Undercover in Tibet (2008)

I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story

A documentary about Caroll Spinney who has been Sesame Street's Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since 1969. At 78-years-old, he has no intention of stopping.

Waiting for the Sun

In China more people are on death row than the rest of the world combined. The children of the convicts are often left alone, stigmatized and living in the streets. Grandma Zhang, as the kids call her, is a former prison guard who has founded an orphanage in Nanzhao.

Big Rig

Big Rig (2008) is a documentary film by Doug Pray about long-haul truck drivers. The film consists of a series of interviews with different drivers, focusing on both their personal life stories and also the life and culture of truck drivers in the United States.

World War C

It's war. War against an invisible enemy that is not as deadly as we are told. The world is changing rapidly. Disproportionate measures are taken worldwide that disrupt society as a whole. A dichotomy in society forced vaccinations and restrictions on freedom. Have we had the worst? Or is there something more disturbing to awaiting us.

10 Questions for the Dalai Lama

How do you reconcile a commitment to non-violence when faced with violence? Why do the poor often seem happier than the rich? Must a society lose its traditions in order to move into the future? These are some of the questions posed to His Holiness the Dalai Lama by filmmaker and explorer Rick Ray. Ray examines some of the fundamental questions of our time by weaving together observations from his own journeys throughout India and the Middle East, and the wisdom of an extraordinary spiritual leader. This is his story, as told and filmed by Rick Ray during a private visit to his monastery in Dharamsala, India over the course of several months. Also included is rare historical footage as well as footage supplied by individuals who at great personal risk, filmed with hidden cameras within Tibet.

Blindsight

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

Maineland

Chinese teenagers from the wealthy elite, with big American dreams, settle into a boarding school in small-town Maine. As their fuzzy visions of the American dream slowly gain more clarity, their relationship to home takes on a poignant new aspect.

How Lucky China

Follows Long Island’s Mary Lamont Band on their groundbreaking 23,000-mile tour in six cities and provinces across mainland China in 2002.

Forbidden City: The Great Within

Amidst the grand walls of the Forbidden City, the film takes us on a deep journey through the ceremonial life of the Chinese emperor, unveiling the secrets and intrigues of concubines, eunuchs, and palace maids. As the West begins to influence China in the late 19th century, the dynamics within the city shift dramatically. The film highlights the preservation and restoration of invaluable treasures and paintings, culminating in the creation of the Palace Museum. With insights from renowned China scholar, Jonathan Spence, this is an intimate exploration of the rich cultural and historical tapestry that makes up the heart of ancient China.

Ascension

The absorbingly cinematic Ascension explores the pursuit of the “Chinese Dream.” Driven by mesmerizing—and sometimes humorous—imagery, this observational documentary presents a contemporary vision of China that prioritizes productivity and innovation above all.

Mrs. Fang

In a quiet village in southern China, Fang Xiuying is sixty-seven years old. Having suffered from Alzheimer's for several years, with advanced symptoms and ineffective treatment, she was sent back home. Now, bedridden, she is surrounded by her relatives and neighbors, as they witness and accompany her through her last days.

Free Tibet

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

24 City

As a decades-old state-run aeronautics munitions factory in downtown Chengdu, China is being torn down for the construction of the titular luxury apartment complex, director Jia Zhangke interviews various people affiliated with it about their experiences.

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.

Manufactured Landscapes

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.

Brilliant Moon: Glimpses of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Brilliant Moon chronicles the life of the writer, poet, and meditation master Khyentse Rinpoche, one of Tibet's most revered 20th-century Buddhist teachers. Spiritual guide to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Royal Family of Bhutan, his life and teachings were an inspiration to all who encountered him. Richard Gere and Lou Reed provide the narration for his dangerous journey out of China, the subsequent spread of his influence and the search for his reincarnation after his death.

Youth (Spring)

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

Tea War: The Adventures of Robert Fortune

In the 19th century, China held the monopoly on tea, which was dear and fashionable in the West, and the British Empire exchanged poppies, produced in its Indian colonies and transformed into opium, for Chinese tea. Inundated by the drugs, China was forced to open up its market, and the British consolidated their commercial dominance. In 1839, the Middle Empire introduced prohibition. The Opium War was declared… Great Britain emerged as the winner, but the warning was heeded: it could no longer depend on Chinese tea. The only alternative possible was to produce its own tea. The East India Company therefore entrusted one man with finding the secrets of the precious beverage. His mission was to develop the first plantations in Britain’s Indian colonies. This latter-day James Bond was called Robert Fortune – a botanist. After overcoming innumerable ordeals in the heart of imperial China, he brought back the plants and techniques that gave rise to Darjeeling tea.

Mao: Seize the Day, Seize the Hour

Mao Zedong was not only a revolutionary leader and thinker, he was also a poet. In poems written in the classic calligraphic tradition he expresses his experiences and visions. In this film, 8 of Mao's poems are sung, recited and interpreted: 'Changsha' (1925), 'Jinggang Mountains' (1928), 'The Long March' (1935), 'Snow' (1936), 'The People's Liberation Army Captures Nanjing' (1949), 'Swimming' (1956), 'Reply to Comrade Guo Moruo' (1961) and 'Reascending Jinggang Mountains' (1965). Through these poems we get a picture of the Chinese revolution from its first beginning in 1921 until the Cultural Revolution. The poems of Mao Zedong have been published in more than 57 million copies

A Long Way Home

A Long Way Home takes us on a fascinating journey into both the grim days of recent Chinese history and the dazzling cultural scene in present-day China. The film centers around five of the most significant representatives of contemporary Chinese counterculture: the visual artists the Gao Brothers, the choreographer and dancer Wen Hui, the animation artist Pi San and the poet Ye Fu. With bravery and subversive wit, they each shed light on the social problems in their country. In doing so, the film poses universal questions that ultimately concern us all: which values determine our cultural identity and in what kind of world do we want to live.

Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

CRAZY WISDOM explores the arrival of Tibetan Buddhism in America through the story of Chögyam Trungpa, who landed in the U.S. in 1970. Trungpa became renowned for translating ancient Buddhist concepts into language and ideas that Westerners could understand and shattered preconceived notions about how an enlightened teacher should behave. Initially rejected, his teachings are now recognized by western philosophers and spiritual leaders as authentic and profound.

Surviving Progress

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

Starring Jerry as Himself

Jerry, an ordinary immigrant dad, retired in Orlando, is recruited to be an undercover agent for the Chinese police. Jerry’s family recreates the events on film and his three sons discover a darker truth. True crime meets spy thriller in this genre-bending docufiction hybrid about an immigrant’s search for the American dream. A Slamdance Film Festival Grand Jury and Audience Award winner.

Wheel of Time

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

China's Lost Pyramids

In China, there exists an astonishing place. A burial ground to rival Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, where pyramid tombs of stupendous size are full of astonishing riches. In 221 BC, China's first Emperor united warring kingdoms into a nation that still exists today. To memorialise this achievement, he bankrupted the national treasury and oppressed thousands of workers to build one of the world’s biggest mortuary complexes. China's second dynasty, the Han, inherited the daunting challenge of building larger tombs to command respect and establish their right to rule without running the nation into the ground. Although no Han emperor's tomb has been opened, the tombs of lesser Han aristocrats have revealed astonishing things: complete underground palaces (including kitchens and toilets) and at least one corpse so amazingly well-preserved some believe Han tomb-builders knew how to "engineer immortality".

Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang

Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns to the shooting locations of his films, along with his actors, friends and close collaborators. Jia recalls the inspiration sources for his movies, such as Platform, Still Life and A Touch of Sin. The film is the memory of a filmmaker and of a country in convulsion, China, which reveals itself little by little.

Redefining China's Family: Women

10 May 2007 - China's staggering economic growth has overshadowed a more subtle shift in Chinese society. In domestic life, many women are now ignore the advice of their mothers and grandmothers, turning instead to counselling hotlines and, increasingly, divorce.

Last Train Home

A family embarks on an annual tormenting journey along with 130 million other peasant workers to reunite with their distant family, and to revive their love and dignity as China soars as the world's next super power.

Under the Dome

Chai Jing's documentary about the massive smog problem in China. Chai Jing started making the documentary when her as yet unborn daughter developed a tumour in the womb, which had to be removed very soon after her birth. Chai blames air pollution for the tumour. The film, which combines footage of a lecture with interviews and factory visits, has been compared with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in both its style and likely impact. The film openly criticises state-owned energy companies, steel producers and coal factories, as well as showing the inability of the Ministry of Environmental Protection to act against the big polluters.

No Other Land

This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers and the alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.

China - Treasures of the Jade Empire

Plot unavailable

Born in China

Venturing into the wilds of China, "Born in China" captures intimate moments with a panda bear and her growing cub, a young golden monkey who feels displaced by his baby sister, and a mother snow leopard struggling to raise her two cubs.

Women 50 Minutes

A representation of queer and feminist imagery that was mainly shot in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, remote and developing areas in southwest China, and metropolitan cities like Beijing from 2000 to 2004 to document the social changes in contemporary China. The director sympathetically and erotically represents a variety of women, including women as laborers, women as prayers, women in the ground, women in marriage, and women who lie on the funeral pyre with their dead husbands. Her camera juxtaposes the mountains and rivers in old times, the commercialized handicrafts as exposition, the capital exploitation of the elders’ living space, and the erotic freedom of the young people in a changing city.

Chinese Portrait

Shot over the course of ten years on both film and video, the film consists of a series of carefully composed tableaux of people and environments. Pedestrians shuffle across a bustling Beijing street, steelworkers linger outside a deserted factory, tourists laugh and scamper across a crowded beach, worshippers kneel to pray in a remote village. With a painterly eye for composition, Wang captures China as he sees it, calling to a temporary halt a land in a constant state of change.

