Social & External
Orson Welles presents a proposed film project to prospective investors in Spain. Speaking to an audience of wealthy arts patrons, Welles outlines his vision for an improvised, documentary-style fiction set in the world of bullfighting, centered on a solitary, existential matador who stands apart from his peers. As he expounds on cinema, performance, and the ritualized spectacle of death, the film captures a project that would ultimately remain unrealized.
This early travelogue film, made in a Kenyan train station, captures an impromptu musical performance. Some passengers eagerly join in while others sleep—blissfully unaware of the performance taking place around them.
In search of the lucrative matsutake mushroom, two former soldiers discover the means to gradually heal their wounds of war. Roger, a self-described 'fall-down drunk' and sniper in Vietnam, and Kouy, a Cambodian refugee who fought the Khmer Rouge, bonded in the bustling tent-city known as Mushroom Camp, which pops up each autumn in the Oregon woods. Their friendship became an adoptive family; according to a Cambodian custom, if you lose your family like Kouy, you must rebuilt it anew. Now, however, this new family could be lost. Roger's health is declining and trauma flashbacks rack his mind; Kouy gently aids his family before the snow falls and the hunting season ends, signaling his time to leave.
When this film’s director was still a boy, he stood in front of “Flotel Europa“ and was hugely excited about the prospect of this gigantic ship moored in the port of Copenhagen becoming a new home for him, his mother and his older brother. Together with about 1000 other refugees from the former Yugoslavia, they started life anew on the ship.
The documentary tells the story of one day in Smara, a refugee camp in the south of Algeria. A handmade symbolic toke takes us through the lives of six characters and the reality of the situation in Sahara: The past, present and future of a population without land who want that their words will be heard by the world.
In Zaatari, Jordan – one of the world’s biggest refugee camps – Maamun owns a little shop: a small white container aligned in a seemingly endless row of identical containers. There he repairs mobile phones of the numerous Syrian refugees. They are anxious to retrieve the devices’ content which consists of memories from the past, a time when the war had yet to begin and they were not yet refugees but just ordinary people. Maamun and his friend Karim invent a new way to satisfy their customers: they buy a printer to print the photos, allowing the camp dwellers to retrieve some of their identity. The film provides an insight into the daily goings-on in a refugee camp.
The film documents Palestinian everyday's life under Isreali occupation in East Jerusalem. It uncovers Isreals policy of judaizing the city in order to gain Jewish majority by driving out Palestinian people from the city. The documentary includes interviews with Palestinian as well as Isreali political leaders, political analysts and human right activists.
Follow Chris Cotter, an American traveler, as he explores a common migration path through Ethiopia and into Israel, tracking the plight of Eritrean refugees. Chris and his crew visit several refugee camps, including the never-before-documented Afar region. The refugees tell stories of oppression, torture, and survival. Searching for solutions, Chris speaks to various NGOs and experts, including Assistant Secretary of State, Anne Richard. The outlook is bleak, but the spirit of the Eritrean refugees is hard to ignore.
Refugee here I am, is a musical documentary based on the life of a Congolese Musician Enzo Ikah, a refugee and a renown reggae artist living in Istanbul.
Four clowns tour Germany to perform for Syrian refugees.
Jelani secretly married a woman from a different tribe. They fled their country in order to avoid being killed. On foot – and every other way they could – they arrived at a river, months later. Some people die crossing it; others swim across it and enter Europe. But, once they set foot in the first European country, Greece, they found themselves and their children homeless and socially excluded, without being able to move on or go back. Their only solution is to enter Germany illegally, the smugglers say. But they have no money to pay for the whole family to travel. Jelani is faced with the dilemma: If one of the children leaves unaccompanied and arrives safe and sound in Germany, he or she can help the family obtain visas to enter that country. His children will learn in a violent way either how one finds their own planet or how one creates it from scratch; and whether Germany is really the solution or just a new nightmare.
Nearly 20 years since the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, there are people who still live in refugee Centers, usually located on the outskirts of cities and villages. In such centers what should have been temporary has become indefinite. Collecting medicinal herbs or scraps from nearby coal mines and raising children who were born as refugees in their own country are just some aspects of the monotonous daily life of the people in Ježevci.
