Planting for Life

Ranjit, a farmer in India, takes on the fight of his life when he demands justice for his 13-year-old daughter, the victim of a brutal gang rape. His decision to support his daughter is virtually unheard of, and his journey unprecedented.

Film adaptation of French economist Thomas Piketty's ground-breaking global bestseller of the same name: an eye-opening journey through wealth and power.

Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.

Alexander McQueen's rags-to-riches story is a modern-day fairy tale, laced with the gothic. Mirroring the savage beauty, boldness and vivacity of his design, this documentary is an intimate revelation of McQueen's own world, both tortured and inspired, which celebrates a radical and mesmerizing genius of profound influence.

A documentary about the life and films of director John Ford.

After the high-profile killing of Damilola Taylor, Cornelius' family move out of London. But when they discover their new town is run by racists, Cornelius takes a drastic step to survive.

A string of threatening emails escalates into a revenge plot involving a newly married US marshal and his ex-girlfriend.

The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.

When a cross-section of seven-year-olds were interviewed for 7 Up in 1964 it was immediately evident that their social backgrounds influenced their attitudes towards life. While the upper class children were confident and self-assured, those from middle and working class backgrounds were resigned to a challenging life of hard work. This premise was put to the test every seven years when the same group were interviewed about the progression of their lives. 49 years in the making, the changes that occurred to the original 14 make for fascinating television and are in many ways the stories of all our lives. From success and disappointment, marriage and childbirth, to poverty and illness, nearly every facet of life has been captured on film. Now, at the age of 56, the group are once more brought together and, with the benefit of hindsight, assess whether their lives have been ruled by circumstance or self-determination.

SEDUCED AND ABANDONED combines acting legend Alec Baldwin with director James Toback as they lead us on a troublesome and often hilarious journey of raising financing for their next feature film. Moving from director to financier to star actor, the two players provide us with a unique look behind the curtain at the world's biggest and most glamourous film festival, shining a light on the bitter-sweet relationship filmmakers have with Cannes and the film business. Featuring insights from directors Martin Scorsese, 'Bernando Bertolucci' and Roman Polanski; actors Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain and a host of film distribution luminaries.

Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.

A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.

In a crime-plagued neighborhood near Miami, brutal, bare-knuckled backyard fights give young men a chance to earn money -- and self-respect.

Just two years away from turning 30, participants in Michael Apted's documentary series are facing serious questions of identity and purpose, wondering whether they've found their place in the world.

A documentary examining the decade of the 1970s as a turning point in American cinema. Some of today's best filmmakers interview the influential directors of that time.

Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.

Legendary journalist Gay Talese unmasks a motel owner who spied on his guests for decades. But his bombshell story soon becomes a scandal of its own.

A documentary about how a dominant cultural and demographic institution both sustains their traditional activities and adapts to the digital revolution.

BBC Arena's documentary on the Dames of British Theatre and film featuring Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Joan Plowright on screen together for the first time as they reminisce over a long summer weekend in a house Joan once shared with Sir Laurence Olivier.

The life and career of an actor, artist, and icon. His own journey through his own camera.

Workers, peasants, soldiers, students and merchants were five groups of Chinese society in the 1950s, after the so-called elimination of the exploited class. Borrowing this concept, the umbrella is taken as the clue to rediscover changes in various social classes after the economic reform, and to analyze the social problems in China. Workers making umbrellas, merchants selling umbrellas, students looking for jobs in the rain. Umbrella is used as a metaphor that can be seen everywhere. As the raindrop, what we see is sometimes clear, sometimes untraceable.

"China Gate" tells the story of young Chinese fight to change their fate through studying. Right before dawn, students in Huining have already started their self-studying session; hard working youngsters have filled up the space of school ground. This is one of the most poverty-stricken Counties in Western China; here people's only hope is in education, as the way to change their social status. Therefore all their effort point towards the College Entrance Examination, the process is like going through a gate, those who pass can study at urban Universities, and have the chance to build a better life. During the same winter season in Beijing, a graduate student faces a big decision. Should he keep trying to survive in the big city or get back to his countryside home? The exhausted faces at the Beijing underground seem to be revealing the truth about their distance in between. The student comes to see the flag ceremony at Tiananmen Square, where the pulsing symbol of the nation lies.

