The Knowledge of Healing (1997)

Reimagining A Buffalo Landmark

The Richardson Olmsted Campus, a former psychiatric center and National Historic Landmark, is seeing new life as it undergoes restoration and adaptation to a modern use.

The Frozen Kingdom of the Snow Leopard

Join the big cats as we get up close and personal with their journeys through growing pains, adulthood, survival struggles and unfamiliar territories. These seven films follow the lives of some of the most formidable feline predators - lions, leopards, tigers and cheetahs in intimate detail.

Feel Better with Pressure Point Therapy

Dr. Michael Pinkus, D.C., utilizes alternative Eastern medicine practices and applies techniques involving ancient acupressure points in order to provide pain relief and shows viewers how to apply these techniques in daily life. Often airs on PBS stations during pledge drive season.

Meteshu innushkueu

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The Rebel Surgeon

Portrayal of a surgeon who feels stifled by Swedish bureaucracy and relocates to Ethiopia to practice medicine. In a small field hospital, with limited resources, he uses anything at hand to help the patients.

The Tapping Solution

This film explores "Tapping", a new discovery that combines ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology with startling results. The Tapping Solution explores Tapping in a way that's never been seen before. The film combines the wisdom and experience of world famous teachers, speakers, and motivators, with an element that's usually missing: REAL LIFE CASES, unfolding before your eyes. Ten people spend four days working with Tapping practitioners to see if they can turn their lives around. The results are fully documented and the ride is one that you'll never forget.

Serviced

Serviced explores touch based service businesses including cuddling, erotic massage, sex surrogacy and sex work. Meet the men who have foregone the 9-5 grind or are adding on a side-hustle service-based job. From cuddling to sex work we're looking at the world's oldest profession with eyes wide open.

My Name is Hungry Buffalo

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Free Tibet

A film about the Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco in 1996.

The Paris Opera

A behind-the-scenes look at the of how the Paris Opera is run under the direction of Stephane Lissner.

Wisdom of Happiness

A deeply intimate and highly cinematic documentary featuring the Dalai Lama, who, at nearly ninety year of age, offers practical advice for navigating the 21st century's challenges.

Into Great Silence

An intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in the French Alps (Chartreuse Mountains). The idea for the film was proposed to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. The Carthusians finally contacted Gröning 16 years later to say they were now willing to permit Gröning to shoot the movie, if he was still interested.

Les Pouvoirs thérapeutiques de l'eau

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Auf der Suche nach Heilern

“I am a hypochondriac”, admits Rosa Von Praunheim, the icon of the gay movement, right at the beginning at the film. The director, who turned seventy in 2012, is afraid of cancer, and he actually suffers from glaucoma, with osteoarthritis in his big toe. Von Praunheim is interested in alternative medicine and goes on a foray into the scene.

Léa & I

Best friends travel though Latin America meeting shamans, experimenting with plant medicines, and wondering about what makes a life well-lived when one of them might have half the time to live it.

The Song That Calls You Home

A personal, scientific, mystical exploration of Amazonian curanderismo, focus on Ayahuasca and Master Plants, their healing and visionary properties and risks, along with the Shipibo people and their songs.

Balifilm

Balifilm was originally commissioned as a stage performance, created from diary images and sounds collected in 1990 and 1992 by Peter Mettler on the island of Bali. The soundtrack is a live recording of eight Gamelan musicians playing the bronze and wooden instruments of Indonesia during the projection of the film. balifilm is a personal, lyrical observation and expression of the creative pulse of an extraordinary culture.

Unrest

When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s "all in her head." Determined to live, she sets out on a virtual journey to document her story—and four other families' stories—fighting a disease medicine forgot.

Bending the Arc

About the extraordinary doctors and activists—including Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Ophelia Dahl—whose work 30 years ago to save lives in a rural Haitian village grew into a global battle in the halls of power for the right to health for all.

Mirr

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Blindsight

Six blind Tibetan teenagers climb the Lhakpa-Ri peak of Mount Everest, led by seven-summit blind mountain-climber Erik Weihenmayer.

Max Frisch, Citoyen

Max Frisch was the last big Swiss intellectual widely respected as a “voice” in its own right – a character hardly found today. The film retells Frisch’s story as a witness of the unfolding 20th century, wondering if such “voices” are needed at all, or if we could do without them.

