Quiet towns across rural Australia are in the grip of an Ice epidemic. Major international drug cartels are working with local outlawed motorcycle gangs to push crystal meth to a captive market of children.
Mémé
Documentary about the harvest of 1950 conceived as a celebration of the joint work of Czechoslovak cooperatives.
A place of biological superlatives with a flora and fauna that have only just begun to be researched: Lord Howe Island, between Australia and New Zealand. This is the first documentary on what may be the most isolated nature reserve on the planet.
The Australians call the endless deserts in the interior of the continent the "dead heart". Here lies the town of Birdsville, 23 houses and a bar with a liquor license. The long-awaited telephone connection arrived in 1979, 90 years after it had been applied for. For one weekend, this place at the end of the world turns into a cauldron when 5,000 Australians, tired of civilization, invade for the annual horse race, the "Birdsville Cup". They come in buses, off-road vehicles, motorcycles and sports planes and have become a veritable plague. Because here, everyone can do what they've always wanted to do: for example, get drunk until they drop and never get up again. The collective mass drinking reaches its peak on Saturday night. By Monday morning, the fun is over. What remains is a village with 23 houses, a bar and a street littered with 80,000 empty beer cans.
God's Girls describes life in a Sisters of Mercy convent in country New South Wales from the 1940's to present day. This courageous and clever film investigates the subtle complexities of change within a society that has been surrounded by mystery for hundreds of years. The stories from the women in the film reflect the often intricate paths of social, political and religious history, not only in Australia but also in the rest of the world.
L'échappée
There's a mysterious predator lurking in the depths of Australia's wild Southern Ocean, a beast that savagely devoured a great white shark in front of cinematographer David Riggs 11 years ago. Riggs's obsession to find the killer leads him to an aquatic battle zone that's remained hidden until now. Here, killer whales, colossal squid and great white sharks face off in an underwater coliseum where only the fiercest creatures of the marine world survive.
A year in the life of troubled Australian graffiti artist Justin Hughes.
Nepřítel plevel
Milk is Big Business. Behind the innocent appearances of the white stuff lies a multi-billion euro industry, which perhaps isn't so innocent…
In California’s Central Valley, tucked between the county jail and the shooting range, 100 Mexican-American farmworking families live, love and strive at the Artesi II Migrant Family Housing Center. Until every December, that is, when they’re asked to leave.
In 1980, Jack Shae and Allen Moore, two ethnographic filmmakers from Harvard University, moved their families to the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides. Over the course of 18 months they documented the everyday lives and struggles of the crofters they lived among, whom were even then a vanishing breed. The film is in English and Gaelic. This carefully observed documentary by filmmakers Jack Shae and Allen Moore is a poetic ethnographic film in the style of their mentor, Robert Gardner (“Dead Birds”). It follows the rhythm of life on a wind-swept island in the Outer Hebrides through the four seasons and in the filmmakers’ observation of the day-to-day struggles of a vanishing society we see the deep-time legacy of their kind. The film is in English and Gaelic.
takayna / Tarkine in northwestern Tasmania is home to one of the last undisturbed tracts of Gondwanan rainforest in the world, and one of the highest concentrations of Aboriginal archaeology in the hemisphere. Yet this place, which remains largely as it was when dinosaurs roamed the planet, is currently at the mercy of destructive extraction industries, including logging and mining. Weaving together the conflicting narratives of activists, locals and Aboriginal communities, and told through the experiences of a trail running doctor and a relentless environmentalist, this documentary, presented by Patagonia Films, unpacks the complexities of modern conservation and challenges us to consider the importance of our last truly wild places.
Opylování rostlin
Aki's Imagination is imbued through Tobu Himeo aka the Floating Girls. As a Japanese born Australian artist, Aki Yaguchi moulds her artwork around the interplay between her heritage and being a women within a male dominated space.
Carlos Sainz: The Operator
Eight men escape from the most isolated prison on earth. Only one man survives and the story he recounts shocks the British establishment to the core. This story is the last confession of Alexander Pearce.
Suellyn thought the Department of Community Services (DOCS) would only remove children in extreme cases, until her own grandchildren were taken in the middle of the night. Hazel decided to take on the DOCS system after her fourth grandchild was taken into state care. Jen Swan expected to continue to care for her grandchildren but DOCS deemed her unsuitable, a shock not just to her but to her sister, Deb, who was, at the time, a DOCS worker. The rate of Indigenous child removal has actually increased since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered the apology to the ‘stolen generations’ in 2008. These four grandmothers find each other and start a national movement to place extended families as a key solution to the rising number of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care. They are not only taking on the system; they are changing it…
Documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner examines how mammoth corporations have taken over all aspects of the food chain in the United States, from the farms where our food is grown to the chain restaurants and supermarkets where it's sold. Narrated by author and activist Eric Schlosser, the film features interviews with average Americans about their dietary habits, commentary from food experts like Michael Pollan and unsettling footage shot inside large-scale animal processing plants.