Living Without Menace

Guinea Pig Diaries is an unfiltered look into the lives of guinea pigs and the people who adore them, breed them, show them, and rescue them.

With a crowded arena in the background, a stationary camera records a bull charging a picador astride his horse. An attendant on foot throws stones at the rump of the horse to get it to move. Various toreadors run past the bull to try to get him to charge or at least run about.

Propped upon the tail-end of a match, a housefly performs astonishing feats, alternately juggling a series of objects - a blade of grass, a cork, a miniature dumbbell… Most extraordinary of all is the sequence in which the fly spins a ball twice its own size, while a second fly perches on top. In the final sequence, the fly repeats some of its earlier tricks while apparently seated on a tiny chair.

Two girls do one of their chores. Standing alongside a tree-lined farmhouse, two children who are about ten and four years old toss grain to a flock of about 50 domesticated ducks. A woman watches them briefly and then moves on. The older girl has her grain in a bucket, the younger one's grain is in her apron. The children stay in one spot, as does the camera; it's the ducks that move around. Chickens are in the background; only one braves the ducks' territory.

Ogni volta che il lupo

The domestic cat has conquered almost the entire globe with around 400 million animals and is now also the star of social networks. It is not clear when and how they secured the favor of humans. Archaeologists, geneticists and behavioral biologists around the world have been researching these questions for years. Their latest findings make it possible to trace the path of the house cat.

A collective project empowering people to speak up for the stories of farmed animals, with footage from 10+ countries, to raise awareness about the unnecessary suffering those animals go through every day, telling their intimate and truthful story.

After the sunset, a man wonders between the edges of the highways gathering edible roadkill animals.

Mythos Wald

In a world where farming is mechanized and farm animals are fed with products coming from across the globe, a young shepherd is trying to keep his practice sustainable by using ancestral ways to raise his flock.

The film "Wild Animals of Virginia" explores the diverse wildlife inhabiting Virginia's forests, fields, and waterways. It highlights various species such as chipmunks, squirrels, woodchucks, beavers, muskrats, minks, otters, raccoons, elk, white-tailed deer, cottontail rabbits, foxes, black bears, opossums, bobcats, and skunks. The documentary emphasizes the natural laws governing these animals, their habitats, diets, and behaviors, while also touching on their historical significance and interactions with early settlers.

Three months after the March 2011 disaster in Fukushima, TEPCO, the electric company operating the nuclear power plant, installed a livecam on the facilities. The images, on which days and minutes add up, are available online. Using them for sole visual material, such is the daring challenge Philippe Rouy has taken up in 4 bâtiments, face à la mer. (Nicola Féodoroff, FID 2012)

Inhabitants depicts animals in panic: the film is mostly filled with shots of mass migrations and stampedes (some, surprisingly, filmed from a helicopter). The title equalizes the species of the earth. Artavazd Peleshian merely alludes to the presence of human beings—a few silhouettes that seem to be the cause of these vast, anxious movements of animal fear. In many ways, this film is an ode to the animal world that moves toward formal abstraction, with clouds of silver birds pulverizing light. Peleshian said, “It’s hard to give a verbal synopsis of these films. Such films exist only on the screen, you have to see them.”

After many years of careful conservation, Banff and Jasper National Parks have become vast zoological gardens. Deer, moose, bear, big-horn sheep, birds and small animals that live above the treeline are natural subjects for the close-up camera, with a backdrop of snowy peaks.

Something strange and unpredictable takes inthe mysteriously vacant rooms of Berlin’s infamous Techno club Berghain. A group of wild animals occupy the monumental spaces of the former power station. We explore the building together with the animals and experience its dimensions from a new, nonhuman perspective. The brutality of the industrial architecture is confronted with the beauty of these shy creatures.

Every year, thousands of Antarctica's emperor penguins make an astonishing journey to breed their young. They walk, marching day and night in single file 70 miles into the darkest, driest and coldest continent on Earth. This amazing, true-life tale is touched with humour and alive with thrills. Breathtaking photography captures the transcendent beauty and staggering drama of devoted parent penguins who, in the fierce polar winter, take turns guarding their egg and trekking to the ocean in search of food. Predators hunt them, storms lash them. But the safety of their adorable chicks makes it all worthwhile. So follow the leader... to adventure!!

Deutschlands wilde Vögel

This short documentary offers a humorous look at horse-pulling contests in Ontario and the people who prepare for them. We travel from the farm to the contest, where excitement runs high and the quips do not lack in local colour. Which of these magnificent creatures will be able to pull the heaviest load and win the prize?

A family in rural area of West Java, Indonesia enjoys their time with 'Ngadu Bagong', a sundanese traditional game where dogs put to fight against a wild boar in a single event. Ngadu Bagong has always been some sort of animal abuse but it's been in the tradition for a long time. Ade Rohmat has been in the game for a long time; a hobby that he now passes on to his daughter, Ilma Nurjanah. The potentially controversial Ngadu Bagong has always brought intense emotion, prestige, and fortune upon its practicioners.

Translated literally as "Animals in Love," the French-language documentary Animaux Amoreux depicts various species of the animal kingdom in courting, mating and reproduction activities. Laurent Charbonnier directs.