Contrasts of Peru
Peru is a country of many contrasts. From the cold waters of the Coast over the 6000 m high Andes to the unique biodiversity of the Amazon Jungle. Peru isn't only Machu Picchu. It's much more.
Peru is a country of many contrasts. From the cold waters of the Coast over the 6000 m high Andes to the unique biodiversity of the Amazon Jungle. Peru isn't only Machu Picchu. It's much more.
Documentary short about a strange phenomenon where a phone booth that was in the middle of the Mojave Desert began to attract people around the world to call the number and also to travel to the desert to answer the phone.
Permaculture expert Geoff Lawton describes how he and a team of volunteers grew an oasis in arid, salty lowland, despite extremely high temperatures and minimal irrigation. The site is the lowest dryland expanse on Earth: a plain in Jordan, two kilometres northeast of the Dead Sea, and 400 metres below sea level.
Namib, an incredible spot is home to the highest sand dunes on Earth, along with 3500 species of plants of incredible diversity, all adapted to the arid climate. Elephants, antelopes, lions, giraffes and rhinoceros roam freely in the Namib with neither fence nor enclosure, as if at the dawn of time. Management of the protected areas has been entrusted to the local people and in particular to the Himba, the dominant tribe of the desert. Underground there are hidden treasures, diamonds, uranium and iron. From the beginning of the 20th century the Namib has attracted miners from all over the world, with an increasing appetite. Today, new mining projects threaten the ecosystem of the region. Olivia crosses the desert from the South to North, sharing the difficult everyday lives of the people of the desert. Exploring this rich but fragile garden of Eden, she attempts to understand why the survival of the desert is so important to the people and animals that live there.
A short documentary about Father Christmas' annual six-day trek through the Australian desert aboard the Tea and Sugar Train.
Secrets and mysteries lose power when they are spread too widely. This is what the villagers discover when they invade an old man's vision-inspired shrine to the namelessly holy.
At the border between Navarre and Aragon we find the moors known as the Bardenas Reales, characterized by the dust and the omnipresence of the northern wind. This is a portrait of a land, but also a journey through Pilar’s memories. It is a glance at the past but also the present, and about how everything has changed, for better or worse.
In 1950, the explorer Roger Frison-Roche made a crossing of more than a thousand kilometers on the back of a camel with the photographer Georges Tairraz II, in the heart of the Sahara, from Hoggar then Djanet in Algeria to Ghat in Libya. From their journey they brought back a large number of color films and documents. Among thousands of photos, they selected 47 images which reflect the various aspects of these immense spaces which occupy a third of Africa in the book "The Great Desert". “The Great Desert, 1000 kilometers on camelback” is the eponymous 85-minute documentary of this epic, released in 1950.
In the desert, a man extracts stones from a mountain and breaks them. In his perpetual labour, he meditates upon life and death.
A tour of the arid, inhospitable region of the southern California desert known as Death Valley, originally named because of the many travelers in the 1840s who died of thirst, starvation and/or exposure trying to cross it.
Short documentary on the making of Henry Levin's Genghis Khan, which filmed on location in Yugoslavia. The final film's epic battle scenes are contrasted with the mundane reality of life on a film set.
After traveling the globe to highlight low-tech, Corentin de Chatelperron has set himself a new challenge: to live independently, alone for four months, on a bamboo raft floating in Phang Nga Bay, Thailand. On his 70 square meter platform, the engineer, passionate about ecology and system D, puts into practice what he has learned in order to feed himself and produce his own energy.
In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers peer deep into the cosmos in search for answers concerning the origins of life. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones, dumped unceremoniously by Pinochet's regime.
In the Moroccan desert night dilutes forms and silence slides through sand. Dawn starts then to draw silhouettes of dunes while motionless figures punctuate landscape. From night´s abstraction, light returns its dimension to space and their volume to bodies. Stillness concentrates gaze and duration densify it. The adhan -muslim call to pray- sounds and immobility, that was condensing, begins to irradiate. And now the bodies are those which dissolves into the desert.
Palm Springs, a small desert oasis 100 miles East of Los Angeles was Sinatra's true home for 50 years. During his brief yet turbulent marriage to Ava Gardner his Palm Springs home was center stage. For the rest of his life, the Rancho Mirage compound on Frank Sinatra Drive, was the home he called "My Heaven". Palm Springs still feels the ghost of Frank Sinatra.
Beyond the sprawl of the urban jungle, 150 race teams meet to do battle in the heart of the Mojave Desert in southern California. The format is "run what ya brung" Unlimited 4 Wheel Drive Racing, and the stakes are higher than ever. Only 20% of the teams that take the green flag will make it to the end, the remainder being left strewn across the desert floor in the wake of one of the hardest off road races on the planet, the King of the Hammers. Follow teams in 'Element of Survival' as they set out to conquer harsh desert at speeds in excess of 100mph, as well as some of the hardest rock crawling North America has to offer, all in an effort to be crowned "King" at the setting of the sun.
An undercover documentary film produced and directed by British filmmaker Dominic Brown, about the struggle of the indigenous Sahrawi people of Western Sahara. The documentary covers the current human rights and political situation of the Sahrawi. There are several interviews recorded with human rights victims including an elderly lady who had been attacked in her home the previous day by Moroccan security forces. There is also a focus given to the alleged vested interests of countries in the region, particularly France. The film states that the French Government's close relationship with Morocco, their trade deals and their use of veto over the terms of the UN mission in Western Sahara are major factors.
Out of State is the unlikely story of native Hawaiians men discovering their native culture as prisoners in the desert of Arizona, 3,000 miles, and across the ocean, from their island home.
A sublime documentary on childhood and bereavement that’s one of several shorts the filmmaker completed while working in Algeria for Georges Derocles’s company Les Studios Africa, for whom he would shortly make his breakthrough feature The Olive Trees of Justice.
Twenty-Five miles from town, a million miles from mainstream society, a loose-knit community of eco-pioneers, teenage runaways, war veterans and drop-outs, live on the fringe and off the grid, struggling to survive with little food, less water and no electricity, as they cling to their unique vision of the American dream.