memories/fortress

Nai Nai follows the story of a Chinese immigrant grandmother, Chu-Ming Wu. Known as “Nai Nai,” Chu-Ming has always been a woman of control. But her grasp of reality and the control of her own mind is slipping away. Told through the lens of her grandson, the film focuses on the joyful, heartbreaking and intimate moments in the last chapters of her life.

During the rice sowing season, Jun, a young Catalan of Chinese origin, works as a seasonal worker in the Ebro Delta. This ancient labour will make him confront his own roots and the distance that separates him from his family.

Thomas Haemmerli is about to celebrate his fortieth birthday when he learns of his mother's death. A further shock follows when he and his brother Erik discover her apartment, which is filthy and full to bursting with junk. It takes the brothers an entire month to clean out the place. Among the chaos, they find films going back to the 1930s, photos and other memorabilia.

The story of a family marked by tragedy gives rise to a reflection on memory, emotional ties, family secrets and the difficulty for new generations of knowing and accepting life events.

Hemshej

Keenly aware that his niece is going through a particularly rough time at home, Uncle James teaches Ava Dee how to use the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. As an experiment, he tells her to shoot whatever she wants and he'll edit it into a film.

A filmmaker's poetic memories of her father.

Arctic Tale is a 2007 documentary film from the National Geographic Society about the life cycle of a walrus and her calf, and a polar bear and her cubs, in a similar vein to the 2005 hit production March of the Penguins, also from National Geographic.

Explore the life and legacy of actor Paul Walker, the Southern California native who cut his teeth as a child actor before breaking out in the blockbuster Fast and Furious movie franchise.

The documentary's title translates as "to be and to have", the two auxiliary verbs in the French language. It is about a primary school in the commune of Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, Puy-de-Dôme, France, the population of which is just over 200. The school has one small class of mixed ages (from four to twelve years), with a dedicated teacher, Georges Lopez, who shows patience and respect for the children as we follow their story through a single school year.

In Uganda, AIDS-infected mothers have begun writing what they call Memory Books for their children. Aware of the illness, it is a way for the family to come to terms with the inevitable death that it faces. Hopelessness and desperation are confronted through the collaborative effort of remembering and recording, a process that inspires unexpected strength and even solace in the face of death.

The vessel is Infinity, a 120-foot hand-built sailboat, crewed by a band of miscreants. The journey, an 8,000 mile Pacific crossing from New Zealand to Patagonia, with a stop in Antarctica. Unlike all the other boats heading to the Southern Ocean, Infinity is no ice-reinforced super-yacht crewed by professional sailors; rather, Infinity lives in the moment and sails on a whim. What can be found in abundance on board is blood, sweat, enthusiasm, risk tolerance, disdain for authority, and an ample supply of alcohol – all in all a mad voyage of reckless adventure just for the sheer joy of it. Along the way the crew will battle a hurricane of ice in the Ross Sea, assist the radical environmental group Sea Shepherd in their fight with illegal whalers, and tear every sail they have. At the heart of their journey is a quest for awe and a sense of wonder with the raw power of the natural world.

Chandler Wild, A New York based filmmaker, travels 6,700 miles to the end of the road in Alaska to honor his deceased father by naming a mountain after him.

Meet three families from around the world as they keep households with 13, 16 and even more than 150 family members organized on a daily basis.

A young director tries to understand his estranged relationship with his father

The lecturer shows a microcinematographic sequence of spirochaetes and drawings of the gonoccus (the bacteria responsible for syphilis and gonorrhea). He then turns to an easel and begins to draw 'the road of health'; the cartoon takes this up in magic drawing, in a style that is highly reminiscent of the 'Giro the Germ' series made for the Health and Cleanliness Council a few years before.

Between September 2012 and May 2013, France is debating the upcoming marriage equality laws. During those nine months, sociologist Irène Théry talks about what is at stake with her son Mathias Théry, who will make a movie with Étienne Chaillou out of those hours of conversations. It is a documentary about the social debate in France, but also about family and intimacy.

National Film Board of Canada documentary of stories of Acadians (French Canadians from the eastern Maritime provinces). Hundreds of thousands of Acadians emigrated to Louisiana following deportation by the British during the Acadian Expulsion of the mid-18th century, hence the term 'Cajun.'

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

In this layered short film, filmmaker Janine Windolph takes her young sons fishing with their kokum (grandmother), a residential school survivor who retains a deep knowledge and memory of the land. The act of reconnecting with their homeland is a cultural and familial healing journey for the boys, who are growing up in the city. It’s also a powerful form of resistance for the women.