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Dated to the late Stone Age, Stonehenge may be the best known and most mysterious relic of prehistory. Every year a million visitors are drawn to England to gaze upon the famous circle of stones, but the monument's meaning has continued to elude us. Now, investigations inside and around Stonehenge have kicked off a dramatic new era of discovery and debate over who built Stonehenge and for what purpose. How did prehistoric people quarry, transport, sculpt, and erect these giant stones? Granted exclusive access to the dig site at Bluestonehenge, a prehistoric stone-circle monument recently discovered about a mile from Stonehenge, NOVA cameras join a new generation of researchers finding important clues to this enduring mystery.
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Play with Window Media Player: 300k or 700k
Length: 60 min.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Gail Willumsen
Producer: Gail Willumsen and Jill Shinefield
Distributor: PBS Distribution
Distributor Web site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-stonehenge.html
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The Great Sphinx has cast its enigmatic gaze over Egypt's Giza Plateau for forty-five centuries. The biggest and oldest statue in a land of colossal ancient monuments, its mighty head is as tall as the White House and its body is nearly the length of a football field. Surprisingly, the scribes of Egypt's Old Kingdom passed over it in silence, inspiring countless theories of its mysterious origins. Adding to the enigma, archeologists found that its creators abruptly discarded their tools and abandoned the Sphinx near completion. Searching for clues, NOVA's expert team of archeologists, including Mark Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, carries out eye-opening experiments that reveal the techniques and incredible labor that was invested in the carving of this gigantic sculpture. The team also unearths new discoveries about the people who built the Sphinx and why they created such a haunting and stupendous image.
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Length: 56 min.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Gary Glassman
Producer: Gary Glassman
Distributor: PBS distribution
Distributor Web site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/riddles-sphinx.html
Festival Screenings and Awards:
CINE Golden Eagle Awards; Banff World Television awards, science and technology category.
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Latvian scientists, archaeologists, radar and photogrammetry specialists, architects, geologists, historians, computer programmers, and others alike banded together to create a unique technology for exploring archaeological sites. With their new techniques they made a sensational discovery in 2007. In the oldest stone building in the world, Egypt's Pyramid of Djoser, the Latvian scientific expedition discovered new underground rooms as well as a network of galleries. This new information has forced a re-evaluation of previous assumptions about the role and function of pyramids.
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Play with Windows Media Player: 300k or 700k
Length: 93 min.
Country: Latvia
Language: Latvian with English subtitles
Director: Ramualds Pipars
Producer: Baiba Urbane, Romaulds Pipars
Producer Web site: www.gilde.lv
Distributor: Film Studio Gilde
Distributor Web site: www.gilde.lv
Festival Screenings and Awards:
East Silver Market, 2010; Broadcast on Latvian Public Television Channel 1, 2011.
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Countless treasure-seekers have set off in search of King Solomon's mines, inspired by the Bible's account of splendid temples and palaces adorned in glittering gold and copper. Yet to date, the evidence claimed to support the existence of Solomon and other early kings in the Bible has been highly controversial. In fact, so little physical evidence has been found of the kings who ruled Israel and Edom that many contend that they are no more real than King Arthur. In the summer of 2010, NOVA and National Geographic embarked on two cutting-edge field investigations that illuminate the legend of Solomon and reveal the source of the great wealth that powered the first mighty biblical kingdoms. These groundbreaking expeditions expose important new clues buried in the pockmarked desert of Jordan, including ancient remnants of an industrial-scale copper mine and a 3,000-year-old message with the words "slave," "king," and "judge."
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Length: 60 min.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Graham Townsley
Producer: Graham Townsley
Distributor: National Geographic Television
Distributor Web site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/quest-solomons-mines.html
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The Wat Phou archaeological site in Laos has brought to light proof of an entire Khmer city contemporary with the city of Angkor in Cambodia. The director of the excavations, Patrizia Zolese, began the excavation campaign during the Nineties, basing her intuition on some rather scarce mappings and scientific documents which were handed down by her French predecessors from the beginning of the century. Following some extended and difficult scouting and excavation works, she managed to obtain permission from the Laotian government to systematically continue her scientific research. Today, the area has become the most important archaeological park of Southeast Asia and has been declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. One of Professor Zolese's young students follows daily life on the excavation site and discovers the relationship that has been built up over this twenty-year collaboration period between the Italian mission, government authorities and the local population that is doing its best to rediscover its own cultural identity.
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Length: 30 min.
Country: Italy
Language: Italian with English subtitles
Director: Isabella Astengo
Producer: Duna Film International and Rai Educational
Producer Web site: www.educational.rai.it/
Distributor: Duna Film International
Distributor Web site: www.omd.hu/en/ugyfel/uip-duna-film
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"Better take a photo now as it will be no more," comments a local man as activist Zhang Jinqi snaps a photo of the man's traditional home in one of Beijing's narrow lane-ways. Zhang Jinqi's photography project, Memories of China, documents the remaining heritage districts of the old city which soon will be demolished. Focusing on the transition from old to new, the documentary gives a panoramic view of the biggest construction boom in history while charting the modern face of Beijing and its newly iconic buildings such as Watercube, Birds Nest Stadium and the National Theater. Wallace-Crabbe's film is a fascinating record of a period of extraordinary change in one of the oldest cities on earth.
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Length: 53 min.