Second Hand Heroes

Documentary about thrift shops in Berne, Switzerland and how they want people to recycle and re-use instead of throw away.

OLO, the Boy from Tibet

A 6-year-old Tibetan boy leaves his family and flees to a refugee camp in northern India.

The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms

Filmed in the jungles of Peru, shaman Don Jose Campos introduces the practices and benefits of Ayahuasca, the psychoactive plant brew that has been used for healing and visionary journeys by Amazonian shamans for at least a thousand years.

Auf Messers Schneide - Eine Geschichte der Chirurgie

The documentary tells the exciting story of the beginnings of surgery through to its specialization - a fascinating journey through time from the Stone Age with the first skull openings through antiquity and the early modern era to the first heart operation. The film was shot at the most important locations in the history of surgery - including Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Hungary and the USA. The film contains fascinating and partly unpublished archive material.

Queen of Condoms

Ceschi and Stamm's documentary tells the incredible story of Monika Krause, a former East German citizen, who became Fidel Castro's Sexual Education Minister. After 20 years in Cuba, Krause set the Cuban sexual revolution in motion: in favor of a woman's right to sexual fulfillment and legal abortion, and against exclusion of homosexuals, she acquired the title "Queen of Condoms". A film about potent female agitators, staunch macho men and Caribbean love lives.

Picture of Light

A documentary of an expedition to Churchill, Manitoba to film the Northern Lights.

Born in Auschwitz

The untold story of a Jewish baby who was born in the death camp before the liberation and survived. An extraordinary journey of the second and third generation, breaking the cycle of trauma to free themselves from Auschwitz - forever.

Jean Ziegler: The Optimism of Willpower

In 1964, Che Guevara asked the young Jean Ziegler to stay in Switzerland to fight in the "Monster brain" capitalist. Since then, Jean Ziegler nerve stops fighting against injustices as a public writer, a speaker and as a Kofi Annan collaborator. During a trip to Cuba, his ideas are challenged by what he discover on the island.

Sicko

A documentary about the corrupt health care system in The United States who's main goal is to make profit even if it means losing people’s lives. "The more people you deny health insurance the more money we make" is the business model for health care providers in America.

Architecture of Infinity

How can structures, which take up defined, rigid portions of space, make us feel transcendence? How can chapels turn into places of introspection? How can walls grant boundless freedom? Driven by intense childhood impressions, director Christoph Schaub visits extraordinary churches, both ancient and futuristic, and discovers works of art that take him up to the skies and all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. With the help of architects Peter Zumthor, Peter Märkli, and Álvaro Siza Vieira, artists James Turrell and Cristina Iglesias, and drummer Sergé “Jojo” Mayer, he tries to make sense of the world and decipher our spiritual experiences using the seemingly abstract concepts of light, time, rhythm, sound, and shape. The superb cinematography turns this contemplative search into a multi-sensory experience.

Sounds and Silence - Travels with Manfred Eicher

On the way through a world of sounds and noise – with Manfred Eicher, the oustanding discoverer and mediator of contemporary music and founder of the music label ECM. On this journey we are meeting musicians and composers, but also people and places which are connected with him and with each other. We are encountering stories, landscapes, cities, disputes and hugs, tranquillity, hectic pace, work, self-doubt, joy, passion.

Stalin's Last Plot

January 1953: On the eve of his death Stalin finds himself yet another imaginary enemy: Jewish doctors. He organizes the most violent anti-Semitic campaign ever launched in the USSR, by fabricating the "Doctors' Plot," whereby doctors are charged with conspiring to murder the highest dignitaries of the Soviet Regime. Still unknown and untold, this conspiracy underlines the climax of a political scheme successfully masterminded by Stalin to turn the Jews into the new enemies of the people. It reveals his extreme paranoia and his compulsion to manipulate those around him. The children and friends of the main victims recount for the first time their experience and their distress related to these nightmarish events.

