The Coast of Commerce

Large numbers of children and adults can be seen enjoying themselves, splashing about in the water or diving from the high-boards.

Residents of the Cleveland market town of Stockton High Street smile for the camera on market day.

A timeless landscape steeped in history that is little changed today, but was surely made to be filmed!

A colourful miscellany of footage from both sides of the Pennines.

On August 3rd, 1979, a Vietnamese refugee shoots and kills a white crab fisherman at the town docks in Seadrift, TX. What began as a fishing dispute erupts in violence and ignites a resurgence of the KKK and open hostilities against the Vietnamese along the Gulf Coast. Set during the early days of Vietnamese refugee arrival, “Seadrift” examines the circumstances that led up to the shooting, its tumultuous aftermath, and the unexpected consequences that continue to reverberate today.

This Traveltalk series short celebrates San Francisco, past and present.

La cité médiévale de Rocamadour

This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.

Coal miners are dying from the resurgence of an epidemic that could have been prevented. FRONTLINE and NPR’s joint investigation revealed the biggest disease clusters ever documented, and how the industry and the government failed to protect miners.

Jarred by the loss of his closest friend, a farmer on Tasmania’s remote West Coast, begins to mentor at-risk local youth. In an area renowned for its poverty, low literacy, and high suicide rates, Stafford Heres is determined to provide opportunities for kids who have few. Eden Alone Surpasses Thee explores his relationship with the land, loss, and the young men he takes under his wing.

The Land of Little Rivers, a network of tributaries in the Catskill Mountains of New York, is the birthplace of fly fishing in America and home to anglers obsessed by the sport.

For more than four centuries, young Portuguese fishermen have followed their fathers to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and in recent years to Greenland’s banks to fish the cold waters for cod. Intrepid men, set off for the Banks on schooners under full sail, then adrift in a flat-bottomed dory, they bait the hundred of hooks of their long-line, oblivious to fog, rain and Arctic wind, they labour 18 hours a day and haul up cod by the score.

The Southern Sea Otter was historically abundant along the California coastline until intense hunting pressures reduced their numbers to near-extinction levels. But now the otters are coming back, and with them they bring the potential for drastic change to the modern-day economics and ecology of the Santa Barbara Channel.

Sea otters are once again in peril after being brought back from the brink of extinction. An unprecedented number of sea otter deaths have occurred along the California coast in the last three years. Meanwhile, the Fish & Wildlife Services decision to eliminate their No Otter Zone from Southern California waters remains controversial. This fragile species threatened by pollution, infectious diseases, starvation, and competition with fishermen struggles for survival.

The film describes the microcosmos of the small village Wacken and shows the clash of the cultures, before and during the biggest heavy metal festival in Europe.

With Pete Smith providing dry off-screen commentary, we watch some serious fishing: a marlin caught near Catalina, a hammerhead shark caught then wrestled in a small rowboat near Baja, the largest (721 pounds) great white shark caught to date in California waters, Chinook Indians catching salmon at Celilo Falls in Oregon - each with his designated place on the river where his ancestors stood, and, last, a crew on a boat off Mexico hoisting and hurling tuna using unbarbed hooks (baited only with a feather) as fast as they can as long as the school is there - backbreaking work - but a $25,000 catch.

Sigrid Koetse, award-winning actor and grande dame of Dutch theater, lived most of her life in the public eye and was always surrounded by a crowd of admirers. With this short documentary, filmmaker Wytse Koetse shows how his aunt spends her days nowadays, lonely in her Amsterdam home.

This FitzPatrick Traveltalk series short looks at Czechoslovakia before World War II, including images of bridges, churches, and castles in Prague, also a non-military parade through the city.

A modern answer to Luis Buñuel's mythical documentary “Land Without Bread” (1933) about Las Hurdes, a historically impoverished region of the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, and also a journey of discovery of the soul of this beautiful land and its inhabitants.

A photographer shares unpublished images chronicling time spent among the 'fiercely independent' residents of a remote English fishing village.