Sweet Osmanthus Flowering Late (2024)

Sans Soleil

A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.

Melodies of the mountains

Film about the singing and dancing culture of the Ingush people

Canto de Família

Raised in one of the most violent outskirts of Fortaleza, the Cruz brothers had their lives shaped by music to the point that their parents turned the house where they live into a school.

Filme Hõkrepöj

A deep dive into contemporary Brazilian music. Guided by the composer, anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Kilza Setti and the Hésperides Música das Américas nucleus, the documentary takes us to a world where contemporary music, the Guarani and Timbira peoples, the colonization of America and poetic professions meet.

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey

The film discusses the traits and originators of some of metal's many subgenres, including the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, power metal, Nu metal, glam metal, thrash metal, black metal, and death metal. Dunn uses a family-tree-type flowchart to document some of the most popular metal subgenres. The film also explores various aspects of heavy metal culture.

In the Frozen Tomb of Mongolia

Plot unavailable

Koka

Somewhere on the coast of the Bering Sea, a father and son make a living fishing in a community that seems almost outside of time. Aliaksandr Tsymbaliuk’s camera takes us in close to the subjects, recording both the harshness of their condition and the rigour of education, softened by paternal love and the universal insouciance of childhood.

Statues Also Die

Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.

Bamboo Theatre

This film is a portrait of unique cultural space for Spirits, Gods and People. While permanent theatres are commonly built in most cosmopolitan modern cities, Hong Kong preserves a unique theatrical architecture, a Chinese tradition that has lasted more than a century - Bamboo Theatre.

American Hardcore

Inspired by Steven Blush's book "American Hardcore: A tribal history" Paul Rachman's feature documentary debut is a chronicle of the underground hardcore punk years from 1979 to 1986. Interviews and rare live footage from artists such as Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, SS Decontrol and the Dead Kennedys.

Global Metal

In GLOBAL METAL, directors Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn set out to discover how the West's most maligned musical genre - heavy metal - has impacted the world's cultures beyond Europe and North America. The film follows metal fan and anthropologist Sam Dunn on a whirlwind journey through Asia, South America and the Middle East as he explores the underbelly of the world's emerging extreme music scenes; from Indonesian death metal to Chinese black metal to Iranian thrash metal. GLOBAL METAL reveals a worldwide community of metalheads who aren't just absorbing metal from the West - they're transforming it - creating a new form of cultural expression in societies dominated by conflict, corruption and mass-consumerism.

Burden of Dreams

The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years

An exploration of the heavy metal scene in Los Angeles, with particular emphasis on glam metal. It features concert footage and interviews of legendary heavy metal and hard rock bands and artists such as Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Megadeth, Motörhead, Ozzy Osbourne and W.A.S.P..

Broken Gods

India has one of the largest populations of Indigenous people in the world, known locally as adivasis or tribals. As India's current Hindu nationalist government pushes to redefine India as a homogenous Hindu nation, adivasis’ ways of life are under greater threat. Set among the Rathava and Bhil adivasi communities of western India, broken gods document the social impact of Hindu religious evangelism among India’s Indigenous groups. As Indigenous people join Hindu religious sects, their old gods are literally becoming broken - devotional mural paintings are being whitewashed from homes, and the earthen figurines in honour of village gods and ancestors are being left to fall apart. While for those who convert joining a Hindu sect offers the allure of a better life, those who continue to follow their old ways have become ostracized by their communities. Their broken gods have lost the power to protect them from illness and scarcity.

Dolores guapa!

Religious-based images and traditions permeate the lives of all the people who inhabit Seville. Historically, the city's mariquitas ("sissies") have also assimilated them in their childhood and, through them, have been creating their own encounter spaces and their own codes. Nowadays, new dissident identities continue to respond to them: they participate or distance themselves, they continue what exists or transform it. This film looks at these traditions from a perspective always relegated to the margins.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

The extraordinary life story of science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) who, in spite of remaining for many years on the sidelines of the mainstream literature, managed to be recognized as one of the most remarkable US writers of all time, due to the relevance of her work and her commitment to the human condition.

