.
7.3At the edge of the Yangtze River, not far from the Three Gorges Dam, young men and women take up employment on a cruise ship, where they confront rising waters and a radically changing China.
African American filmmaker David A. Wilson decided to look into his family's history during the slave era. The result is this documentary, which provides a unique perspective on the long shadow cast by slavery in America. Wilson travels to North Carolina to visit the plantation where his ancestors once toiled and to meet its current owner -- a white man named David Wilson, whose slave-owning ancestors originally occupied the property.
6.0The free, almost naive view from the perspective of a child puts the "68ers" in a new, illuminating light in the anniversary year 2008. The film is a provocative reckoning with the ideological upbringing that seemed so progressive and yet was suffocated by the children's desire to finally grow up. With an ironic eye and a feuilletonistic style, author Richard David Precht and Cologne documentary film director André Schäfer trace a childhood in the West German provinces - and place the major events of those years in completely different, smaller and very private contexts.
6.7This documentary delves into the mysteries surrounding the Neanderthals and what their fossil record tells us about their lives and disappearance.
0.0The film consists of video tapes made by the filmmaker’s father documenting daily scenes of family life, family celebrations, and holidays over the course of fifteen years. The tapes are a mixture of the personal and the political – the father was politically engaged in the revolutionary movement that brought Hugo Chávez to power. The family’s life becomes a backdrop for political and economic developments in Venezuela and their impact on the lives of ordinary citizens.
7.3They have no roots, no seeds, no flowers, but mosses show immense survival capacities and can suspend their biological activity for long periods. Today, researchers are exploring the exceptional resistance of these archaic organisms. British ecologists have even resurrected a "zombie" moss that has been trapped in the permafrost for 1,500 years. Associated with decay and disliked in Europe, mosses are deified in Japan. With 25,000 species worldwide, bryophytes - their scientific name - are the seat of real ecosystems, and can develop in inhospitable landscapes, through an extravagant reproduction cycle.
7.1Embark on a delightful journey into the world of dogs in this documentary that reveals scientific and emotional insights about our lovable BFFs.
7.0While life expectancy is increasing in Western countries, cases of diabetes, hypertension, obesity and cancer are increasing, and the use of medication has exploded. Does this mean that in order to live to a ripe age we are condemned to swallow more and more drugs? What if there was another way? For half a century, in Russia, Germany and the U.S., doctors and biologists have been exploring a different therapeutic approach: fasting. The results are amazing. Soviet researchers have provided a body of clinical studies of exceptional health…only published in Russian, and thus unknown in the West. Young biologists from the University of Los Angeles have overturned conventional wisdom and used molecular biology to demonstrate the powerful effects of fasting. This research suggests a wide-ranging potential, which could include treatments for the disease of the century, cancer. If these scientists are right, maybe our approach to disease and treatment will need a rethink.
6.0Billions of years ago, Venus may have harbored life-giving habitats similar to those on the early Earth. Today, Earth's twin is a planet knocked upside down and turned inside out. Its burned-out surface is a global fossil of volcanic destruction, shrouded in a dense, toxic atmosphere. Scientists are now unveiling daring new strategies to search for clues from a time when the planet was alive.
7.3Although a real awareness of the populations is underway - the multiplication of natural disasters and heat records helping - the human activities responsible for global warming remain unchanged, as if the threat was unreal. This collective immobility could have its origin in the brain. A number of cognitive biases impede judgment.