
04 Jan 2025

Matsuko in Real Life
Matsuko Deluxe explores the seemingly familiar yet overlooked facets of Japanese culture through real-life experiences.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th century Finnish philologist G. J. Ramstedt travelled around Mongolia and Central-Asia. In this documentary Ramstedt’s memoirs are heard in the modern day setting, where tradition is replaced with hunger for money, and deserts give way to cities.
G. J. Ramstedt (voice)
G. J. Ramstedt (voice)
04 Jan 2025
Matsuko Deluxe explores the seemingly familiar yet overlooked facets of Japanese culture through real-life experiences.
18 Oct 2015
No overview found
08 Jun 1983
Examines the early 1980s Hong Kong filmmaking community. Tony Rayns interviews some of the new generation of filmmakers and figures from the wider film culture.
02 Mar 2016
The Ta'ang or Palaung people, an ethnic minority living in the mountainous area between Myanmar's Kokang region and China's Yunnan province, have historically suffered many forced migrations due to war. When their survival is threatened again in 2015, thousands of them flee across the border. Filmmaker Wang Bing accompanies them and becomes a privileged witness to a human story that is both a modern reportage and a mythical epic.
07 Aug 2015
An Irish doctor survived the atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki and was given a Samurai sword for the lives he saved. 70 years later his family searches for the origin of their father's sword.
23 Mar 1902
Women getting onto a rickshaw.
23 Oct 2007
This documentary follows the lives of five Japanese individuals to explore how depression is perceived in Japan and how the marketing of anti-depressants since the late 1990s has shifted public awareness. Once a term used only by psychiatric professionals, "utsu" is now commonly used as anti-depressant use has surged.
11 Sep 2000
In 1997, Oscar-winning documentarian Allan Miller embarked on a film project with renowned conductor Zubin Mehta and celebrated Chinese film director Zhang Yimou as they joined forces in a production of Puccini's opera Turandot in Florence. Before the year was out, an extraordinary opportunity arose: to stage Turandot in its original setting in the Forbidden City of Beijing. The outdoor production was an undertaking on an epic scale. A fascinating chronicle of an unprecedented cross-cultural collaboration, THE TURANDOT PROJECT combines the pageantry of this opulent opera production with a spectacular cinematic portrait of the struggles and triumphs of Zubin Mehta and Zhang Yimou to mount their production in this most historic venue of China. (Source: Amazon.com)
01 Jan 1998
Explores the plans for the construction of the monumental dam on China's Yangtze River, the structure that when completed in 2009 will become the Three Gorges Dam. It is slated to be 610 feet high, 1.3 miles across, creating a reservoir 400 miles and the largest power plant in the world.
01 Jan 2008
The director accompanies the German women's national soccer team.
21 Feb 1992
The Darkhad and Soyon Uriyanghai peoples live in a vast valley in Northern Mongolia, much as their ancestors have for centuries. "Taiga" is the record of a long period spent by the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger among these people.
23 Mar 2020
The culture of Japan is incredible, from bloom festivals to ultra-modern cities. But there are also more than 130 mammals and 600 bird species dwelling in Japan’s 6,852 islands. This island chain is long enough to span climate zones, providing a huge range of habitat.
21 Oct 2014
A look at the work of Japanese woodblock printing artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).
27 Dec 2017
Expedition China invites you on location in some of the world's most intense, hard-to-reach environments with the filmmakers of Disneynature's big-screen adventure Born in China.
25 Aug 2011
Inspired by the student revolutions of 1968, two women in Germany and Japan set out to plot world revolution as leaders of the Baader Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army. What were they fighting for and what have we learned?
08 Oct 2021
The absorbingly cinematic Ascension explores the pursuit of the “Chinese Dream.” Driven by mesmerizing—and sometimes humorous—imagery, this observational documentary presents a contemporary vision of China that prioritizes productivity and innovation above all.
09 Nov 2014
In America, everyone has a family story of immigration. Every family, at some point, has had somebody leave their native country behind to search for a better life. How did they hold onto their identity? How did they adapt to their new life? Every family has a special story. In my case, it's my Chinese-American story. My father would always tell us his story about walking for 7 days and 6 nights, before swimming for 4 hours to Macau to escape communism in 1966. His story would fall on my deaf ears until I returned to China with him.
21 Oct 2015
Confucius was one of history's most influential thinkers. He was a sage, philosopher and teacher who, with Socrates and Buddha, lived at an extraordinary time in the evolution of human civilization. This stunningly beautiful drama-documentary explores the life and times of Confucius, while reflecting on his influence on modern justice and morality. Today, Confucius is a window into China's rise.
10 Nov 2015
For the men who fought perhaps the fiercest battle of WWII, seventy years have passed. But the memories of those 36 bloody days on Iwo Jima have not. In the spring of 2015, survivors of both sides of the battle returned for the last time to join a Reunion of Honor — a unique, now-peaceful fellowship first forged of fire and bullets.
11 Nov 2016
Few of us have stopped to consider the lives of the workers who manufacture the objects that make up our daily lives. We use these objects without knowing anything about the Foxconn plants in which they are made, or even where these factories are located, let alone who works in them. One such worker was the young Chinese poet Xu Lizhi, who, at the age of 24, jumped out of a building not far from where he worked at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen.