Child of the Andes

The true story of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates' disastrous and nearly-fatal mountain climb of 6,344m Siula Grande in the Cordillera Huayhuash in the Peruvian Andes in 1985.

The story, told by the survivors, of a group of young men, members of a Uruguayan rugby team, who managed to survive for 72 days, at an altitude of almost 4,000 meters, in the heart of the Andes Mountains, after their plane, en route to Chile, crashed there on October 13, 1972.

Movie about David Lama climbing the Patagonian mountain Cerro Torre for the first time free, a mountain that has been dubbed the most difficult to climb in the world.

Narrated by Academy Award winners Sissy Spacek and Herbie Hancock, River of Gold is the disturbing account of a clandestine journey into Peru's Amazon rainforest to uncover the savage unraveling of pristine jungle. What will be the fate of this critical region of priceless biodiversity as these extraordinarily beautiful forests are turned into a hellish wasteland?

In the Formative Period 4,000 years before the Incas and the arrival of the Conquistadors, Peru’s earliest civilizations - the Chavín, Caral, Ventarrón, Sechin, Cupisnique, and Cajamarca cultures - built centers of learning and technological achievements, including the largest work of hydrological engineering in the ancient Americas: the Cumbemayo canals.

The last two surviving members of the Piripkura people, a nomadic tribe in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, struggle to maintain their indigenous way of life amidst the region's massive deforestation. Living deep in the rainforest, Pakyî and Tamandua live off the land relying on a machete, an ax, and a torch lit in 1998.

Florian Hartung and Dirk Pohlmann have reconstructed a previously unknown dimension of the collaboration between Nazis and the CIA in the Cold War. Drawing upon recently released documents, the film exposes for the first time a perfidious, worldwide net that reaches deep into the power structures of the Federal Republic of Germany. Lending their authority to the fact-finders’ mission are high-ranking statesmen, journalists and historians.

In 1972, a plane carrying an Uruguayan rugby team disappeared into the Argentinean Andes. Now, 50 years after one of the greatest ordeals of survival in recorded human history, the full story is finally comprehensively told through the words of each of those who lived it.

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.

A documentary revolving around the 1972 crash of the plane carrying an Uruguayan rugby team; interviews with survivors and the families of victims.

A story of three young Europeans, who fell victims to a momentary lapse of reason and currently serve their terms in prisons around South America. By following their daily lives and dissecting their deepest motivations, the film reconstructs the breaking point which turns young, optimistic, people into mere beasts of burden.

The chronicle of the political tension in Chile in 1973 and of the violent counter revolution against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

History of the first ascent of Aconcagua by the south face in February 1954 by the French shock team led by René Ferlet and composed of Lucien Bérardini, Adrien Dagory, Edmond Denis, Pierre Lesueur, Robert Paragot and Guy Poulet. In seven days of combat, they extricate themselves from the mountain in a pitiful state; all except Robert Paragot will be victims of severe frostbite which earned them amputations, some important as for “Lulu” Bérardini who lost part of his left hand.

"In Chile, when the sun rises, it had to climb hills, walls and tops before reaching the last stone of the Cordillera. In my country, the Cordillera is everywhere. But for the Chilean citizens, it is an unknown territory. After going North for Nostalgia for the Light and South for The Pearl Button, I now feel ready to shoot this immense spine to explore its mysteries, powerful revelations of Chile’s past and present history." Patricio Guzmán

The third installment in Dan Přibáň's series of travel documentaries describes the author's journey with his friends across South America in vehicles that are often notorious but cult in their own way. The charming dynamics of the group on screen are further enhanced by the high-quality craftsmanship.

Amérique latine, l'année de tous les dangers

A documentary that invites us to discover the strange path led by the explorer-ethnographer Marquis de Wavrin who, in the 1920s and 1930s, made ethnographic films in several countries of Latin America.

Since 2015, the Landless Workers Movement has been occupying an indebted sugarcane factory's land to press for its redistribution through land reform. Grandma, P.C. and their encamped fellows struggle to conquer a small share of land where they can settle down and live a self-sustainable life, growing agro-ecological crops in a newly knit peasant community they draw in their dreams.

This Traveltalk series short looks over the South American Andes mountains, and the South American west coast, also Rio de Janeiro.