Signer's Suitcase

SIGNERS KOFFER is a kind of road movie across Europa. From the Swiss Alps to eastern Poland, from Stromboli to Iceland. Always following the scenery's magically charged contours. Immersing yourself, letting yourself be infected, then travelling on. Roman Signer determines the route that we are moving on and the film improvises along the way. Being on the road also means tracking down the right places. Signer brings them alive using his own personel instruments, brilliantly simple operations full of subtle humour. «Simple» poems being transmitted into space with INSTRUMENTS as gunpowder, fuse, rubber boots, balloons, stool, small table ... and a three wheelded Plaggio. SIGNERS KOFFER is also a journey through the state of mind. A tightrope walk between fun and melancholy. Danger also mental mental danger becomes the stimulus of the senses. Sudden crashes, abrupt chagnes of mood determine the rythm and atmosphere of this cinematic journey.

The Shelter

It is winter at an emergency shelter for the homeless in Lausanne. Every night at the door of this little-known basement facility the same entry ritual takes place, resulting in confrontations which can sometimes turn violent. Those on duty at the shelter have the difficult task of “triaging the poor”: the women and children first, then the men. Although the total capacity at the shelter is 100, only 50 “chosen ones” will be admitted inside and granted a warm meal and a bed. The others know it will be a long night.

The Cost of Cobalt

In the cobalt mining areas of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), babies are being born with horrific birth defects. Scientists and doctors are finding increasing evidence of environmental pollution from industrial mining which, they believe, may be the cause of a range of malformations from cleft palate to some so serious the baby is stillborn. More than 60% of the world’s reserves of cobalt are in the DRC and this mineral is essential for the production of electric car batteries, which may be the key to reducing carbon emissions and to slowing climate change. In The Cost of Cobalt we meet the doctors treating the children affected and the scientists who are measuring the pollution. Cobalt may be part of the global solution to climate change, but is it right that Congo’s next generation pay the price with their health? Many are hoping that the more the world understands their plight, the more pressure will be put on the industry here to clean up its act.

Miriam Goldschmidt – Creator of the In-between

Nearing the end of a long and successful stage career, Miriam Goldschmidt finds her prowess as an actress increasingly on the wane. She struggles to memorize her lines and as her last project with lifelong collaborator, the legendary director Peter Brook, threatens to fall apart, Miriam looks back. Referencing Brook’s ground-breaking book «The Empty Space», she uses an empty rehearsal room in Berlin to invoke her archetypal life journey that took an orphaned black child from post-war Germany to the world’s biggest stages. We «Call Her Miriam» is a bewitching and moving portrait of a great artist living between dream and reality, truth and fction and life and death.

Thus Spake Vanga

А film about the world-famous prophetess Vanga with unique, hitherto unseen shots, in which she is the main character and in which she speaks only, sharing how the gift of seeing into the future overshadowed her, what miracles she witnessed in her long life. Vanga meets the tragic fates of different people, to whom she inspires faith and comfort. At the same time, with her own funds, she built the church "St. Petka" in Rupite, painted by the artist Svetlin Russev. The film was shot for years until the last days of the prophetess, leaving it to mature in the minds of the authors and is dramatically meaningful with the attitude towards it and with today's view of the presented events.

A Common Experience

A poetic exploration of the multi-generational affects of Canada's Indian Residential School system, based on the personal trials of Aboriginal playwright Yvette Nolan.

Wheel of Time

Wheel of Time is Werner Herzog's photographed look at the largest Buddhist ritual in Bodh Gaya, India.

Operation T4: A Doctor Among the Nazis

A reckoning of Nazi Germany’s planned execution of its own citizens with physical and mental disabilities whom they deemed useless to their society.

The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy

The incredible story of how the mummified corpse of a 40-year-old man was discovered by a hunter in one of the most remote parts of the country. The dead man's detailed notes reveal that he actually committed suicide through self-imposed starvation only the summer before. Liechti's film is a stunning rapprochement of a fictional text, which itself is based upon a true event: a cinematic manifesto for life, challenged by the main character's radical renunciation of life itself.

Violently in Love

Behind the closed doors of the Copenhagen-based women's shelter, the women and children are slowly recovering after having escaped domestic violence. Day by day the women are processing their traumas, building confidence and slowly understanding what it takes to break the cycle of violence.

David Wants to Fly

A documentary. David Sieveking takes the advice of his idol, David Lynch and tries out Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's transcendental meditation technique.

Arada

The story of three Turkish men. They all grew up in Switzerland and all got deported after various criminal offenses.