A family on the Himalayan plains discovers their dog is worth a fortune, but selling it comes at a terrible price. The Tibetan nomad mastiff is an exotic prize dog in China, fetching as much as millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese. When a young man notices several thefts of mastiffs from Tibetan farm families, he decides to sell his family's dog before it is stolen and sold on the black market. …

In the 1950's, Ivory Coast artist Frederic Bruly Bouabré created several hundred pictograms, based on one-syllable words in his language, Bété, to help people in the Bété community learn to read more quickly. Although some 600,000 Bétés live in the Ivory Coast, their language is not taught in schools, and all education is conducted in French. Bouabré's 400 pictograms, in various combinations, …

According to Unesco, a human language disappears every two weeks. Within a century, 50 to 90 percent of all languages will be gone. Does it matter? Linguist Florian Lionnet of Princeton University emphatically believes it does. For years, he’s been documenting Láàl, a language spoken by only 700 people living in two villages on the banks of the Moyen-Chari River, in Southern Chad. Language encodes …

The Rape of Europa tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich and World War II. In a journey through seven countries, the film takes the audience into the violent whirlwind of fanaticism, greed, and warfare that threatened to wipe out the artistic heritage of Europe. For twelve long years, the Nazis …

THE WALDHEIM WALTZ is a film about truth and lies or “alternative facts”. About individual and collective consciousness. “Waldheim no, Waldheim no” shouts a crowd in the center of Vienna in 1986. Ruth Beckermann was one of the activists trying to prevent the election of Kurt Waldheim and documented the political events with her camera. More than 30 years later she goes back into her own archive …

Beauty in Trouble explores a young woman’s romantic dilemma: torn between a primal connection and the need to provide for her children, she loves two men. Set against the back drop of the recent floods in Prague, Beauty in Trouble is full of unexpected twists, humor and amazing performances culminating in a surprising and paradox ending.

On a summer day in 1945, an Orthodox man and his grown son return to a village in Hungary while the villagers prepare for the wedding of the town clerk's son. The townspeople – suspicious, remorseful, fearful, and cunning – expect the worst and behave accordingly. The town clerk fears the men may be heirs of the village's deported Jews and expects them to demand their illegally acquired property …

The Ritchie Boys is the riveting, untold story of a group of young men who fled Nazi Germany and returned as soldiers in U.S. uniforms. They knew the psychology and the language of the enemy better than anyone. In Camp Ritchie, Maryland, they were trained in intelligence and psychological warfare. Determined, bright, and inventive, they fought their own kind of war; they were victors, not victims.

For more than 90 years, the Streit’s matzo factory sat in a low-slung tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. While other matzo companies modernized, Streit’s remained a piece of living history, churning out 40 percent of the nation’s unleavened bread on pre-War machinery as old as the factory itself. In a neighborhood where the Jewish immigrants long ago moved on, in a nation where …

Chronicles the history of mankind's relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry. Chris Marker's co-director, Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986), descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, had been a journalist, painter, and ethnologist before discovering his vocation as a documentary filmmaker. In the Sixties he became …

A new independent feature documentary by acclaimed Canadian director Brenda Longfellow, TINA IN MEXICO, follows the tumultuous and epic story of Tina Modotti, revolutionary, bohemian spirit and renowned photographer, acclaimed for her innovative and impassioned depiction of social issues. Longfellow's film weaves archival footage, the luminous photographs of Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, the murals … More

On February 14th, 1974, 19-year-old Deni Prieto Stock was killed by the Mexican army in the town of Nepantla, along with four of her comrades in the Fuerzas de Liberacion Nacional (National Liberation Forces), a forerunner to the Zapatistas. FLOWER IN OTOMI depicts Prieto Stock's short, but very full life and the trajectory that brought her to Nepantla and the FLN.  Her sister and other family members … More

It was once illegal to read books by Roque Dalton, one of El Salvador's most celebrated poets, in his own country. A descendant of legendary outlaws the Dalton Gang, he devoted his life to the cause of socialist revolution in Latin America - leading ultimately to his murder at age 39, in 1975. ROQUE DALTON: LET'S SHOOT THE NIGHT! looks back on the life of this key figure in the movement resisting … More

Domestic work is a real market in Lebanon, segmented according to the national and ethnic origins of the workers and in which the Lebanese employer is master and the worker the property. Zein owns a domestic worker agency in Beirut. He arranges for Asian and African women to work in Lebanese households and assists his clients in choosing 'mail-order' housemaids that will best suit their needs. Advertisement, … More

By focusing on the blindfold, Koré explores the eye as purveyor of desire, sexual fear, and the fantasy of blindness. An alternative sexuality is founded in touch-based (feminine?) pleasure as opposed to a vision-based (masculine?) pleasure. An examination of institutional blindspots towards women, and people of color, concerning AIDS expands on the issue of vision, visibility and the disease.

In this captivating take on documentary co-creation, Kelly Saeturn and her boyfriend, Tony Saelio, both refugees from Laos who grew up in the US, record a year and a half of their own lives as Kelly balances her hopes to attend college, a pregnancy, and her relationship with Tony, an ex-con trying to reform.

The first feature film from artist and digital pioneer Shu Lea Cheang brings her radical experimental vision to a viciously political and campy narrative of two young lesbian parents who fight against environmental racism in the form of radioactive fish lips.

Sue Coe continues to shock and inform the art establishment with her graphic depictions of the world around her. This energetic and moving film introduces Coe’s passionate art and explores her vision. Produced early in her career, it remains the only film on her work. In the tradition of Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, and Otto Dix, Coe’s visual journalism has a keen ideological thrust that identifies … More