Country: Australia
Language: English
Director: Georgia Wallace-Crabbe
Producer: Film Projects Plc, Gregory Miller & Georgia Wallace-Crabbe
Producer Web site: www.filmprojects.com.au
Distributor: Off The Fence Netherlands
Distributor Web site: www.offthefence.com
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This animated film is based on an indigenous tale from the Amazon Forest, in which young Naia learns from her tribe's elders stories of how the stars in the sky came to be. According to legend, the moon came out at night in search of the most beautiful Indian women. When he fell in love with a beautiful woman he would shine his light on her, transforming her blood into light, making her a star so she could be by his side forever. Naia falls in love with him instead and runs deep into the jungle to let his light shine on her. Seeing the moon's reflection in a deep lake, Naia believes that the moon came from heaven to take her. The young girl is not transformed into a star, but still finds her place close to the moon.
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Length: 13 min.
Country: Brazil
Language: Guarani with English subtitles
Director: Leandro Tadashi
Producer: Leandro Tadashi
Distributor: Leandro Tadashi
Festival Screenings and Awards:
Gramado Film Festival, Brazil, 2010; Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival, Brazil, 2010; Goiania Short Show.
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In the 3rd Century AD, the Roman Emperor Septimus Severus, known as "the African" because he was born in Leptis Magna, turned the ancient Cathaginian trading center into a metropolis of 300,000 inhabitants. It was the third largest in the Empire, but soon was abandoned to the desert and lay covered in sand until its discovery in the 20th Century. The excellent condition and beauty of the excavated sites conjures a vision of what the city must have been like 1700 years ago. Leptis Magna was an influential, bustling, cosmopolitan city with a prosperous port and a market which was renowned as far away as Rome. All in marble with flowing water, Leptis Magna rivaled the wealth of Rome and flaunted its power to the people of Africa. Based on recent research by teams of Italian, German and French archaeologists, this film tells the story of mad ambition by a civilization which decided to transform a trading center into a capital city and did everything it could to succeed at making the "desert blossom."
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Length: 52 min.
Country: France
Language: English
Director: Baudouin Koenig
Producer: Bonin Cédric
Producer Web site: http://www.seppia.fr
Distributor: Seppia Sarl
Distributor Web site: http://www.seppia.fr
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This documentary film examines what archaeologists are learning about daily lives of Euro-American settlers, slaves, laborers, and immigrants during the 1800s. The storytellers travel to historic sites across the Commonwealth, blending interviews with video, artifacts, archival photographs, and original animation for a fascinating look into the lives of ordinary people of the historic era in Kentucky. The documentary is presented in four segments based on archaeological periods; the Frontier, the Antebellum, Civil War, and Industrial. Each segment features key scientific discoveries made by some of the states' top archaeologists of the past decade.
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Length: 58 min.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: David Pollack
Producer: Tom Law, Voyageur Media Group, Inc.
Producer Web site: voyageurmedia.org
Distributor: Kentucky Heritage Council/ Kentucky Archaeological Survey
Distributor Web site: heritage.ky.gov/kas
Festival Screenings and Awards:
Premiere on Kentucky Educational Television channels, 2010; Society for American Archaeology Film Competition, 2010; Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting, St. Louis, Missouri, 2010.
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In 2007, Archaeological Services Inc. began an investigation to uncover the Murderer's Graveyard, home to some of Canada's most infamous criminals. Hangman's Graveyard is a dark and haunting tale of rogues, rakes and villains as a modern day archaeological investigation seeks to uncover and identify the remains of the executed inmates of Toronto's notorious Old Don Jail. They discover the skeletal remains of fifteen men who went to the gallows between 1880 and 1932. Who were these men? What were their crimes? The film follows the lives of three of the men found in the forgotten cemetery and examines the history of the Don Jail, capital punishment in Canada, and the nation's most feared hangman, Arthur Ellis.
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Length: 47 min.
Country: Canada
Language: English
Director: Mick Grogan
Producer: Daniel Thomson
Producer Web site: www.danielthomson.ca
Distributor: Ballinran Productions
Distributor Web site: www.ballinran.com
Festival Screenings and Awards:
Premiere on History Television, 2009; Special Screening, The Ontario Archaeological Society's 36th annual symposium, 2009; Official Selection, DocFest, Stratford, Ontario, 2009; Nominated Best Editorial Research, Gemini Awards; Public Communications Award, Canadian Archaeological Association; Director of Photography nominated Docudrama Cinematography, Canadian Society of Cinematographers Award; Nominated Heritage Toronto Award in the Media Category, 2010.
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To visit this site is to take a journey into history. The reason is as simple as it is unbelievable: in the forest of Saint-Sauveur, France, fifty craftsmen are constructing a castle following 13th Century techniques. The forest provides them with their building materials: water, stone, earth, sand, and wood. Construction uses no excavator, no drill, no electricity, and no internal combustion engine is in use. Quarriers, stone hewers, masons, and carpenters are working as they would have seven centuries ago as more than 300,000 visitors come each year to watch. It is a continuous, lively, and progressive building yard where towers, curtains, and the keep will spend twenty-five years emerging from the earth. Reinhard Kungel and his film team began working at Guédelon in 1999.
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Length: 84 min.
Country: Germany
Language: English
Director: Reinhard Kungel
Producer: Reinhard Kungel
Producer Web site: www.rk-film.de
Distributor: RK Film
Distributor Web site: www.rk-film.de
