In the Golden Age of Chinese Craftsmanship

Demolition of the old and building of the new Kunsthalle in Mannheim in the years 2013 to 2018.

Regular opening times do not apply as we accompany Sir David Attenborough on an after-hours journey around London’s Natural History Museum, one of his favourite haunts. The museum's various exhibits come to life, including dinosaurs, reptiles and creatures from the ice age.

In this documentary, we go back to the beginning and tell the origin story of Scotty the T. Rex and how it was discovered on that fateful day in 1991. We also showcase the lasting impact the discovery had on the town of Eastend and the Paleo world in Canada. In 2019, Scotty was proclaimed the biggest in the world. Believed to be a female, she measured over 13 m or just over 42.6 feet long and weighed over 8.8 metric tons. Discovered in the dinosaur-rich Frenchman Formation, Scotty's bones have been carefully preserved and are stored at the T. Rex Discovery Centre in Eastend, Saskatchewan.

This film follows the lives of undocumented Vietnamese workers in Taiwan doing odd jobs to survive, after having been forced to flee their employers due to harsh working conditions and lack of medical care. How will living this way for more than a decade shape their lives?

Two girls in the bloom of youth meet at a vocational training program. Afterwards, their lives move in completely different directions.

Commentator-comic Bill Maher plays devil's advocate with religion as he talks to believers about their faith. Traveling around the world, Maher examines the tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and raises questions about homosexuality, proof of Christ's existence, Jewish Sabbath laws, violent Muslim extremists.

Inaugurated in 1986 by François Mitterrand, a link between the Louvre and Pompidou, Orsay houses the largest collection of Impressionist art in the world. Project after project, the museum has been transformed to modernize and welcome more visitors, while preserving its historic character. Challenges taken up with each new project.

'Peng! Snowman' is a feature length documentary about a farmer's son who became one of the worldwide best martial artists. Just forget what you know about martial arts master. Peng will redefine the term: He's a funny, crazy genius! At the age of 60, Peng Wu-Chi was willing to share his incredible story for the first and last time - before he disappeared.

As soon as he came to power in 2012, Xi Jinping clearly stated his ambition for a national renaissance. He will combine this with the construction of a powerful army and a certain vision of Chinese territory, which includes the reunification of Taiwan. In this quest, control of the oceans has become a crucial issue, and America an obstacle. In the South China Sea and the Pacific, the Chinese Communist Party has been pursuing a strategy to undermine American influence for the past decade. Relying on the active participation of maritime militias - fishermen trained by the military - China is creating a grey area between war and peace that destabilizes both its neighbors and the world's leading military power.

At the peak of Perestroika, in 1987, in the village of Gorki, where Lenin spent his last years, after a long construction, the last and most grandiose museum of the Leader was opened. Soon after the opening, the ideology changed, and the flow of pilgrims gradually dried up. Despite this, the museum still works and the management is looking for ways to attract visitors. Faithful to the Lenin keepers of the museum as they can resist the onset of commercialization. The film tells about the modern life of this amazing museum-reserve and its employees.

The natural sciences museum of La Plata, Argentina, had indigenous people held captive as study objects in the past, and their skeletons were on exhibit for many decades. The story of Krygi, served as a trigger to look back at the ideologies that defined us as individuals and as a people.

Taipeilove* is a documentary on the perception of homosexuality in the Taiwanese society. As Taiwan is the first country in Asia that is in the process of legalizing same-sex marriage, the documentary follows activists, politicians and experts in the Taiwanese society who have been fighting for marriage equality and navigating their lives through the hardship of coming-out, reaction of families, abandonment and finding love.

A century ago the Torres Strait Island were the subjects of the famous Cambridge Anthropological Expedition - the resulting depletion of their cultural artifacts left them with nothing but a history of remembered loss. The only people in the Pacific to make elaborate turtleshell masks have none left - they are all in foreign museums. In a quest to reclaim the past, Ephraim Bani, a wise and knowledgeable Torres Strait Islander, travels with his wife to the great museums of Europe where his heritage lies. The film, an SBS Independent production, shows that the thickest of masks cracks when a descendant of the original owners enters a museum.

From the desk on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence to Dorothy's ruby slippers, the National Museum of American History houses many of America's greatest treasures and icons. Learn the stories of how they came to be a part of the museum's collection, and meet the people who have restored some of these treasures.

Taiwan - Angst vor der Invasion

What if there was a museum that contained every type of life form in the universe? This experience takes you on a tour through the possible forms alien life might take, from the eerily familiar to the utterly exotic, ranging from the inside of the Earth to the most hostile corners of the universe. New research is upending our idea of life and where it could be hiding: not just on Earth-like planets, where beings could mimic what our planet has produced, but in far flung places like the hearts of dead stars and the rings of gas giant planets. Nowhere in the universe is off limits. Only when we know what else is out there will we truly know ourselves. This thought experiment will give us a glimpse into what could be out there, how we might find it, and just how far nature’s imagination might stretch.

Williamstown, Kentucky, is home to the Ark Encounter – a “life-size” creationist museum filled with all of the creatures that traveled in Noah's Ark, including dinosaurs. With incredible access to the park leading up to its opening, the filmmakers expose the larger system behind the creationist movement, piecing together the many factors that have led to the museum presenting its information as historical fact, and the people who are fighting to set the scientific record straight. Amid a climate of science denial and a well-funded corporate behemoth, three Kentuckians (a local geologist, an ex-creationist, and an atheist activist) try their best to challenge the movement that is taking over their home state. Meanwhile, fervent believers work diligently to create the lifelike animatronics that will be on display in the Ark.

Paintings conservators at the Getty Center reveal details of their craft as they restore two large paintings by French master Jean-Baptiste Oudry.

Taiwan is at the heart of a struggle between two nuclear powers – China and the United States - and there are fears it will become the next global conflict. President Xi Jinping insists Taiwan is part of China and must re-unify with the motherland. But Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, says the island is already independent and must maintain its freedom and democracy. Jane Corbin investigates how the Taiwanese government and young people are fighting what they say is Chinese disinformation, cyber attacks and dirty tricks.

The Kabul National Museum, once known as the "face of Afghanistan," was destroyed in 1993. We filmed the most important cultural treasures of the still-intact museum in 1988: ancient Greco-Roman art and antiquitied of Hellenistic civilization, as well as Buddhist sculpture that was said to have mythology--the art of Gandhara, Bamiyan, and Shotorak among them. After the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992, some seventy percent of the contents of the museum was destroyed, stolen, or smuggled overseas to Japan and other countries. The movement to return these items is also touched upon. The footage in this video represents that only film documentation of the Kabul Museum ever made.