2014-09-29
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10.0How the Monuments Came Down is a timely and searing look at the history of white supremacy and Black resistance in Richmond. The feature-length film-brought to life by history-makers, descendants, scholars, and activists-reveals how monuments to Confederate leaders stood for more than a century, and why they fell.
0.0A fascinating compilation tracing the development of British trains throughout the 20th century. This program provides a record of the greatest days of steam; the magnificent express engines developed by the 'Big Four' - the GWR, SR, LNER, and LMS; many famous named trains like the Golden Arrow and the Brighton Belle, the War and Nationalism; and the amazing variety of elder locos from the 1950's.
10.0The Chukchi reindeer breeders are peculiar people. They are nomads. Reindeers are their welfare, the purport of life. The mother-reindeer is the main divine being; it protects the Chukchi from misfortune and troubles. Nature is not friendly towards people here. Only Chukchi can survive in Tundra. A rush period for the Chukchi reindeer breeders comes in winter, when the temperature rises up to 50 degrees Celsius at night and in the sunlight of the day it doesn't exceed 40 degrees Celsius in tundra: they should separate young deers from the rest of the herd, the weak from the strong. And this, considering that the herds of the Chukchi reindeer breeders number some thousand heads...
10.0In 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.
9.0The story of Tasmanian-born actor Errol Flynn whose short & flamboyant life, full of scandals, adventures, loves and excess was largely played out in front of the camera - either making movies or filling the newsreels and gossip magazines. Tragically he was dead from the effects of drugs and alcohol by the time he was only 50 & the myths live on. But there is another side of Flynn that is less well known - his ambitions to be a serious writer and newspaper correspondent, his documentary films and his interest in the Spanish Civil War and Castro's Cuba
9.2It is the year 2546. Corporations rule the world, and an agent is on a secret mission to explore the untold stories of the past. His journey leads him into a secret virtual reality where one corporation has recreated the 1980s, an era that witnessed the birth of video game development, an event in which a politically and economically restricted small European country, Hungary, had a significant role. He discovers a strange but exciting world, where computers were smuggled through the Iron Curtain and serious engineers started developing games. This small country was still under Soviet pressure when a group of people managed to set up one of the first game development studios in the world, and western computer stores started clearing room on their shelves for Hungarian products.
1.0At the peak of Perestroika, in 1987, in the village of Gorki, where Lenin spent his last years, after a long construction, the last and most grandiose museum of the Leader was opened. Soon after the opening, the ideology changed, and the flow of pilgrims gradually dried up. Despite this, the museum still works and the management is looking for ways to attract visitors. Faithful to the Lenin keepers of the museum as they can resist the onset of commercialization. The film tells about the modern life of this amazing museum-reserve and its employees.
7.5The documentary is titled after Arkadaş Z. Özger’s poem “Hello My Dear” which had caused much controversy in the period it was first published. Considered to be in defiance of heteronormativity, the said poem includes references to the poet’s personality, his family, his relationship to the society, and his “unexpected” death, which came three years after its publication. Today, 50 years after it was written, the documentary follows these same lines in the poem utilising cinematic elements. The documentary also rediscovers the poetics; reaches out to the family, the comrades, the friendships, departing from the official historical accounts, cognizant of his experience of otherness, in pursuit of the “lost” portrait of Arkadaş Z. Özger.
10.0Buddhist monks open up about the joys and challenges of living out the precepts of the Buddha as a full-time vocation. Controversies swirling within modern monastic Buddhism are examined, from celibacy and the role of women to racism and concerns about the environment.
10.0Crocodile 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.
9.0A 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.
0.0Undercover in Tibet reveals the regime of terror which dominates daily life and makes freedom of expression an impossibility. Tash meets victims of arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and ‘disappearances’ and uncovers evidence of enforced sterilizations on ethnic Tibetan women. He sees for himself the impact of the enormous military and police presence in the region, the hunger and hardship being endured by many Tibetans and hears warnings of the uprising taking place across the provinces now.
0.0A documentary from 1987 featuring the life of early Chinese immigrants to the island of Newfoundland.
5.6An excellent comprehensive look at all the music that came out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Cincinnati "Rock Legends" "James Brown" "King Records" "Pure Prairie League" "Lemon Pipers" "Syd Nathan" WEBN "Bootsy Collins" "Lonnie Mack" "The Who concert 1979" "Rick Derringer"
5.7The impact of Marx on the 20th century has been all-pervasive and world-wide. This program looks at the man, at the roots of his philosophy, at the causes and explanations of his philosophical development, and at its most direct outcome: the failed Soviet Union.
0.0Over the course of 10 months, a camera travels to Buenos Aires, Argentina and Hanover, Germany to meet with Magalí, María Belén, Ivana and Carla, the founding members of the Archivo De La Memoria Trans Argentina, the first existing Trans Archive in the world. Taking the shape of a photo-novel, the documentary not only recounts the founding members lives as trans women under the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), the AIDS epidemy, state repression and mass assassinations but also years of fighting for their rights, sorority and the exaltation of life and laughter in times of death. Filming each one of them is filming them embracing their new role as curators, archivists and historians while a collection of 7,000 photos goes through the filter of their memories.
6.8One Country, Two Systems? No Way! say the youth of Taiwan. But China under President Xi Jinping wants more than ever to bring the island of Taiwan back into the fold, just like Hong Kong. Can the burgeoning democracy on China’s doorstep, driven by digital technology, resist the Middle Kingdom’s advances? To China Taiwan is a breakaway province that must return to the fold. To its 24 million inhabitants it is a sovereign state with its own constitution and democratically elected leaders. Now that Hong Kong has been brought into line, Taiwan remains determined to stand up as a vibrant, young democracy. But it won't be easy. Since the Sunflower Movement in 2014 when the young came out to prevent an economic agreement with China, citizen groups have been fighting for the transparency of institutions.