2021 Schedule

Sound of Nomad: Koryo Arirang starts with a diva of a tragic family history related to a history of migration. The rare archival footage re-animates her history reverberating with the current world crisis. This is a testimonial – a witness to injustice and tragedy, but it is also a declaration of survival – a survival that is not static but…

A wild flower power ride on the footprints of the Soviet hippie movement take you into the psychedelic underground of 1970s. In search of freedom and happiness under the thumb of political regimes a colorful crowd of artists, musicians, freaks, vagabonds and other long-haired drop-outs created their own system in the Soviet Union. Years later, a group of eccentric hippies…

Daniel, Marika and Leo have Tourettes. And they are fed up of being stigmatized by society and unsuccessful therapies. So they are traveling to the European far north – trying to find the place where they can be as they are.

Upon advice of neurologist Prof. Dr. Alexander Münchau, Leo, Marika and Daniel are visiting different Tourette research facilities in…

Legend has it that the capoeira player Besouro Mangangá summoned Bahia’s full magical power to seal his body from harm. Neither bullets nor knives could pierce his skin anymore. But his enemies knew that the act of love could remove this magical protection and so they sent him a beautiful woman. Even today, young men in Santo Amaro tell each…

At the dawn of the first millennium, the arrival of a mysterious shaman upsets the natural balance in a community of nomadic Inuit, resulting in the murder of the camp’s leader. Years later, power in the community begins to shift when the tribe’s two best hunters — the brothers Amaqjuaq, the Strong One (Pakak Innuksuk), and Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner…

Amis Hip Hop documents how a group of young Amis men in A’tolan have blended influences from contemporary social and cultural life in Taiwan with their traditional practice of ritual dance performance in the village. Rooted in the Amis ethos of respect for male age-grade organization, matrilineal affiliation, intimacy with the ocean, and appreciation of joking relationships, these young men…

The Amis people of the coastal areas have maintained a tightly knitted relationship with the ocean, and this co-existence helps both humans and the ocean to mutually define each other. An intertidal zone is such a place where the Amis people interact with the ocean. Between the ebb and flow of the tides, there is Masia’c, an Amis word used…

Ophir tells the story of an extraordinary indigenous revolution for life, land and culture, opening up the path for the creation of the world’s newest nation in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. A poetic yet dramatic ode to the indelible thirst for freedom, culture and sovereignty; the film sheds light on the biggest conflict of the Pacific since WWII, revealing the…

Taiwan Premiere

Ever since fleeing Myanmar as a child, Mu, a young Kayan woman, lives confined as a refugee and tourist attraction in Thailand. Soon after she becomes a single teenage mother, the U.N. initiates a resettlement plan for the refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border which creates an opportunity for potentially tens of thousands of people to start new…

The story of how Dr. Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Shakur, along with fellow Black Panthers and the Young Lords, combined community health with radical politics to create the first acupuncture detoxification program in America in 1973 – a visionary project eventually deemed too dangerous to exist in America.

Hidden among the mountains north of Beijing, a Wild West-themed gated community promises to deliver the American dream to its several thousand Chinese residents. In Americaville, Annie Liu escapes China’s increasingly uninhabitable capital city to pursue happiness, freedom, romance, and spiritual fulfillment in the town; only to find the American idyll harder to attain than what was promised to her.…

When Kyle Felter, the lead singer of I Don’t Konform sent out a demo album to Flemming Rasmussen, the Grammy Award-winner producer of Metallica, they never imagined themselves a few months later rehearsing with Rasmussen inside a hot hogan on a Navajo reservation before recording their debut album at the iconic Sweet Silence Studio in Denmark. While following I Don’t…

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (in South Dakota) declares a State of Emergency when youth suicide rates reach the highest levels in the country. A respected female elder leads the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s only suicide prevention team, while mentoring a group of suicide-survivor teenagers to find their voice, encouraging them to bring hope and awareness to the reservation.

We Were SMART tells the stories of China’s Sha-ma-te (referred to as SMART) subculture. Based on in-depth interviews with migrant workers born in the 1990s and 2000s, this documentary film explores why younger migrant workers began expressing themselves through punk hairstyles. The film focuses on their hometowns, educational backgrounds, destination cities, factory lives and spiritual world.

Taiwan Premiere

Within a few months, the Kutupalong refugee camp has become the biggest in the world. Out of sight, 700,000 people of the Rohingya Muslim minority fled Myanmar in 2017 to escape genocide and seek asylum in Bangladesh. Prisoners of a major yet little publicized humanitarian crisis, Kalam, Mohammad, Montas and other exiles want to make their voice heard.…

While working on her first documentary film, director Areum meets a progressive party activist and a chef, Seongman, and gets married. After getting married, she takes Seongman with her to study in France, which she has long been preparing to do. In France, the only thing Seongman can do is housework. Not being able to read or speak the language…

The highest peaks of the mountains rise above the clouds. Sometimes they seem to merge with the sky. There is no god and neither there is a devil. We are in the heights of the Peruvian Andes, more than 5000 meters above sea level, where Celestino, a peasant hermit, undertakes a healing journey with his cow Samichay, from the loneliness…

Flowing out from the spinning cassette tape, one after one, the melody of top tribal classics sway on the stage witnessing the golden days of Kaleskes Labaceken and Biung Isdanda as time goes by. In the whispering words of tribes, emotions are moved by the persistence of Cule.e Gaku to the old folk music. The forever-young music band of producer…

“Hawfwen”, a traditional gathering that once popular where the Zhuang people sing folk songs. It often takes place around the clan temples or under the old trees. Singers are divided into male and female groups. They improvised their lyrics to sing in correspondence with one another.

Traveling along the songs in antiphonal style, the camera has found different singers and…

The robots are at our doorstep. Scientists as well as tech-visionaries are certain that in a few years robots will be an integral part of our everyday life. But humanoid robots are more than just another gadget. Bearing a resemblance to living creatures in their conduct and looks, they are more like new beings on our planet. We are the…

Within a neoliberal context marked by poverty and exclusion, land re-distribution together with food production become part of the return to the countryside.

In 1918, during the Japanese colonial period, the tribes in the upper reaches of the Mugua River began to move to the river terraces in the middle reaches of the river, and in 1928, they became known as the Tongmen tribe. In less than a hundred years since the formation of the tribe, the tribal environment has changed with social…

A rice huller is used for rice hulling, its history can be traced from thousands of years ago.

The film begins with the time with no electricity. Back then, “Tu Long” were widely used. Then we visit the wooden rice mills which first appeared when there was electricity. And it ends with the modern rice mills built by technology and…

The island is a place to nurture people and the ocean is the route for outsiders. It all started when a Dutch merchant ship broke into Liuqiu Island offshore of Taiwan in 1622 and began the Dutch colonial plunder of Taiwan.

The Indigenous People Action Coalition of Taiwan acts like the assembly of the reunited back then. They are writing…

In April 1961, John Kennedy is America’s new President, the Cold War heats up in Berlin and nuclear bombers are deployed from bases in arctic Canada. In Kapuivik, north Baffin Island, Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dog team as his ancestors did when he was born in 1900. When the white man known as Boss arrives…

What happens when your land is being claimed as event zone for the two biggest sport events of the planet? A question that applies to the Indigenous community of Aldeia Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as they face increased pressure ahead of the World Cup and the Olympic Games in Brazil. The Indigenous group lives right next to the…