Sea otters are once again in peril after being brought back from the brink of extinction. An unprecedented number of sea otter deaths have occurred along the California coast in the last three years. Meanwhile, the Fish & Wildlife Services decision to eliminate their No Otter Zone from Southern California waters remains controversial. This fragile species threatened by pollution, infectious diseases, starvation, and competition with fishermen struggles for survival.
FRONTLINE examines the Houston Astros cheating scandal and what it says about baseball today. With reporter Ben Reiter, the documentary traces the making of one of the best teams and worst scandals in modern Major League Baseball history, the limited accountability and how the Astros’ approach to baseball changed the sport.
Four women, four stories: Anissa, Fatiha, Malika and Sarah share in intimate portraits their journey of practicing the youyou or zaghareed, the cries of joy and emotion that women express in North Africa and West Asia. Through their life stories, interspersed with songs and personal narratives, they express the strength they draw from their voices and the legacy they carry with them.
Shot in Poland, Ukraine and Israel, this film tells the story of Shimon Redlich, a Holocaust survivor who returns to places from his childhood as well as different hiding places in his struggle to survive.
What will it mean when most of us can afford to have the information in our DNA - all three billion chemical letters of it - read, stored, and available for analysis. Cracking Your Genetic Code reveals that we stand on the verge of such a revolution. Meet a cancer patient who appears to have cheated death and a cystic fibrosis sufferer breathing easily because scientists have been able to pinpoint and neutralize the genetic abnormalities underlying their conditions. But what are the moral dilemmas raised by this new technology? Will it help or hurt us to know the diseases that may lie in our future? What if such information falls into the hands of insurance companies, employers, or prospective mates? One thing is for certain: the new era of personalized, gene-based medicine is relevant to everyone, and soon you will be choosing whether to join the ranks of the DNA generation.
Hammer and compass in Mozambique. We see a GDR flag waved at a rally in Maputo, carried by "Madgermanes", contract workers who once toiled in eastern Germany. Some of them founded families there, like Eulidio. His daughter Sarah grows up with her mother in Berlin. The relationship with her "second home" is slow in growing, partly thanks to Luana, Sarah's baby, whose father, Eduardo is also from Mozambique.
This vibrant documentary celebrates Guillermo Gómez-Peña and the contribution his radical, queer, anti-colonial art has made to conversations around border-thinking, gender politics and Latinx identity.
In the practice of overtone singing (called also bi-phonic singing), whose best-known examples can be found in Mongolia and with the Tuva people of Southern Siberia, a single person sings what the audience perceives as two voices at the same time: a low pitch with his vocal cords, and in addition, a high-pitched melody using harmonics (overtones) selected by modifying the volume of the mouth cavity. This documentary is not an ethnography filmed in location. It is partly an illustration of the results of former research, partly the very actual investigation on overtone singing carried out in Paris, in the Ethnomusicology Department of the Musée de l'Homme, during a workshop, during a concert of the Mongolian National Ensemble, and in the medical visualization department of a hospital.
Extending a lifetime’s worth of zero-waste activism, visionary designer Bakker devises the Future Food System, a self-sufficient residence that provides shelter, food and energy while reusing any by-products as fuel or fertiliser. Joined by esteemed chefs Matt Stone and Jo Barrett, he works with a team of builders, engineers, and experts in agriculture, aquaponics and biochemistry to realise the project at Melbourne’s Fed Square – culminating in the launch of a unique farm-to-table restaurant.
The people and their labor are bound to the land in the cycle of activities to the sowing to the harvesting of wheat. Without narration or subtitles, the film conveys a sense of unity between the people and the land. Filmed in the Balkh Province, an area inhabited by Tajik and other Central Asian peoples. The town of Aq Kupruk is approximately 320 miles northwest of Kabul. The theme of the film focuses on rural economics. The film and accompaning instructor notes focus on herding, and fishing under diverse environmental conditions. The impact of technological change, human adaptation, and governmental extension of market systems are parallel themes.
A portrait of two very different mathematicians, porridge pulleys and Pi features Fields medalist Vaughan Jones, one of the world's foremost knot theorists and an avid windsurfer, and Hendrik lenstra, a number theorist with a passion for Homer and all things classical. Porridge pulleys and Pi poses the question: how do we get first-rate research mathematicians? Hendrik lenstra and Vaughan Jones have had an extraordinary impact on mathematics; this charming documentary gives the viewer a taste of their personalities, mathematical and otherwise. A whirlwind tour of knots, geonomics, cryptography, music, Homer, elliptic curves, art, and windsurfing, the video contains sections on the history of Pi, and a suprising discovery involving a cocoa tin and an Escher print.
Drawing on over seventy-five encounters with New Yorkers of different ages, races, genders, and sexual interests, Searchers is a portrait of The Big Apple as seen through the eyes of lovers, searching the web for their special someone.
When a Chinese-American family travels from California to Mississippi to visit the grave of their ancestors, they stumble upon surprising revelations. Along the way, they meet a diverse group of local residents and historians, who shed light on the racially complex history of the early Chinese in the segregated South. Their emotional journey also leads them to discover how the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 impacted their family and how deep their roots run in America.
This is one of three short films in the Living Texas Blues series. Battle of the Guitars shows the ranging influence of Aaron "T-Bone" Walker throught the performance of Pete Mayes and Joe Hughes at the Doll House Club in Houston.
Cameras record artist Ellsworth Kelly as he creates sculptures for the US Embassy in Beijing. With all his equipment around him, Ellsworth undertakes a big task as his creates he next masterpieces.
Between 1405 and 1433, Admiral Zheng He of China led seven epic voyages to more than 30 countries, including Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Kenya and Tanzania. The admiral and his crew gathered knowledge and wealth from Indochina to Africa for China's Ming empire. These voyages were the biggest naval expeditions mounted at the time. Zheng He was bigger than life and could have changed the course of history. But after the seven voyages, he and his Treasure Fleet were forgotten by China, and the world, for six hundred years. National Geographic photographer Michael Yamashita sets sail to discover why. To celebrate the 600th anniversary of Zheng He's maiden exploration voyage, Michael Yamashita traveled over 10,000 miles from Yunnan in China to Africa's Swahili coast taking over 40,000 pictures for the feature story on this great explorer, published in the July 2005 edition of National Geographic.
The brilliant writing and troubled life of Californian Larry Levis came to an abrupt halt when he died at age 49. Is self-destruction required for a serious life of art? Featuring an original score by Iron and Wine and film excerpts by award-winning Spanish filmmaker Lois Patiño, this innovative documentary explores his childhood working alongside Mexican-American field hands, three marriages, friendships with America’s greatest poets, and his own words for answers.
A portrait of artist May Wilson, former “wife-mother-housekeeper-cook” and a grandmother who, at age 60 after the break-up of her 40-year marriage, moves to New York City and discovers an independent life of her own for the first time.
One day in 2005, Lina Fruzzetti receives a startling email that reads, "If this is your father, we are cousins." There follows a decade-long quest to learn more about her Italian father who died young in Italian ruled Eritrea and her Eritrean mother who does not dwell on the past. Above all, Fruzzetti strives to understand her far-flung African, European, and American family against the backdrop of colonial rule, worlds at war, migration, grief, diasporas, and the global world in which we all live.