Schedule

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern‐day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s Absaroka‐Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.…

This road movie documentary follows mobile homes across the highway, connecting the grandiose vastness of the American West to the transitory nature of the homes and the tenuous life stories of their inhabitants. In fragmented stopovers, the film revolves around questions of home, belonging, and an American Dream that has become brittle.

Sailing A Sinking Sea explores the culture of the Moken people of Myanmar and Thailand. The Moken are a nomadic seafaring community and one of the smallest ethnic groups in Asia. Spending eight months out of the year in thatch-roofed wooden boats, they are wholly reliant upon the sea, and their entire belief system revolves around water. Filmed on boats,…

This film depicts the Gonya festival among the Tamang ethnic group in the Kathmandu valley of Nepal. The celebration for Gonya revolves around the performance of the bonbo, an equivalent for the more universal term “shaman” in Tamang culture. The film consists of three parts: The first part shows how the Gonya is incorporated within the overarching tradition of Janai…

Laundry Lives takes us into the usually invisible everyday worlds of five middle class Indonesians: Lia, Dyna, Ning, Adi and Nur. As Indonesia’s economy and market grow, there are hidden implications for the domestic lives of the country’s rapidly expanding professional middle classes and for environmental sustainability. Laundry Lives captures this moment of change, showing the shifting gender relations, new…

In a world where everyone has a mobile phone, a personalised ringtone says a lot about you. Welcome to a once-remote Aboriginal community in northern Australia, where individual ringtones reveal rich insights into lives and relationships.

Set in the high plateau of eastern Tibet, Drokpa is an intimate portrait of the lives and struggles of Tibetan nomads whose life is on the cusp of irreversible change. Richly observed daily lives and family relationships, especially those of Tamku, a teenage single mother, Dhongya, a senior nomad, and Yithan, a mother of two boys, are at once deeply…

In June 2014, the harvest festival of the tribe was just around the corner. Two local Pulima people in Taiwan felt called to the artistry of the land on one side, and the forest on the other side, and they met each other in Champagne-Ardenne, France, to go on a trip of spirituality.

Etan Pavavalung is an indigenous Paiwanese artist…

As a reachable form of a lost Eden within everyone’s grasp, everybody comes to the Bois de Vincennes to seek refuge in nature. People from all walks of life have the right to be here: rich, poor, French, foreign, gay, straight, alone or accompanied, old-school or hip. The woods are an island surrounded by the towns that encircle it: a…

My father, Du-Ya, left the Amis tribe and went to Taipei City as a construction worker when he was an adolescent. He later returned to his hometown after he got married, and adopted fishing as his career in Shih-Ti Habor, Hualien. Fishing was his way of making a living. However, he still needed to leave home occasionally to seek labor…

In the evacuated zone around the nuclear plant of Fukushima, five years after the “catastrophe,” a few rare individuals still live on this land burning with radiation. The seemingly irrational yet peaceful existence of these diehards reminds us that, as a last resort, a patch of land is our strongest bond to the world.

Residents of an industrial town in the Arctic ponder how pollution affects their lives and the landscape.

An immersive meditation on the passage of time and the persistent resonance of place, Linefork follows the daily rituals of an elderly couple living in Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains. Now well into his eighties, Lee Sexton is the last living link to the distant past of a regional American music. A retired coal miner with black lung, Lee and his wife,…

A consulting service is located in the Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny. It’s an outpost at the end of a corridor. A large, run-down room where sick men show up bearing physical scars, and whose pain seems closely linked to the suffering of exile. They keep coming back here because they still harbor hopes that this place will give them the means…

For the first time in history, survivors Jenerasi, Mauda, and Grace provide evidence of a story that has become a legend in Ugandan culture: women who broke the taboo of premarital sex were abandoned on a deserted island to die.

A documentary that recounts the lives of passengers traveling on the longest railway route in the world. The director tells the stories and fortunes of ordinary Russians met by chance on the Moscow-Vladivostok train. The endless journey is a metaphor of the country in perpetual motion, while the passengers’ stories form a social portrait of contemporary Russian society.

