Crane City of the North

Livestreaming your life to a devoted audience is big business. What happens when the cameras are off?

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The film 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.

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Prague faces the challenge of a new zoning plan. The city's development leads to conflicts between the private developer lobby, city residents, and elected officials. By following several years of town council meetings, the film paints an image of a public policy apparatus that ignores the role of the urban planner. Using a journalistic approach, the filmmaker attempts to depict all points of view, although in the end the dominant perspective is of those who believe in the city as an expression of culture and quality of life.

Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years Suburbia, and all it promises, has become the American Dream. But as we enter the 21st century, serious questions are beginning to emerge...

Crocodile in the Yangtze follows China's first Internet entrepreneur and former English teacher, Jack Ma, as he battles US giant eBay on the way to building China's first global Internet company, Alibaba Group. An independent memoir written, directed and produced by an American who worked in Ma's company for eight years, Crocodile in the Yangtze captures the emotional ups and downs of life in a Chinese Internet startup at a time when the Internet brought China face-to-face with the West. Crocodile in the Yangtze draws on 200 hours of archival footage filmed by over 35 sources between 1995 and 2009. The film presents a strikingly candid portrait of Ma and his company, told from the point of view of an “American fly on a Chinese wall” who witnessed the successes and the mistakes Alibaba encountered as it grew from a small apartment into a global company employing 16,000 staff.

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What happens when a world that relies on traffic and the logistics that allow it comes to a standstill? What happens when sickness and even death are taken from us?

Since the end of World War II, one of kind of urban residential development has dominate how cities in North America have grown, the suburbs. In these artificial neighborhoods, there is a sense of careless sprawl in an car dominated culture that ineffectually tries to create the more organically grown older communities. Interspersed with the comments of various experts about the nature of suburbia

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris.

If God came down to earth and try to earn a living in Bombay, most probably he would become successful as a voice over artiste, lending his voice to thousands of Hindi movies and even more documentaries and public service films in India.

An inside look at China working towards the goal of becoming a superpower by the year 2000 via education as the key to modernization. Filmed in Peking, on a rural commune in central China, and in the industrial northeast region, Jack Reynolds interviews Vice Premier Fang Yi and the president of Peking University, as well as students, workers, and peasants.

The film uses a documentary approach to tell the stories of 12 Chinese pioneers, chosen from the fields of business and the arts. The protagonists reflect upon their life journeys against the backdrop of modern China.

As the 'one country two systems' policy in Hong Kong has slowly eroded, resentment among the territory's citizens has steadily grown. What began as a series of spontaneous protests against an extradition law in March 2019 has now escalated in to a full-blown popular uprising that shows no signs of abating. ABC Four Corners reports from the frontline of the action, capturing extraordinary footage of the growing tension and violence.

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Mao Zedong was not only a revolutionary leader and thinker, he was also a poet. In poems written in the classic calligraphic tradition he expresses his experiences and visions. In this film, 8 of Mao's poems are sung, recited and interpreted: 'Changsha' (1925), 'Jinggang Mountains' (1928), 'The Long March' (1935), 'Snow' (1936), 'The People's Liberation Army Captures Nanjing' (1949), 'Swimming' (1956), 'Reply to Comrade Guo Moruo' (1961) and 'Reascending Jinggang Mountains' (1965). Through these poems we get a picture of the Chinese revolution from its first beginning in 1921 until the Cultural Revolution. The poems of Mao Zedong have been published in more than 57 million copies

Red Guards were a student movement supported by Mao Zedong in 1966-67 during the Cultural Revolution. A group of students at Qinghua University who issued 2 big-character posters in May-June 1966 called themselves Red Guards. The students criticised the university administration of elitism and bourgeois tendencies. In August 1966 Mao Zedong expressed support for the Red Guards. This gave the student movement political legitimacy and it spread outside Beijing. The Red Guards started to attack the Four Olds and marched across China to eradicate old ideas, old cultures, old customs and old habits. Ultimately the struggle between different Red Guard factions led to a chaotic civil-war-like situation. During 1967-68 the Peoples Liberation Army got the movement under control and restored social order. Beginning late 1968 members of the Red Guard movement were sent to the countryside to undergo re-education. We met and filmed them in August 1971.

Nana Xu travels to the place built by her father as a prisoner during the Cultural Revolution: first a work camp, later a prison, fruit farm and treatment centre. Conversations with last remaining witnesses, where home is still shaped by a repressed past.