Mont Saint-Michel is among the world’s celebrated silhouettes. Millions visit annually. It fascinates, tightly wrapped in walls, seeming to soar skyward out of the very rock itself. A labyrinth of narrow passages finds the foot of this monumental Norman abbey. Its interior echoes 15 centuries of eventful history. Combining sanctuary, abbey, fortress, and prison, Mont Saint-Michel blends eras and purposes. What happened here? For whom were these majestic halls designed? Who moldered in its prison? What do hidden passageways tell of medieval monastic life? How was this edifice affixed atop this gigantic crag? Questions abound. Now, a huge restoration effort gives historians, archaeologists, and scientists opportunities for closer examination. Via innovative approaches, these explorations can delve deeper than ever before, possibly solving many architectural mysteries, revealing the stories that forged this wonder. And revealing how an abbot’s legendary dream birthed a marvel, balanced between the heavens and the sea.
Screening time: 11:50 - 12:47 PM, Sunday, May 5, 2019
Length: 59 mins.
Country: France
Language: English
Director: Marc Jampolsky
Producer: Gedeon Programmes
Distributor: Terranoa
With time’s passage, remembering becomes a form of sleepwalking. One-time émigrés of Manchuria and of its legendary city, Harbin, take us on a journey of memory back to China. For many—Russians, Poles, Germans, and Japanese—who left the country of the “last emperor” during the late 1940s and 50s, remembering borders on obsession. For Kumiko Muraoka, a Japanese-French poet, only forgetting alleviates the pain of losing her childhood home. Her amnesia provides more than a metaphor for the whole story: what can, and cannot, be retained and recovered. Via interviews in China, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, and Russia between 2009 and 2017, plus photographs and archival footage, this film attempts to make the effects of loss and nostalgia palpable and somehow to include the viewer.
Screening time: 10:10-11:15 AM, Sunday, May 5, 2019
Length: 64 mins.
Country: Canada
Language: Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Russian (with English subtitles)
Director: Thomas Lahusen
Producer: Chemodan Films
Distributor: Chemodan Films
Leonardo da Vinci is not just the superlative of all painters—he is iconic, a superstar. Yet the person eludes us. Accounts during his lifetime describe one too handsome, too strong, too perfect. But in 2008, chance discovery in Italy of an ancient portrait with strangely familiar features gripped the art world. Was this a previously unknown Leonardo self-portrait? Controversy erupted. Such would have far reaching implications for our understanding of Leonardo’s work. Like a CSI for art, this film recounts the heart of an extensive investigation involving world-renowned experts, art historians, scientists, and even police detectives. The newest, most advanced scientific techniques plunge us back 600 years into the life of Leonardo. Like passing us through a mirror, this film recreates probable events surrounding this portrait’s creation in the brilliant, decadent Florence of the early Renaissance, living its last moments of artistic glory.
Screening time: 4:00-5:27 PM, Sunday, May 5, 2019
Length: 86 mins
Country: France
Language: French and English with English subtitles
Director: Luca Travellesi Asana
Producer: ARTE FRANCE, ZED PRODUCTION, SYDONIA
Twelve thousand years ago, the first inhabitants arrive on the Greek island of Kythera. A truck full of antiquities is escorted by the police. A museum is under construction. A man asks his great grandfather “why do we dig in the earth?” Parallel stories slumber in the ground, covered by soil. The soil we dig up to make roads and build our homes upon, plant our gardens in, the soil that gave clay to the potters and painters of antiquity for their art, is the same soil that is the protective shroud of centuries gone by.
Screening time: 7:17-8:08 PM, Thursday, May 2, 2019
Length: 50 mins.
Country: Greece
Language: Modern Greek, with English Subtitles
Director: George Didimiotis
Producer: George Didimiotis
Lost mines, abandoned diggings, ghost towns! The very words conjure enigmatic images of the Old West—of the thousands of towns and mining camps that boomed and died during that brief era when men scrambled through unexplored territory, searching for the next big gold strike. Today, the old hotels and saloons stand in mute testimony to a fabled but faded past, when prospectors came to gamble, find and lose fortunes, or die without revealing the locations of rich and elusive mines. Their tales continue to fascinate and intrigue us—and even to haunt us.
Screening time: 2:32-3:30 PM, Sunday, May 5, 2019
Length: 57 mins.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: E. S. Knightchilde
Producer: Todd P. Prescott
Distributor: Knight Sky Pictures, LLC
One day 13,000 years ago, a slight, malnourished, unlucky teenager missed her footing and tumbled into a 100-foot pit deep inside a Yucatán cave. Rising seas flooded it, cutting it off from the outside — until a team of divers chanced upon her nearly complete skeleton in 2007. Intricate detective work revealed that her bones are among the earliest known human remains in the Americas. What drove her nearly a mile underground inside that vast cave? Where did her people come from? Why does she look so different from today’s Native Americans? From this stunning Mexico cave to the Yukon wilderness, from the genetics lab to the forefront of forensics, NOVA pursues tantalizing new clues that are rewriting the story of the forgotten first people who ventured into the Americas.