China marks the beginning of the extensive Asian theme in Ottinger’s filmography and is her first travelogue. Her observant eye is interested in anything from Sichuan opera and the Beijing Film Studio to the production of candy and sounds of bicycle bells.

Part mournful meditation through documentary footage, part experimental narrative. This film looks at the life of the Chinese who have been displaced within their own society.

A microcosm of China past and present flows through Xu Tong’s intimate docu “Shattered,” in which the maverick indie filmmaker continues to refine his techniques and concerns shown in his previous “Wheat Harvest” and “Fortune Teller.”

"Huangyangchuan, Gansu province, China. It's an arid mountain area with poor roads. Ma Bingcheng is well-respected local doctor, so many patients (most of them farmers) come to see him every day. In his small clinic, people chat with each other about their lives, local conditions, or the people they know. The clinic seems to open up like a microcosm, the information and experiences of different people intertwine, revealing the conditions of typical Chinese farmers, and the typical fates of both young and old--"

On the thirteenth of the first month of each year, Xiafang Village, Anle Township, even in the cold and rain, the Seven Saints Peregrine Falcons, who are shirtless, are powerful and mighty. During the 2008 Spring Festival, Uncle Ghost's desire to record terroir images was irresistibly teased.

A documentary film showing the life of Niu Hongmiao, a 20-year-old country girl who is now a prostitute in Beijing. Around the time of wheat harvesting, she goes back home to Dingxing County, Hebei Province to visit her parents.

A 480-minute documentary, a historical record of the change of independent music across China, mammoth and complete, involving evolution and conflicts of several generations in Chinese society. In the second decade of the 21 century, it has been ten years since the Beijing Olympics. China has seen the abundance of wealth and civilization. Facing such a diverse lifestyles, people are far more different from each other than ever. Conservative, avant-garde, worried, daring, they not only fail to be understood, but also fail to understand one another. The film is a driving bus of our times, which has already lost its political halo in 30-years glory history, filled with artists, businessmen, workers and all different people who get in and off, however, the innocent younger generation is still queuing up anxiously outside, who might get in one of the buses, or smash all buses.

As a special generation born in the New China, the hundreds of thousands of educated youth from Shanghai went through enormous hardship during their work in Xinjiang from 1963 to 1966. Because of the specific historical conditions and context, they have been strikingly stamped with the mark of the times and have had to struggle to understand the relationship between themselves and the nation.

An ice sculpture in a northern city, a marching band, and the bitter silence on the radio.

In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.

A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, who lived and worked in Shanghai nine years earlier, uses the eclipse as a catalyst to explore the way weather, light, and sound affect the urban architectural environment during this extremely rare phenomenon.

"If the old doesn't go, the new never comes" recites a teenager hanging out near a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China. In Demolition, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki deconstructs the transforming cityscape by befriending the migrant laborers on the site and documenting the honest, often unobserved, human interactions, yielding a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of work and life in the shadow of progress and economic development.

I bought a VHS player to watch my parents’ wedding video. My mother came by and chatted with me as I was rewinding the VHS tape.

Documentary about a tribe of indigenous people in northern China.

A documentary chronicling the coming of age of a young chinese man.

Two Uigur brothers and a friend are in love with parkour, a kind of extreme sport. Regardless of opposition from their worried mothers, the boys train themselves to be the best in an upcoming parkour event in Beijing while managing to iron out additional difficulties. They lose the game, but eventually they learn much more about their true selves.

The film explores the hidden face of poverty in one of the world's most affluent and capitalistic cities. Directed by CHEUNG King Wai (KJ: Music and Life), the film follows five Hong Kong families of different backgrounds that receive government subsidies. How do the poor get by in a glossy city that flaunts conspicuous consumption and hides poverty in cavernous public housing estates? All's Right With The World shares the different stories of these low-income families, their daily living conditions, and their ways of celebrating Chinese New Year.