OBAIDA, a short film by Matthew Cassel, explores a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli military arrest. Each year, some 700 Palestinian children undergo military detention in a system where ill-treatment is widespread and institutionalized. For these young detainees, few rights are guaranteed, even on paper. After release, the experience of detention continues to shape and mark former child prisoners’ path forward.
Germans colonized the land of Namibia, in southern Africa, during a brief period of time, from 1840 to the end of the World War I. The story of the so-called German South West Africa (1884-1915) is hideous; a hidden and silenced account of looting and genocide.
The incredible life of novelist, screenwriter, actress and nude dancer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), who led her life to the beat, constantly reinventing herself through words, scandals and metamorphoses; a peasant woman who became an icon of the European Belle Époque; an artist who defied religion and social prejudices to live a hedonist existence worthy of her desires; a real woman who turned herself into a fictional character…
Vasily Livanov’s historical movie carries the viewer back into the 18th century and tells the story of the monument to Peter the Great through Alexandr Sergeevich Pushkin’s poem «The Bronze Horseman». The sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet comes from France at the invitation of the Empress Ekaterina the 2nd to erect the monument. Thanks to the master’s meticulous work and painstaking creative search the monument has become not only a masterpiece of art but one of the symbols of Russia.
The True Story of Sargent Joseph Hoover went to war to preserve the Union. After being captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp, he understood what it was to be kept against his will. Together with a friend he escaped and aided by slaves made it to freedom
Archaeologists believe that a massive grave in a vicarage garden in Derbyshire may be the last resting place of a vast army of thousands of warriors that invaded Britain in the ninth century.
In the 1960s, the US government came up with an experimental plan supported by the oil companies to try using nuclear explosions to extract natural gas in the American West. The tests set for Wyoming were known as the Wagon Wheel Project.
When a Japanese pilot crash-lands on the tiny remote Hawaiian island of Ni'ihau, he is met with courtesy and traditional Hawaiian hospitality from the locals - until they discover he was part of the recent attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon the community is split between those of Japanese ancestry who support the pilot and those of Hawaiian ancestry who oppose them.
Set in Qin Dynasty during the warring states period in ancient China. Shin was a war orphan. He has a dream of becoming a great general Shin has a fateful encounter with young King Eisei. King Eisei aims to unify all of China.
Paris, 1930. Luis Buñuel is penniless after the scandal surrounding the release of his last movie. Sculptor Ramón Acín, a good friend, buys a lottery ticket and promises Buñuel that he will pay for his next movie if he wins the prize.
Shongram (struggle) is a romantic drama set during the 1971 liberation struggle of Bangladesh. A British Bengali on his death bed is interviewed by a daring London reporter, where four decades later, Karim is able to recall and finally share his past. We are transported to 1971, when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan and a young Karim (a Muslim) is in love with a beautiful Asha (a Hindu). The peaceful village life is suddenly interrupted by war and Karim must grow up fast to survive in an era where mass killings and abduction was common. He must also carry out his duty and revenge before he can finally search for Asha.
"El odio" describes the discrediting campaign against Lula da Silva and the Workers' Party in Brazil, demonstrating how this process led Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. Conducted by Argentine documentary filmmaker Andrés Sal.lari, also details the participation of Judge Sergio Moro, the media and Washington in the entire operation.
As his fate was decided, Patrice Lumumba decided to write a letter to his wife, as a token of the promise he had made to himself about his country and his people. This letter, although keeping a militant tone, reveals the more private side of Lumumba, yet freer still to express what is deep inside him. This story, mainly told in his own words, gives Lumumba back the humanity he was not afforded throughout his career. It is about understanding the passion that animated his convictions. But above all, it is about seeing the man behind the political emblem, facing a destiny that gradually escapes him.
Actor Jeremy Irons embarks on an epic journey through the halls of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, two hundred years after its inauguration, along corridors where thousands of masterpieces of all time tell the lives of rulers and common people, and tales about times of war and madness and times of peace and happiness; because, as Goya said, imagination, the mother of the arts, produces impossible monsters, but also unspeakable wonders.
So what if... what if a brash American naval officer and a young Japanese girl met and fell in love? How would they communicate? (Certainly not in Italian!) In POP’s most ambitious production to date, Artistic Director Josh Shaw’s long-time dream of a bilingual Madama Butterfly comes to life at The Aratani Theatre in Little Tokyo. With a new libretto by Josh Shaw and Eiki Isomura, all Japanese roles will be sung in Japanese and all American roles will be sung in English. This is a co-production with Opera in the Heights (Houston). This production is sponsored in part by an Innovations Grant from Opera America.