Along an overgrown rail track south of the Zairean town Kisangani, a UN expedition together with a handful of journalists discover “lost” refugees. They are eighty thousand Hutus from far away Rwanda, the last survivors of three years of hunger and armed persecution that transpired throughout the vast Congo basin. The Hutu-refugees leave the forest, gathering in two gigantic camps. Hundreds of refugees die every day from diseases and malnutrition The Rwandans are promised repatriation with airplanes out of Kisangani. The film traces those refugees into the heart of the rainforest, and the hopeless attempts to help them.. But only four weeks later, the unprotected UN-camps are again attacked by machine-gun fire, deliberately massacred by factions of the rebel army (AFDL) of today’s Democratic Republic Congo. Eighty thousand men, women and children disappear once again back into the jungle. (jedensvet.cz)
The construction of a boat on the island of Anjouan, used to transport migrants over 70km to the island of Mayotte – the outermost region of the European Union.
Each year 400.000 people from Africa, Asia and Middle East, try to enter Europe. They flee from war, persecution and poverty. Since the ways by land have been interrupted, they board overloaded vessels and face a dangerous and often deadly voyage across the Mediterranean.
Chasing Asylum tells the story of Australia's cruel, inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, examining the human, political, financial and moral impact of current and previous policy.
Brussels, Béguinage church. Migrants organize a hunger strike to obtain papers. A man dies. Tunisia, Libya. A border camp of Choucha refugees tell the horror of crossing the Sahara to the north. Liège. In a refugee center, a man narrates his Mediterranean crossing in a chamber of air. Three moments of a battle for survival.
More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II. Filmmaker Ai Weiwei examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over the course of one year in 23 countries, Weiwei follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretch across the globe, including Afghanistan, France, Greece, Germany and Iraq.
Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creators of the hit television series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, reflect on the creation of the masterful series.
In this documentary, recovering addict and amputee John Wood finds himself in a stranger-than-fiction battle to reclaim his mummified leg from Southern entrepreneur Shannon Whisnant, who found it in a grill he bought at an auction and believes it therefore to be his rightful property.
Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
A behind the scenes look into George Romero's groundbreaking horror classic Night of the Living Dead.
Filmmaker Christopher Quinn observes the ordeal of three Sudanese refugees -- Jon Bul Dau, Daniel Abul Pach and Panther Bior -- as they try to come to terms with the horrors they experienced in their homeland, while adjusting to their new lives in the United States.
The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.
After another 7 year wait, director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born children from Seven Up! and 7 Plus Seven. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
After a 7 year wait, director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born children from Seven Up! The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
A musical study of Los Angeles in the late 90s, where homeless teens roam the streets and profess to live a punk lifestyle of music, drugs, and flouting authority.
This real-life look at FBI counterterrorism operations features access to both sides of a sting: the government informant and the radicalized target.
Hundreds of refugee children in Sweden, who have fled with their families from extreme trauma, have become afflicted with 'uppgivenhetssyndrom,' or Resignation Syndrome. Facing deportation, they withdraw from the world into a coma-like state, as if frozen, for months, or even years.
A depiction of the Wrangelkiez neighbourhood in Berlin. The people portrayed tell their life stories. One woman came to the neighbourhood a decade ago to work in Berlin’s still unfinished Brandenburger Airport, one man reminisces his childhood on a Tobacco farm in Kentucky, another speaks of an exceptional day in an otherwise monotonous workplace. These portraits are interwoven with the story of Elpi, a Greek woman who is waiting for the long overdue visit of an old important friend. The outcome of this mixture is a film which captures the lives and perspectives of some of Wrangelkiez’s most commanding citizens, while at the same time evoking the loss that change and time passing means for places and for people.
Just two years away from turning 30, participants in Michael Apted's documentary series are facing serious questions of identity and purpose, wondering whether they've found their place in the world.
Years spent recording footage of creatures from every corner of the globe is bound to produce a bit of drama. Here's a behind-the-scenes look.
Photographer Estevan Oriol and artist Mister Cartoon turned their Chicano roots into gritty art, impacting street culture, hip hop and beyond.
Documentary of the making of the sequel to the popular Schwarzenegger film, The Terminator.
Serial killer Dennis Nilsen narrates his life and horrific crimes via a series of chilling audiotapes recorded from his jail cell.
A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.
A comedic, brutally honest documentary following self-destructive TV writer Dan Harmon as he takes his live podcast on a national tour.
