Saeed and Abdullah are two rural teenagers in Iran who have decided to revive a camel ranch. These two teenagers live in the Sistan and Baluchistan Province, near the Afghan border and the Lut Desert. They are aiming to find jobs with sufficient income so that they can afford to stay in the area and thereby also help to secure peace and solidarity in that area. The film features aspects of the daily life of the village people, and the role of camels in it, as well as Baluchi marriage customs. This documentary focuses on the efforts of these two teenagers to improve their lives by cooperating together despite their divergent beliefs. Their example suggests that in order to achieve peace we must respect each other's beliefs, put aside ideological differences, and help each other to improve life, even under harsh desert conditions.
Length: 30 mins.
Country: Iran
Language: Farsi with English Subtitles
Director: Mohammad Abdollahi
Producer: Mohammad Abdollahi
Distributor: Mohammad Abdollahi
In the Amazon Jungle, a tribe called the Satéré Mawé, with about 10 thousand living members, inhabits northern Amazonia, in Brazil. This film follows Sergio, a member of the Satéré Mawé tribe, who was born into that tribe, but who made the decision 25 years ago to study in a nearby town. Today, with his twelve-year-old son, he returns to the tribe in the jungle for his son to undergo the ritual “for becoming a man,”called Da Tucandeira. He has to join in with the Mawé tribal warriors to help perform this ritual for his son. As part of the ritual, his young son is required to put his hand into a glove full of stinging ants.
Length: 27 mins.
Country: France
Language: English
Director: Olivier Mirguet, Agnès Molia
Producer: Christie Molia, Agnès Molia
Distributor: Arte France
This film is a single-screen version of the multivision program created for the exhibition "A cavallo del tempo" (Riding Through Time), set at the Boboli Garden in Florence, Italy, (June 26 - October 14, 2018) for the Uffizi Gallery, about the art of horse riding from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The program comprises three synchronized films of about 25x5 meters, featuring original footage and high-resolution images of the works of art on display and quotes from renowned authors such as Homer. This is a unique way to view art in comparison to reality, as well as art through the ages.
Length: 8 mins.
Country: Italy
Language: English
Director: Gianmarco D'Agostino
Producer: Gianmarco D'Agostino
Distributor: Advaita Film
“Men hunt, women gather” is the prevailing view of how people lived during the Stone Age. However, researchers continue to uncover archaeological evidence that contradicts this view. Bones, grave goods and art from past times, plus new methods of forensic analysis, provide new facts that turn traditional gender-role expectations upside down and reveal how women took a much greater part in human history than prevalently believed. These new facts range from the discovery of the burial chamber of a Viking warrior woman on Bjorko Island, Sweden, to that of female-form sculptures and structures on the island of Malta and unequal food deficiencies among the sexes in China. This film explains how, why and when the gender divide began, and which cultures were involved in that division.
Length: 53 mins.
Country: Germany
Language: English
Director: Birgit Tanner & Carsten Gutschmdit
Producer: Heinrich-Roller-Strasse
Distributor: ZDF Enterprises
Around the world, people of all ages pray—from childhood to old age. The Japanese notably have made a habit of praying for the last thousand years and more. At about 100,000 Shinto shrines all across Japan, they pray for mother nature, the blessing of newborn babies, children, weddings, and more, by conducting rituals, ceremonies and festivals. This film immerses the viewer into the unique ways of Japanese religion and culture, as practiced regularly in multitudes of locations all across Japan, through the age-old Japanese traditions of prayer.
Length: 27 mins.
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English Subtitles
Director: Kazuya Ashizawa
Producer: Kazuya Ashizawa
Distributor: Yellow Sheep Films
When young archaeologist, John Henry Phillips, makes an ambitious promise to an aging and courageous WWII Royal Navy veteran, Patrick Thomas, they both have no idea where the resulting adventure will take them. In a race against time, and with modest means, a team of undersea explorers struggles to locate a lost D-Day ship off the coast of Normandy. What starts out as an archaeological expedition, to recover the past and memorialize lives lost on that fateful day, becomes a lasting friendship between the two men.