Midsommar

Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nightmare as the mysterious inhabitants invite them to participate in their disturbing festive activities.

Inside the Khmer Rouge

Inside the Khmer Rouge takes an in-depth look at the history, domination, and current status of the Khmer Rouge (a Communist regime) in Cambodia. The film features revealing interviews with soldiers of both the modern Khmer Rouge and those who fight in opposition. A comprehensive timeline of the regime's five-year occupation in Cambodia is dissected and includes a review of key individuals, ideologies, and locations where devastation hit hardest. Following this, the film takes a look at the effects on the Cambodian citizens upon the retraction of Vietnamese forces. Inside the Khmer Rouge continues to investigate the current tactics the modern Khmer Rouge implement and their attempts to persuade followers in order to rebuild and expand their regime. Oppositely, local forces or "jungle soldiers" discuss their devices for assuring the destruction and atrocities once caused by the Khmer Rouge never happen again.

Who Loves the Sun

In war-torn northern Syria, WHO LOVES THE SUN delves into the world of makeshift oil refineries and the stark realities of life within this post-apocalyptic landscape. Mahmood is a prominent figure in these operations, navigating harsh working conditions and complex local dynamics.

Mankind From Space

Mankind from Space is an epic journey of discovery. Using mind-boggling data and CGI, it traces humankind’s story from hunter-gatherer to dominant global species. Seen from the global perspective of space, this special shows the breath-taking extent of our influence, revealing how we’ve transformed our planet and produced an interconnected world of extraordinary complexity.

Mad Mimes

An anthropological study of a cargo cult in a fictitious self-marginalized commune, which existed next to the Moscow Ring Road - a highway that marks the boundaries of the Russian capital - and survived mainly on roadside trash. Although the road provided for their basic needs, the existence of the commune was extremely precarious and highly dependent on the roadway's fluctuations. This dependency led them to develop a cargo cult of the road.

The Last Nomad

Greek Sarakatsani community members, a former group of nomadic animal breeders, share personal experiences and discuss the concept of identity in today's world. A tribute to collective memory through an experiential journey that sets out from the past, progresses into the present, and contemplates the future.

Yurumein: Homeland

YURUMEIN (Homeland) is a documentary film which recounts the painful past of the Caribs on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, their extermination at the hands of the British 200+ years ago, the decimation of their culture on the island, and their exile to Central America where much of that culture survived, even thrived. YURUMEIN (your -o- main) also explores what few cultural remnants of the Caribs, also known as Garifuna, still exist on St. Vincent and the beginnings of a movement to teach and revitalize Garifuna language, music and dance, and ritual to younger generations of Garifuna/ Caribs on St. Vincent.

Mi Barrios Altos querido

Five stories about dignity in the capital of Peru. A local leader looking for someone to leave the post of her complex work, a tourist guide who is a patron of the architectural heritage and Creole music, an ex-delinquent rescued by the Evangelical Church, a teenage dancer of Afro-Peruvian music forced to emigrate and a muralist of Bellas Artes son of Andean migrants, they try to get ahead in Barrios Altos, the most feared – but also most beloved – historic neighborhood of Lima.

Darwin's Darlings

Standing near the reptile section in a zoo we can learn a lot about the animals on both sides of the separating glass.

Le compagnon déloyal

Plot unavailable

The Sea Stares at Us from Afar

Huelva, Spain, an isolated region lost in time. The grass, the sand and the sky are the same that those foreigners saw in the spring of 1895, when they crossed the sea from a distant country to mark the unspoiled terrain and extract its wealth, when the tower was new, when people could climb to the top of the highest dune and imagine that the city of Tartessos was still there, in the distance, almost invisible in the morning brume.

Marked

This documentary explores Nigeria's cultural practice of marking, including its origins and meaning as a symbol of identity, beauty and spirituality.