Screening time:5:45-6:39 PM, Sunday, May 5, 2019
Length: 53 mins.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Graham Townsley
Producer: Graham Townsley
Distributor: WGBH (NOVA)
This documentary portrays actions by the Chickasaw opposing Hernando de Soto’s quest for riches in America in the early 1500s. This event was the Chickasaw’s first European contact. It set the standard by which the tribe for centuries remained, and remains, “unconquered and unconquerable.” De Soto was famous among Americas’ conquistadors. Landing at today’s Tampa Bay in 1539, de Soto and his army sought gold and glory. De Soto and his 700 men seized native villages. They exploited native people and selfishly squandered their resources. De Soto soon sought the “land of the Chicasa,” scouring today’s Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Carolinas. In 1540 he entered Chickasaw territory, forming a reluctant relationship with the Chikasaw. De Soto claimed authority over them, disrupting their ways and making harsh demands upon tribal leaders. The Chickasaw eventually overcame these increasingly unwelcome visitors, ending De Soto’s American expedition.
Screening time:6:10-6:29 PM, Saturday, May 4, 2019
Length: 18 mins.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Philip Sullivan
Producer: Brad Clonch
Distributor: Brad Clonch
This docudrama unravels the life and legacy of Confucius for a truly global audience for the first time. Spanning two hours, this film traces his teachings to key moments in his life, from his mythical birth on the sacred Mount Ni through his years wandering across the violent, warring states of pre-imperial China, to the creation of his academy at the end of his life, from which a group of devoted disciples went on to transform the world through his teachings. Along the way, we’ll meet emperors and concubines, eunuchs and unicorns, dashing dukes and dancing girls, coming face to face with not just the myth of Confucius but with the real man.
Screening time: 3:30-501 PM, Saturday, May 4, 2019
Length: 90 mins.
Country: France
Language: French and English with English subtitles
Director: Hugo Mac Grégor
Producer: LION TV
In the first century AD, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on a hill in Jerusalem. From belief in his resurrection emerged, out of Judaism, a new monotheism: Christianity. Born in the darkness of a cave in Palestine, early Christianity was forbidden by prevailing authority. It lived in secret for three centuries. To gather and practice their rites, Christians built monuments adapted to their worship: churches. Over time, Christianity spread to all continents, creating monasteries, churches and cathedrals, ever taller, ever more capacious. From Jerusalem to Mont Saint-Michel, from Florence to Moscow, through Chartres and Seville, the Christian monumental style transformed itself at every crucial turn in Christianity’s history, including the division of Eastern from Western orthodoxies, the advent of Gothic architecture, the Muslim conquests, and the Renaissance. In all this diversity, these buildings express Christians’ faith, plus their frantic race to height and light, for the glory of God.
Screening time: 8:16-9:46 PM, Thursday, May 2, 2019
Length: 88:34 mins.
Country: France
Language: French and English with English subtitles
Producer: ARTE FRANCE, ZED
One of the most important castles of the baroque period in Languedoc has also long disappeared from our sight. However, it is still there, in the center of Caveirac, in the Department du Gar, France. Today, it’s a City Hall! However, unfortunately, due to development, additions, property sale and division – even the building of a road through it – the Castle by itself can no longer be clearly discerned. But recently, a historical research campaign, including 3D modeling, has enabled a better understanding and a virtual reconstruction of many of the stages of the castle throughout its history.
Screening time: 9:40-10:02 AM, Saturday, May 4, 2019
Length: 21 mins.
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Director: Henri-Louis Poirier
Producer: Bertrand ABADIE - PY FILMS
Distributor: PY FILMS
The Stonehenge megaliths site on UK’s Salisbury Plain is one of the world’s most famous and most enigmatic prehistoric monuments. Neolithic farmers erected dozens of huge standing stones here in the third millennium BC. Who were the men and women who erected such a monument? And why did they do it? These questions have long been the subject of speculation, yielding probable answers only recently. Thanks to the use of cutting-edge technologies, scientists are gradually lifting the veil on the identity of the amazing builders of Stonehenge and their world.
Screening time: 10:02-10:29 AM, Saturday, May 4, 2019
Length: 26 mins
Country: France
Language: French and English with English subtitles
Director: Agnès Molia
Producer: ARTE FRANCE, TOURNEZ SVP