Karl Steudel

Earth teems with a staggering variety of animals, including 9,000 kinds of birds, 28,000 types of fish, and more than 350,000 species of beetles. What explains this explosion of living creatures—1.4 million different species discovered so far, with perhaps another 50 million to go? The source of life's endless forms was a profound mystery until Charles Darwin brought forth his revolutionary idea of natural selection. But Darwin's radical insights raised as many questions as they answered. What actually drives evolution and turns one species into another? To what degree do different animals rely on the same genetic toolkit? And how did we evolve?

Primal Fear" goes beyond the innate terror associated with our deepest fears to examine the history, psychology, and science behind what scares us most. Each fear - being burned alive under six feet of suffocating dirt, the strike of a lethal snake, terrorist attacks that can occur at any time - will be explored by looking at its history, the science behind it, and contemporary survivor stories that relate what a near-death experience was like.

Grieving over the death of his son, Jacob Lazar (C. James Roberts) connects with an alien visitor stranded on Earth. But Jacob tests their bond when he seizes the being's magical staff with the intent of traveling back in time and saving his son's life. This very act changes the alien's assessment of mankind's motivations and forces Jacob to choose between bringing back his son and saving humanity's future.

How do you see your way beyond? A painter loses her creative vision at the same time that her father, now going blind, moves in with her. She faces the same degenerative disease. Will she overcome fear, anger, career setbacks, to take care of her loved one and find her creativity again - with her own disability hovering in the future?

A documentary on what is it that makes us who we are: an African an African, a Jew a Jew, an Arab an Arab, a white person white -and what do we make of our apparent differences? Not so long ago, all human cultures assumed a natural and unassailable hierarchy - Europeans on the top, blacks on the bottom and everybody else in the middle. The work of the anthropologist Melville Jean Herskovits helped upend many of these assumptions. Herskovits: A Jew at the Heart of Blackness is the journey of a man into international race politics and its consequences for him -and us- in the first half of 20th century, when the battleground in the earliest "culture wars" was newspapers, radio shows, movies and cartoon, all infused with propaganda that explained why Caucasians dominated the world and other peoples as part of life's natural and inevitable order.

While falling in love with a reclusive homeless musician, a drug-addicted Chinese school girl regains her appetite for life and makes peace with herself.