Forced to leave his tribe still young, Thini-á lives an exile that will end soon. Will he find his place among his people? In search of answers, he crosses the basin of the Araguaia and Xingu rivers in the heart of Brazil, in the footsteps of another passer-by who, like him, has lived between two cultures: João da Luz, son…

Strongly encouraged by an environmental protection program, Rendala and his clan left their native forest in the southwest of Madagascar and the rest of the Mikea community to settle a few kilometers away. Attracted by the modern world, spit tobacco, and the promise of a better future, they gave up their lives of hunting and gathering. But five years later,…

Despite having lost everything, Yazidi women Hedil and Naam are struggling for a humane life for their families. In the Yazidi massacre by the terrorist organisation “Islamic State” they were forced to leave their homeland, and have finally found protection in a refugee camp. Their situation seems hopeless, caught between the dictatorship of ISIS and their dream destination: Europe. What…

Born in 1981, a Nanao Atayal from Yilan, Wu Ta Elementary School teacher Wilang hunted with elders in the mountains and learned rattan weaving techniques since he was a boy. He has an old soul that is passionate about Atayal culture. In 2014, Wilang embarked on the “Finding our Roots Project” at Wu Ta Elementary School. He took school children…

The first documentary about hospice care in China. Hospice care is usually called palliative care because of cultural taboos in China. In the hospice care center of Lukang, Hangzhou, there are more than 60 patients, but over 20 patients will be gone in a year’s time. Most of them cannot be cured. Their family members sent them here to ease…

An enthralling look inside the hidden world of a New Zealand funeral home, After Life explores a unique, enigmatic institution, following the men and women who work with the dead and the delicate ritual of the body’s preparation for its final journey. A compelling glimpse into a rarely seen world, After Life reveals a place rich in meaning and humanity…

In the very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.…

Presenting a unique first person perspective, filmmaker/subject Michelle Maren gives access to the rarely seen inner world of Borderline Personality Disorder. Inspired by Michel Negroponte’s film Jupiter’s Wife, Maren contacted Negroponte, convinced that having him tell her story would change her life. He agreed. Each with their own cameras, Maren and Negroponte embarked on a truly collaborative project over the…

Coal India is a cinematic essay on physical labour and its cyclical movements. It portrays people who work under pre-industrial conditions in the coalfields near Dhanbad, India. The film shows heavy physical labour that is increasingly invisible in our technologized 21st century.…

Perma gold mine, Benin. Some dream to find something, others realized there was nothing to be found. Some dig relentlessly hoping to become rich, others died in the process. And a few of them say that here, nobody dies.

Poetry is immensely popular in Burma/Myanmar, a country emerging from years of dictatorship and isolation. In the past, poetry was a way to endure and resist tyranny. Today, there are more online poets than bloggers. The stories and poems in Burma Storybook circle around Maung Aung Pwint, the country’s most famous dissident poet alive today, as he waits for his…

Faber Navalis is Latin for boat builder, words in an ancient language for describing an ancient profession. This might seem to be a film just about the restoration of a wooden ship, but the actual subject of this documentary is the state of mind of its shipwright: an Italian researcher in maritime ethnography who decided to learn boat building skills…

Welcome to the daily routine of Akbar Pir Ahmadi, one of the few masters of felt-making in Shiraz, Iran. He begins early in the morning and welcomes many visitors throughout the day: a friend comes for help, two customers buy felt, and his little girl joins him for lunch. In the evening, Akbar goes to the Zurkhaneh (traditional gymnasium) to…

In the day he is a delivery driver for a factory, but on dates that ends with 3, 6, or 9, he exchanges his dirty work clothes for a mottled apron with a delicate yellow dragon. The apron is like a mission that carries on the last wishes of his late father. Taking over the mantle of his father, he…

Path of Destiny is a documentary about a group of Sikawasay from the Amis tribe of Hualien, Taiwan, known as the people who possess gods. This fate calls upon them to maintain traditional rituals to serve the tribe, living by way of interaction with the gods. We followed Panay Mulu, who has been with them for more than 20 years,…

We, the hijras, are born neither man nor woman. We are born somewhere in the middle. Our name was mentioned in Sanskrit texts, more than a thousand years ago. It evoked beauty, bravery, and straightforwardness. I try to act as a good guru towards my daughters, I want to teach them how to live properly. It’s not enough to only…

Unity: Dress-scapes of Accra is an ethnographic film about African fashion in the capital of Ghana. The comeback of African print seems to be emerging in the fashion world of Accra. While following Allan, a fashion designer, and his wife Cynthia, this mosaic film shows the great diversity of tailor-made fashion and hybrid styles, the ways that African wear is…

Peruvian alpaca wool is a material of utmost significance among Andean highland communities and their rich textile traditions. Entretejido is an observational documentary that weaves together the different sites and communities involved in the making of alpaca wool fashions. The film is a sensorial immersion into the textures that compose this supply chain, from animal to runway, employing sonic and…