A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
The brief life of Jean Michel Basquiat, a world renowned New York street artist struggling with fame, drugs and his identity.
The documentary film of the brief window of artistic freedom and democracy movement 1978 - 1982 following China's brutal cultural revolution.
Draussen bleiben
An attempt to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes violently, in the Basque Country, in northern Spain.
The Tibetans refer to the Dalai Lama as 'Kundun', which means 'The Presence'. He was forced to escape from his native home, Tibet, when communist China invaded and enforced an oppressive regime upon the peaceful nation. The Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959 and has been living in exile in Dharamsala ever since.
In operation to this day, the mansion known as Madame Satan began its activities in 1983, and in the 1980s was the main hub of avant-garde artists of the city, from which came out disparate and essential names for music, performing arts, visual arts, journalism, photo and video of Sao Paulo, as well as mythical characters of the night of São Paulo who made history with their absurd and impactful performances.
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983. In the last and turbulent days of the military dictatorship, Alicia, a high school history teacher, begins to ask uncomfortable questions about the dark origins of Gaby, her adopted daughter.
Tucumán, Argentina, 1965. Three years before George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead was released, director Ofelio Linares Montt shot Zombies in the Sugar Cane Field, which turned out to be both a horror film and a political statement. It was a success in the US, but could not be shown in Argentina due to Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship, and was eventually lost. Writer and researcher Luciano Saracino embarks on the search for the origins of this cursed work.
The adventure of the minitel, a small cubic terminal with a folding keyboard that began in the 1970s in the labs of France Telecom, is closely linked to Alsace. Alsatians had then in hand the future tools of interactive communication. What remains today of all those minitel years? Like a nocturnal and intimate road-movie, this documentary went to meet the last people who are still interested in the minitel, this strange beige box of access to telematic services, corny today, but pioneers at the end of the last century.
Undercover in Tibet reveals the regime of terror which dominates daily life and makes freedom of expression an impossibility. Tash meets victims of arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and ‘disappearances’ and uncovers evidence of enforced sterilizations on ethnic Tibetan women. He sees for himself the impact of the enormous military and police presence in the region, the hunger and hardship being endured by many Tibetans and hears warnings of the uprising taking place across the provinces now.
Sudan, East Africa, 1980. A team of Israeli Mossad agents plans to rescue and transfer thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. To do so, and to avoid raising suspicions from the inquisitive and ruthless authorities, they establish as a cover a fake diving resort by the Red Sea.
Diplomats, soldiers and other representatives of a dozen nations fend off the siege of the International Compound in Peking during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. The disparate interests unite for survival despite competing factions, overwhelming odds, delayed relief and tacit support of the Boxers by the Empress of China and her generals.
The silence behind the genocide of the Rohingyas in Burma.
Turkey's history has been shaped by two major political figures: Mustafa Kemal (1881-1934), known as Atatürk, the Father of the Turks, founder of the modern state, and the current president Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, who apparently wants Turkey to regain the political and military pre-eminence it had as an empire under the Ottoman dynasty.
Iran, January 16th, 1979. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi flees after being overthrown. Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Tehran and proclaims the Islamic Republic on April 1st, 1979. In the same year, Saddam Hussein seizes power in Iraq and, after several border skirmishes, attacks Iran on September 22nd, 1980, initiating a cruel war that will last eight years. Since its outbreak, correspondent Saeid Sadeghi documented it from its beginning to its bitter end.
In 1985, a spy risks everything to stop a conspiracy that threatens to prolong the dictatorship in Brazil. While facing the military, she becomes involved in a forbidden romance with the heiress of a megacorp.
Historias de las montañas de la bruma
The film begins following the British victory of the first Opium War and the seizure of Hong Kong. Although the island is largely uninhabited and the terrain unfriendly, it has a large port that both the British government and various trading companies believe will be useful for the import of merchandise to be traded on mainland China, a highly lucrative market.