How Yukong Moved the Mountains

From 1972 until 1974, Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, along with a Chinese film crew, documented the last days of the Cultural Revolution, marking the end of an era. The vast amount of footage they shot was edited into 14 films of varying lengths. Focusing on ordinary people spread over a wide geographic area—many of whom were living and working in collectives—the filmmakers recorded a unique moment in history, and also captured some of the more enduring aspects of Chinese culture.

Tibetan Warrior

The true story of one man's fight for freedom. For more than 60 years Tibetans have been fighting Chinese oppression. But their non-violent struggle appears to be in vain. Now, as a new form of peaceful protest, Tibetans are setting themselves on fire. Loten Namling - an exiled Tibetan and musician living in Switzerland - is deeply disturbed by such self-destructive action. So he sets off from Europe to India, on a one-man mission to meet top politicians, experts and young radicals. He himself becomes increasingly radical and is on the verge of violent protest. Finally he ends up at The Office of the Dalai Lama in India to seek the advice of the exiled Tibetan leader.

Scars Of Nanking

During the brutal invasion of China in 1937 by Imperial Japanese forces, tens of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are murdered and women raped in what is known simply as "The Rape of Nanking." This docudrama is a stirring account of a small band of courageous American missionaries who choose to stay in Nanking to try and protect a quarter million vulnerable Chinese civilians who are trapped in a city ruled by a savage, out of control army. Their stories are brought vividly to life through actual real-time letters and diaries as they bear witness to one of the worst wartime atrocities in history.

Behind the Shadows

The Greek shadow puppetry began 130 years ago. A student of Greek shadow puppetry travels to China, where shadow puppetry began over 2000 years ago. There he follows Chinese shadow puppeteer master He Shihong in Wushan of China. Watching his performances and listening to him talk about his art and his career in it, many parallels are drawn and he expresses them by including his Greek shadow puppetry teacher in the film. This documentary is a cultural bridge between Greece and China through the art of shadow puppetry.

Mass-market retailing: The end of a system?

The supermarket chains used to seem unbeatable, capturing the lion’s share of the grocery market. But for some years now they have been in crisis. In the wake of a fierce price war, retailers are resorting to increasingly aggressive commercial negotiation methods at the expense of suppliers, farmers and producers. Further competition is coming from the tech giants as Amazon and Alibaba invest in the food industry. What are the implications of all these changes on working conditions, the quality of our food and the future of our planet?

Paths of the Soul

Eleven Tibetans prostrate themselves every few steps during a 1,200-mile pilgrimage that lasts for seven months.

Heaven

Tomáš Etzler worked for seven years as a foreign correspondent in China. He came to know a country that was developing at an admirably fast pace, was swayed by its energy, and for a moment believed that modernity could bring about political change as well. Before long, it dawned on him that many people would continue to be severely punished, and the regime would still keep most of the nation in a state of indecision and ignorance. Without neglecting that face of China today, Etzler chose to tell a story of hope in his personal documentary. Using the example of an orphanage for disabled children, he shows that the answer to collectivist brutality and ruthlessness can be mutual assistance, tolerance and empathy.

Behemoth

Under the sun, the heavenly beauty of grasslands will soon be covered by the raging dust of mines. Facing the ashes and noises caused by heavy mining , the herdsmen have no choice but to leave as the meadow areas dwindle. In the moonlight, iron mines are brightly lit throughout the night. Workers who operate the drilling machines must stay awake. The fight is tortuous, against the machine and against themselves. Meanwhile, coal miners are busy filling trucks with coals. Wearing a coal-dust mask, they become ghostlike creatures. An endless line of trucks will transport all the coals and iron ores to the iron works. There traps another crowd of souls, being baked in hell. In the hospital, time hangs heavy on miners' hands. After decades of breathing coal dust, death is just around the corner. They are living the reality of purgatory, but there will be no paradise.

Ta'ang

The Ta'ang or Palaung people, an ethnic minority living in the mountainous area between Myanmar's Kokang region and China's Yunnan province, have historically suffered many forced migrations due to war. When their survival is threatened again in 2015, thousands of them flee across the border. Filmmaker Wang Bing accompanies them and becomes a privileged witness to a human story that is both a modern reportage and a mythical epic.

The Secret of HEMA

This documentary takes an economic perspective, painting a candid picture of how the Dutch chain store HEMA has had to adapt to modern times and globalization to continue as a major player on the highly competitive retail market. It's all about expansion, even as far as China. But do foreign countries really need quintessentially Dutch concepts such as uniform pricing, the classic HEMA smoked sausages and timeless ladies' dresses? Chinese filmmaker Yan Ting Yuen, who came to the Netherlands at the age of six, followed the passionate CEO for a year, trying to find out what makes HEMA so unique. It turns out to be about more than just smoked sausages, as shown by the success of the new stores in France, where customers stuff their baskets with coffee mugs and Dutch syrup waffles.