The Knowledge of Healing

A documentary about the corrupt health care system in The United States who's main goal is to make profit even if it means losing people’s lives. "The more people you deny health insurance the more money we make" is the business model for health care providers in America.

Stay inside all the time? Never take your shoes off? Feel fatigued? You could have Natural Deficit Disorder. Learn how the earth can help neutralize the disease-causing radicals in the body, by doing something as simple as swimming or walking barefoot.

Là-Haut, Un supplément d'âme

Between 1947 and 1951, more than 80 000 Greek men, women and children were deported to the isle of Makronissos (Greece) in reeducation camps created to ‘fight the spread of Communism’. Among those exiles were a number of writers and poets, including Yannis Ritsos and Tassos Livaditis. Despite the deprivation and torture, they managed to write poems which describe the struggle for survival in this world of internment. These texts, some of them buried in the camps, were later found. «Like Lions of stone at the gateway of night» blends these poetic writings with the reeducation propaganda speeches constantly piped through the camps’ loudspeakers. Long tracking shots take us on a trance-like journey through the camp ruins, interrupted along the way by segments from photographic archives. A cinematic essay, which revives the memory of forgotten ruins and a battle lost.

The documentary marks the directorial debut of Chinese actor Zhang Zhehan, it documents his deeply personal journey of self-healing in the aftermath of a devastating cyber media storm in August 2021 that abruptly halted his acting career.

Before Rolling Stone, there was Soul Newspaper. Behind Soul, there was Regina Jones. Against all odds, Regina blazed her own path, and at 80 has found herself again.

Tchai is the word used by Ju/'hoansi to describe getting together to dance and sing; n/um can be translated as medicine, or supernatural potency. In the 1950's, when this film was shot, Ju/'hoansi gathered for "medicine dances" often, usually at night, and sometimes such dances lasted until dawn.

American tourists at SpiritQuest Sanctuary, a medicine lodge in Peru, share their thoughts about the traditional medicine ayahuasca, and their motivations for drinking it. Don Howard Lawler, founder of SpiritQuest, describes ayahuasca and its beneficial effects, as do the filmmakers themselves.

Markus Raetz

In May of 1982 Julio Cortázar, the Argentinean writer and his companion in life, Carol Dunlop set out in their VW bus on a journey along the highway from Paris to Marseille that, for each of them, was to be their final one. Twenty-five years later, Océane Madelaine and Jocelyn Bonnerave set out to undertake the journey again.

Benito Arévalo is an onaya: a traditional healer in a Shipibo-Konibo community in Peruvian Amazonia. He explains something of the onaya tradition, and how he came to drink the plant medicine ayahuasca under his father's tutelage. Arévalo leads an ayahuasca ceremony for Westerners, and shares with us something of his understanding of the plants and the onaya tradition.

It is late 2004, and 34-year-old Englishman Alistair Appleton is about to fly from London to the Brazilian coast, where he will drink ayahuasca for the first time. With wit, insight, and sensitivity, Alistair shares this experience with us, and chats with some fellow participants before and after the ayahuasca ceremonies. For the past few years, Alistair had been working as a television presenter. In 2000, he started making trips to the Centre for World Peace and Health in Scotland to learn how to meditate. When clinical psychologist Silvia Polivoy opened an ayahuasca healing center in Bahia in 2004, Alistair faced his fears and seized the opportunity to attend.

Ceschi and Stamm's documentary tells the incredible story of Monika Krause, a former East German citizen, who became Fidel Castro's Sexual Education Minister. After 20 years in Cuba, Krause set the Cuban sexual revolution in motion: in favor of a woman's right to sexual fulfillment and legal abortion, and against exclusion of homosexuals, she acquired the title "Queen of Condoms". A film about potent female agitators, staunch macho men and Caribbean love lives.

A documentary of an expedition to Churchill, Manitoba to film the Northern Lights.

The key to the communal laundry room in the block of flats on the Rue de Genève 85 in Lausanne serves a much greater function than merely unlocking the door. This encounter between a symbol of typical Swiss mentality with a penchant for order and the tenants who have been housed here by the city’s social services department is not something to be taken for granted. Although the laundry room is normally located in the cellar, the tenants in this building share a tiny laundry room off the entrance hall because the cellar is reserved for prostitution. To maintain order and cleanliness, the landlord hires Claudina, a new “laundry woman”.

Der lange Weg ans Licht

A high-rise apartment built in the 1960s provides housing for 2500 people from 42 nations. Separated from the city by a river and bounded by towering sandstone cliffs, everyone attempts to live and survive in their own way. Foreigners who have a go at being Swiss, and Swiss who observe with scepticism. They meet in the corner shop run by an Iraqi living in exile, send their kids to a children’s club managed by a missionary, and old drinking mates meet regularly over a beer in the neighbourhood’s only bar. Despite all the differences, they are rather proud of the fact that they come from here.

A portrait of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, which includes historical footage of China's repression of Tibetan Buddhism in 1959.

Ibogaine is a plant extract that stops drug addiction. In this documentary, a 34-year-old heroin addict undergoes ibogaine therapy with Dr Martin Polanco at the Ibogaine Association, a clinic in Rosarito, Mexico. In Gabon, where use of the iboga root is traditional, a Babongo woman's tribe uses the plant to help her recover from a depressive malaise. Director Benjamin De Loenen interviews people formerly addicted to heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine, who share their perspectives about ibogaine treatment.

Magie & Medizin - Die Geheimnisse des Papyrus Ebers