Kekaiulu Hula Studio follows the Proclaimed Hula Halau of the same name, showcasing their twist on what the real reason for hula is and what life as a dancer in the halau is really like. Something previously unseen in the public eye.
Tatsuhito, a cop, pursues Chinese warlord Wang through the underworld of Shinjuku and over to Taiwan.
The journey of eight diverse youth in China confronting cultural differences. Crossing Borders - Widening Horizons - Building Bridges between Cultures
A sock puppet explores a family history told from the perspective of a mother and father.
Terra incognita
Parvis, the son of exiled Iranians, copes with life in his small hometown by indulging himself with pop culture, Grindr dates, and raves. After being caught shoplifting, he is sentenced to community service at a refugee shelter where he meets siblings Banafshe and Amon, who have fled Iran. As a romantic attraction between Parvis and Amon grows, the fragile relationship between the three is put to a test.
In 1948, decades after fleeing Armenia to the US as a child, Charlie returns in the hopes of finding a connection to his roots, but what he finds instead is a country crushed under Soviet rule. After being unjustly imprisoned, Charlie falls into despair, until he discovers that he can see into a nearby apartment from his cell window - the home of a prison guard.
A Calling to Care is the inspiring story of 55 year-old Grace Stanley, a Canadian nurse who left her home and prestigious career behind to answer a calling halfway around the world in Karachi, Pakistan. Teaching nursing to local women in a strict Muslim culture that forbids them to even to touch men is a formidable task. However, Grace challenges her own values and belief systems to find common ground with her students, helping them to excel and feel respect for themselves in a culture that doesn't respect them. Whether it is getting her hands painted with henna, swimming fully-clothed in the ocean, or marching bravely with them on International Women's Day, Grace bonds with her students in a very special way, and ultimately discovers how the West can learn a lot more from the Third World than she ever thought.
Druids have existed far longer than hitherto assumed, since the 4th century BC. Their traces are found all over middle Europe: from the northern Balkans to Ireland. Their cultural achievements were equal in almost every way to those of the Romans and Greeks: They could read and write and spoke Greek and Latin - for centuries, they were the powerful elite of their culture. Only one single Druid is known by name to history: Diviciacos - an aristocrat of the Aedui and personal friend of Julius Caesar. Diviciacos was a politician, a judge and a diplomat, but he lived at a time when the Celtic lands of Gaul were conquered by the Romans. Greek and Roman contemporaries distrusted the actions of this forbear of the famous comic book druid Getafix: They imagined him in bloody rituals in somber woods.
Through the unrelenting winter in the north of Japan, a small group of workers must brave unusual working conditions to bring to life a 2,000-year-old tradition known as sake. A cinematic documentary, The Birth of Sake is a visually immersive experience of an almost-secret world in which large sacrifices must be made for the survival of a time-honored brew.
A haunting and visually stunning fairytale that blends the horrors of fantasy and the real life historical events of colonization and Indian Boarding Schools in the United States. A Native American girl in the 1700s and a Native American boy in the 1960s struggle to find their way back to a home that may be lost forever.
After the 1999 premiere of the first Matrix movie, it became a pop culture phenomenon. A special documentary about the Matrix saga and its prophetic aspects.
A hard-hitting documentary that tackles head-on a controversial but increasingly alarming subject: young men's obsession with the perfect body, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs to achieve it. Once the preserve of top-level athletes, the use of anabolic steroids has become endemic among teenagers and young men with a passion for bodybuilding. Daring to tackle head-on the taboo of male beauty standards, Adonis offers a field investigation into the heart of this muscle-building machine, questioning the reasons behind and the physical, psychological and social risks of this race to the perfect body. As he stages his own vulnerability, the filmmaker lifts the veil on the scale of the public health crisis that is looming.
The story was born from the pen of debutante Callie Khouri: Thelma, married to a macho man, and Louise, an independent waitress, go on a girls' getaway that turns into a runaway when the latter, during a stopover in a bar, shoots a man who was trying to rape her friend. But at the dawn of the 1990s, screens were dominated by testosterone-fueled opuses, and Hollywood studios were reluctant to entrust the steering wheel to a female duo. Seduced by the script, forwarded by his associate Mimi Polk, Ridley Scott agreed to produce the film and decided, against all odds, to direct it himself. Under the British director's watch, the two accidental outlaws, fabulously portrayed by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, flee across the vastness of the Far West on an emancipatory epic that sees them defy male oppression and reveal themselves to themselves.
A young girl struggles with her cultural identity.
Divas
The 6 Guarani villages of Jaraguá, in São Paulo, fight for land rights, for human rights and for the preservation of nature. They suffer from the proximity to the city, which brings lack of resources, pollution of rivers and springs, racism, police violence, fires, lack of infrastructure and sanitation, among others. Unable to live like their ancestors, their millenary culture is lost as it merges with the urban culture.
People from different ethnic backgrounds with "difficult" names by Western standards share their experience with moving through the world with an identity that challenges others to simply just say their name. A short social docu-film by Mariam Meliksetyan, “Say My Name” is a meditation on identity, otherness, assimilation, community, and ancestral roots.
In the Faroe Islands, hundreds of pilot whales are slaughtered each year in a hunt known as the “Grind.” This gruesome tradition has drawn outrage from activists, most notably the international conservation group Sea Shepherd, who routinely sail to the islands to try to block whaling boats. Yet the Faroese are equally determined to maintain their tradition, defending the practice as more sustainable and less cruel than getting meat from slaughterhouses. Director Vincent Kelner spends time with both Faroese hunters and Sea Shepherd crusaders, building to a nuanced look at a disturbing event with much larger implications for the way humans relate to other creatures.
At a critical moment in the history of the written word, as humanity’s archives migrate to the cloud, one filmmaker goes on a journey around the globe to better understand how she can preserve her own Romanian and Armenian heritage, as well as our collective memory. Blending the intellectual with the poetic, she embarks on a personal quest with universal resonance, navigating the continuum between paper and digital—and reminding us that human knowledge is above all an affair of the soul and the spirit.