Life Is Boundless and Full of Dangers

Cows, Cash & Cover-ups? Investigating VCJD

March 2019 •English

Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is the human version of mad cow disease and has been described as a "ticking time bomb" in Britain. This documentary explores the claims by families of vCJD victims that a criminal inquiry should be held to examine the possibility of a cover-up by authorities of BSE in farming and the food industry.

Between Earth & Sky

February 2023 •English

For her entire professional life, renowned ecologist Nalini Nadkarni pioneered climbing techniques to study "what grows back” after an ecological disturbance in the rainforest canopy. Now, after surviving a life-threatening fall from a tree, she must turn her research question onto herself in order to understand the effects of disturbance and recovery throughout her life.

Angel Applicant

March 2023 •English

A sick man discovers empathetic wisdom on how to cope with his deadly autoimmune disease within the colorful expressive works of the late Swiss-German modern artist, Paul Klee.

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March 2016 •Spanish

The Happiest Man on Earth

March 2019 •Finnish

A lonely 40-year-old man sits on the balcony of a Finnish apartment building. Joonas Berghäll has learned that he will die in 14 years’ time, unless he changes his way of living or attitude towards life. Joonas wants to make a film about the state of wellbeing of Finnish men, drawing from his own experiences and mirroring the society at large. The film is built around six stories. It starts with the context of school and proceeds through the contexts of military service, custody battle, burnout and substance abuse to end on the subject of premature death caused by health problems.

Red Dog

March 2019 •English

Country songwriter Luke Dick spent his toddler years living in the Red Dog, the rowdiest and most popular strip club in Oklahoma City. Now 30 years later, Luke has a toddler and a newborn of his own. As he began asking his mom questions about his own childhood, she turned out to be more hilariously forthcoming than he ever imagined.

Cómo vivir toda una vida con apenas un te quiero

Invalid date •Spanish

TB: Return of the Plague

March 2014 •English

TB is the most deadly infectious disease in history - it has killed over a billion people in the last 200 years. Multi-BAFTA winning film-maker, Jezza Neumann travelled to Swaziland to make this very intimate account of the crippling effects of MDR-TB. We witness victims from two families battle with the disease over the course of a year.

Gods of Molenbeek

August 2019 •Finnish

The district of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean in Brussels has become world-famous as a center of jihadism, but for six-year-old Aatos and his friend Amine, it is a familiar home. Here, they listen to spiders, discover black holes, and fight about what is going to steer a flying carpet. Together they search for the answers to life's big questions. But the brutality of the adult world makes itself known when terrorists detonate a bomb in the neighborhood. Aaatos envies Amine's Muslim faith and looks for his own gods, although his classmate Flo questions him; she is strongly convinced that anyone who believes in God is completely nuts. Gods of Molenbeek is a wonderful portrayal of childhood friendship, inquiry and the creation of meaning in a chaotic time.

things that won't die

March 2022 •Spanish

After finding some videos she uploaded to YouTube when she was a child, Manuela attempts to follow the trail she herself has left on the Internet. A search that looks into all that things that won't never die and that, especially, thinks about the way we look at ourselves.

The World According to Tippi

January 1997 •French

Tippi is no ordinary child. She believes that she has the gift of talking to animals and that they are like brothers to her. 'I speak to them with my mind, or through my eyes, my heart or my soul, and I see that they understand and answer me.' Tippi is the daughter of French filmmakers and wildlife photographers, Alain Degre and Sylvie Robert, who have captured her on film with some of Africa's most beautiful and dangerous animals. Tippi shares her thoughts and wisdom on Africa, its people and the animals she has come to know and love. Often her wisdom is beyond her years, and her innocence and obvious rapport with the animals is both fascinating and charming.

Dying for the Other

January 2012 •English

Dying for the Other is a video triptych, documenting the lives of mice used in breast cancer research and humans suffering from the same disease. In order to produce this video, da Costa documented scenes of her own life during the summer of 2011 and combined them with footage taken at a breast cancer research facility in New York City over the same time frame.

Postcard (Or, from afar, you are a mirage)

March 2024 •Spanish

"The palm trees on the reverse are a delusion; so is the pink sand". This line, taken from a poem by Margaret Atwood, lights the path traced in "Postcard". As the years go by, landscapes transform, take on new meanings, and hold onto joys that will never be regained. The sea and the beach, once stages of happy summers, romances, and encounters, will turn into concentration camps or centers of detention and torture. This occurs across different times and places. In this piece, I embark on a journey through some of my works that explore the relationship between testimony, spaces, and time, engaging in dialogue with the beautiful film directed by Alejandro Segovia in 1972.

Father

November 2020 •Chinese

The director's grandfather is a blind fortune teller and his father a real-estate owner. They have grievances against each other for dismantling the old house. Grandfather thinks it's time for him to leave and asks Father to quit his job. At the same time, an accident happens at Father's construction site. They are entangled in dealing with the hatred from the past and the kinship that has always existed.

A Matter of Time

October 2015 •English

Kathryn Calder, one of the vocalists behind the Influential and successful indie band The New Pornographers, puts her life on hold when her mother is diagnosed with ALS. After moving back to her childhood home to care for her mother, she is inspired to record her first solo album, 'Are You My Mother?' there as a gift to her as she fights the disease. Old bandmates, friends, and a new extended family only recently discovered all join Kathryn in her and her mother's journey.

Eating

May 2004 •English

Eating, 2nd Edition: Introducing The RAVE Diet presents graphic evidence of how animal foods are not meant for human consumption, and how the suffering and death of the animals "takes revenge" on the humans who eat them by causing most of our chronic diseases, and how the switch to a all whole-food plant based diet can begin to reverse many of these diseases in as little as three weeks.

Circus

January 2022 •Estonian

We all carry hell with us. The filmmaker’s hell exists on a canvas, which he studied carefully in childhood. The mystical picture has many names: Circus, Hell, Game at the Arena. Decades later he finds the painting again. The film unravels as loose ponderings about the plight of being an artist and touches upon the filmmaker’s personal demons. Can he see the painting in a new light?

Celeste

June 2009 •Portuguese

"Against an adverse sky, Celeste raises her flight. If he went up, nobody knows, nobody saw."

People We Come Across

January 2021 •Finnish

What happens when a group of Finns travel to a tiny village in Benin to participate in a vaccination study? By participating, they can aid in the development of a diarrhea vaccine for children in developing countries – and, at the same time, have a different kind of vacation in West Africa. The complicated side of helping people and the clashes between two cultures rise to the forefront of Mia Halme’s delicious documentary film.

Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food

June 2023 •English

Through revealing interviews with experts and victims' families, this gripping documentary examines the problem of deadly foodborne illness in the US.