Length: 83 mins.
Country: Canada
Language: English & French with English Subtitles
Director: Daniel Oron
Producer: Daniel Oron, Natasha Ryan
Distributor: Go Button Media
Long before the arrival of modern Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals wandered the vast European plains, regularly flooded from Ice Age glacial melt. Several discoveries over the last two centuries, in France and England, and especially on the island of Jersey, now allow archaeologists to reconstruct the lifestyle, culture and social systems of those first great nomads of Europe, who lasted 300,000 years. This new information resolves many issues, such as how they became such formidable predators, how they survived such extreme climates, what we have in common with them, and more.
Length: 52 mins.
Country: France
Language: English & French with Subtitles
Director: Robe Hope, Pascal Cuissot
Producer: Marie-Anne Sorba
Distributor: Beliane
A tree from the distant time when dinosaurs roamed, of a species thought to have gone extinct perhaps 5 million years ago, surfaced in a remote area of China amidst WWII. This ancient tree was nothing like those seen before—a deciduous Dawn Redwood, scientific name “Metasequoia,” which was most common in the continent now known as North America about 50 million years ago. A battle over academic credit for this discovery pitted paleobotanist Dr. Ralph W. Chaney of the University of California, Berkeley, against Dr. E. D. Merrill of Harvard and raged for decades in America. Meanwhile, the scientific community ignored the role of the original Chinese discoverer, a botanist from the Chinese Ministry of Forestry, Wang Zhan. And in 1952, a Dawn Redwood tree at Hoyt Arboretum in Portland, Oregon, became the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere to produce cones in about 6 million years!
Length: 15 mins.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Jesse Andrew Clark
Producer: Sam Gaty
Distributor: Northwest Documentary
Have you ever wondered what a puppet show looks like backstage or what goes into making a puppet show possible? This film is a unique and creative video portrait of Rodolfo de León and Larraitz Iparragirre, puppeteers in Guatemala. These artists have been making their own puppets, writing their own scripts and performing internationally since 2003. The performances evoke emotion and imagination from their audiences, mostly children, while touching on themes that may be relevant cross-culturally, such as that of justice versus injustice. Explore why they chose to perform with puppets rather than in theater, how they make their puppets, and their roles in performances, as well as how they create their stories.
Length: 14 mins.
Country: Guatemala
Language: Spanish with English Subtitles
Director: Robert Flanagan, Suzan Al-Doghachi
Producer: Robert Flanagan, Suzan Al-Doghachi
Distributor: AJAX Films
In 1943, a young Ashkenazim namely Akiva risks a journey through Miechów in Poland in order to fulfill his obligation to honor his deceased mother on the anniversary of her death. He gets arrested by the Nazis and runs into an elderly rabbi he knows, who also is in Nazi custody. The rabbi, who has lost his entire family to the Holocaust, is hoping to escape Poland for the Promised Land. They are, in time, able to escape from the Nazis. Akiva is then accompanied by the rabbi, so that Akiva can visit his mother’s grave and perform the requisite ritual.
Length: 15 mins.
Country: USA
Language: German, Polish, Yiddish with English Subtitles
Director: Razid Season
Producer: Razid Season
Distributor: Razid Season
The discovery of the remains of “the man of Jebel Irhoud” marks a new stage in our evolving view of humanity’s African history. Its dating to 300,000 years ago in Morocco came as a shock: it invalidated the former consensus that our species was born in East Africa just 200,000 years ago. This discovery resulted from an amazing archaeological investigation. Over more than a decade, several digs took place in North Africa. Their results suggest a new vision of the first appearance of modern humanity. They prompt a new scenario, involving the entirety of Africa, and a much more complex evolution than we had heretofore imagined.
Length: 87 mins.
Country: France
Language: French with English Subtitles
Director: Olivier Julien
Producer: Hind Saih
Distributor: Arte France