Fifty years ago, on Sunday, 2 March 1969, Concorde flew for the first time. Starting from this inaugural flight, the film goes back in time to the origin of the conception of Concorde.
At the end of WWI, the treaty of Versailles established the conditions for peace in Europe. The aim for the victorious powers was to make Germany pay reparations, and to guarantee a future without war. Yet a decade later, the denunciation of 'Versailles' became a powerful lever for the nazis to obtain power as these reparations would mark the beginning of the humiliation of the German people, and nurture a feeling of having been bestowed a hopeless future. In the 20 years that follow the end of WWI, the issue of reparations and responsibility will effectively poison international relationship. The treaty negative impact goes well beyond WWII as the new European borders it implemented led to many conflicts during the twentieth century. This documentary shines a light on the causality between the decisions taken with the treaty of Versailles, and the ensuing events of the century.
Long before the arrival of Homo Sapiens, the Neanderthals wandered the vast European plains, and regularly drowned into the Ice Ages. Several discoveries, in France and England, and especially on the island of Jersey, now allow archaeologists to understand the lifestyle of those first great nomads of Europe, that lasted 300.000 years.
Ahmed flees his war-torn homeland of Syria and faces discrimination in Iraq. The people of the new society he joins make it impossible for him to move on and begin a new life.
Japan in 1910, industrialization is unstoppable and devastating entire areas in the name of progress. In X, a farming village in Ibaraki Prefecture, the environment is so polluted that the plants in the fields die and the air, which is laden with toxic smoke, can no longer be breathed. But Saburo, the grandson of the village elder, can no longer put up with this and forms the resistance of the villagers. In Junpei, the idealistic employee of Hitachi, he finds an unexpected ally, and together they fight for a way to save the village.
To protect his rich and strategic lands in France, the English king, Richard the Lionheart, decided to build an impregnable castle to bar the route along the Seine, thus asserting his supremacy in Normandy. Four years later, France’s King Philip besieged the site at the head of an army of 6,000 men.
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.
For over 30 years a man termed as a mad man, comes to light as his passionate work of collecting artifacts gathers momentum and gains the title of a museum. The film trails through the struggles of Victor Hugo Gomes, a Collector from India-Goa, and how he perceives to leave behind his collection.
The first American space station Skylab is found in pieces scattered in Western Australia. Putting these pieces back together and re-tracing the Skylab program back to its very conception reveals the cornerstone of human space exploration.
The movie revisits the shooting of then-president Chen Shui-bian and vice president Annette LU on the eve of the presidential election in 2004. After the shooting, the two won the presidential election. Moreover, the crime suspect was drowned in a near port days after the incident. The assassination case has been investigated by the authority for 15 years; however, several questions surrounding the "319 Shooting" remain unanswered to this day. The movie approaches a dark period of Taiwan history and shows the mechanics of power - in a witty and creative way.