Benares Chungking Ichang

10 May 2007 - China's staggering economic growth has overshadowed a more subtle shift in Chinese society. In domestic life, many women are now ignore the advice of their mothers and grandmothers, turning instead to counselling hotlines and, increasingly, divorce.

Varanasi is the Indian city where Hindus go to die. Stretching along the Ganges, Varanasi holds great spiritual significance because Hindu scriptutres say that anyone who dies there will attain moksha—liberation from the cycle of rebirth. Berlin-based director Dan Braga Ulvestad captures life and death in India’s heartland in this moving documentary filled with exquisite cinematic moments. By the River starts its narrative journey with the city’s “death hotels,” dedicated apartments where people wait to die, sometimes for decades, so they can be cremated on the banks of the Ganges.

Auroville: L'esquisse d'un monde

Sixteen year olds Palani and Karthik want to become "ladyboys." They're bullied in school and beaten by their families. Their parents would like to see them grow up as normal boys, but they're falling deeper and deeper into the world of the "Aravanis." Loved as dance performers but hated as homosexuals, their stories emblazon the inner conflicts of India's gender culture today.

The Jarawas live in the Andaman Islands on the Indian Ocean. The origin of the tribe is in Africa some 70,000 years back. They have lived in almost perfect isolation from the rest of the world until recent times.

A trip to the spectacular city of Bundi and a Kathakali dance performance, filmed in vivid colour.

Rare amateur footage of East India.

Draussen bleiben

Examines the early 1980s Hong Kong filmmaking community. Tony Rayns interviews some of the new generation of filmmakers and figures from the wider film culture.

Traveling the length and breadth of the country, S. Sukhdev constructs, a panoramic, non-narrated study of Indian life in the late 1960s. Shot across villages, deserts, countryside, and cities, the film observes daily labor, leisure, and movement without commentary, allowing humor, contradiction, and social texture to emerge organically. The result is a sensory encounter with India poised between inherited tradition and accelerating modernity.

The thronging streets of Chennai in festive mood are captured by this lively amateur film.

Extraordinary footage of prayers in the Punjabi capital.

A motorist's excursion captures a world made by hand in the environs of Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi.

Rare stencil-coloured images of early 20th century Delhi during a Muslim festival.

Indian elephants in action as working animals and in hunting.

Souvenirs d'un singe doré

Fireworks, illuminations and traditional dance all feature in a stunningly opulent royal wedding at Kundla, Gujarat.

"Fascinating India" spreads an impressive panorama of India’s historical and contemporary world. The film presents the most important cities, royal residences and temple precincts. It follows the trail of different religious denominations, which have influenced India up to the present day. Simon Busch and Alexander Sass travelled for months through the north of the Indian subcontinent to discover what is hidden under India’s exotic and enigmatic surface, and to show what is rarely revealed to foreigners. The film deals with daily life in India. In Varanasi, people burn their dead to ashes. At the Kumbh Mela, the biggest religious gathering of the world, 35 million pilgrims bathe in holy River Ganges. This is the first time India is presented in such an alluring and engaging fashion on screen.

Actuality film showing a busy Salvation Army parade in a rural village under the British Raj.

Salvation Army General Commissioner Edward Higgins features in the this film of a brass band parade through a village.