On 15 March 1921, Talat Pasha, a high-ranking Turkish dignitary, was shot dead in a Berlin street by a young Armenian. A few months later, Soghomon Tehlirian, his assassin, appeared before a German court. He faced the death penalty. Yet, during the trial, the victim gradually changed into the guilty party, and the accused was finally acquitted.
Over 2000 Union soldiers, passengers and crew were crammed aboard the steamboat Sultana, licensed to carry 376. Graft, greed, overcrowding, a poorly maintained boat, and the Mississippi River was swollen with spring snowmelt conspired together to create a disaster. On April 27, 1865, the boat’s boilers exploded, causing the worst maritime disaster in US history.
Two simultaneous events—the cutting down of a palm tree and the sound of a demonstration against austerity outside the Portuguese Parliament—become related, in unison, reflecting the present situation. While the trees are being cut due to the red weevil plague, that is affecting specific types of palm trees brought from African ex-colonies, the demonstrations against austerity are identified as the roots of economic crisis.
In 2015, we created this cell animation short to commemorate the Armenian Genocide Centenary. To the date, the Turkish government still denies the genocide took place, dodging their responsibility. 100 years will have passed this April 24th, and Armenians will keep on fighting for justice. This is a small tribute to the 1.500.000 victims.
Straw Dolls tells the story of a how a father and daughter sacrifice their own wellbeing for a mother and her young daughter. Based on a series of true events, the film takes place during the start of the Armenian Genocide.
In Jerusalem and Chicago, London and Bavaria, Krakow and Tel Aviv live six people who survived the horror of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is their story, that of their families and friends; the story of their problems, their failures, their triumphs; how with their lives they honor every day the memory of those who perished.
A timely exploration into the complex links between the U.S. and China. Interspersed with remarks from journalists and experts, All Eyes and Ears interweaves the stories of U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, his adopted Chinese daughter, Gracie Mei, and blind legal advocate Chen Guangcheng as they find purpose, identity and resolve amid the two nations’ evolving relationship.
Summer 1939. Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach leave Europe for Asia. Ella hopes to make an ethnographic film and to help Annemarie get off drugs. In Kabul she realizes to have lost all certainties and faces the difficult search for herself. For a year she travels alone in the British Indies, a keen observer of the colonial system, living from moment to moment while war ravages Europe. Letters, diaries, film footage and photographs reveal a portrait of Ella Maillart (1903-1997), one of the greatest travelers and photographers of the last century. Narrated by the voice of a great actress, Irène Jacob.
«Grozny Blues» follows a few people around Grozny, the capital of war-torn Chechnya where daily life is defined by political repression, constricting customs, forced Islamification and the failure to come to terms with recent history. The film revolves around four women who have been fighting for human rights under worsening conditions for many years but get more and more disillusioned with the situation in Putin’s Russia. The building where they work is also home to a Blues Club that is frequented by a group of young people. Having only vague memories of the Chechen wars in the 90s, they try to make sense of the strange things that are happening in their country. In linking the personal and intimate to the political, Nicola Bellucci shows in a dramatic and yet very poetic way what it means to live in a divided society that navigates a no-man’s land between war and peace, repression and freedom, archaic traditions and modern life.
In the 1860’s Alaska and Finland are simultaneously parts of the Russian Empire. A Finnish mining engineer Simon buys a Tlingit girl named Tsamo and decides to bring her to Finland. The child, Tsamo, is baptized and Simon starts to teach her European manners. Tsamo thinks she’s married to Simon and acts accordingly, but when Simon marries a lady of his own age and class, she gets confused. Simon is forced to send the girl away and the battle over Tsamo’s identity takes complicated turns.
A drama centered on the relationship between journalist Michael Finkel and Christian Longo, an FBI Most Wanted List murderer who for years lived outside the U.S. under Finkel's name.
Through the unrelenting winter in the north of Japan, a small group of workers must brave unusual working conditions to bring to life a 2,000-year-old tradition known as sake. A cinematic documentary, The Birth of Sake is a visually immersive experience of an almost-secret world in which large sacrifices must be made for the survival of a time-honored brew.
NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour -- a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars. But where does math get its power? Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists and engineers, follows math from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond, all leading to the ultimate riddle: Is math an invention or a discovery? Humankind's clever trick or the language of the universe?
At the end of the Edo Period, there was a legendary chivalrous thief who stole from rich merchants and self-serving samurai and gave to the virtuous people of the town. His name was Nezumi-kozo (Rat Boy) Jirokichi. This musical is about how he competed with and was friends with the hero of so many period dramas (Touyama Kinshiro), and about the loves they surrounded themselves with in the new and progressive Japan. A Takarazuka take on the tale of Nezumi-kozo.