Christine Meeusen was a corporate executive. After her husband’s bigamy left her penniless, she walked away with her three children. As “Sister Kate” she founded Sisters of the Valley, growing cannabis in California and making medicinal products from it.
These “sisters”, who belong to no church, have to contend with the county sheriff, black-market thieves, local drug cartels, and California’s medical cannabis regulations all at once.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues were trapped in Mariupol for twenty long days. Russian forces shelled civilians and infrastructure indiscriminately from a distance; the city lost water and power, and food supplies and communications collapsed. As the last international reporters in the city, Chernov kept the camera running and recorded the hardest images of the war to look at.
The renowned German conductor Eduard takes on an exceptionally difficult task: forming a youth orchestra drawn from both Israelis and Palestinians. He is soon caught in a storm of love and hatred. These young musicians, from hostile nations, have carried historical enmity and national wounds since birth. Eduard must do everything he can to bridge language, culture, politics and feeling, so that the group can rehearse and perform together on a footing of trust.
For the sake of authenticity, director Dror Zahavi cast Israeli and Arab young actors to perform together — following the example of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and paying tribute to the conductor Daniel Barenboim.
Kaohsiung was a military stronghold under Japanese rule and suffered severe military suppression during the 228 Incident. The film seeks out Taiwanese who served as Japanese soldiers in the Second World War, members of the Kaohsiung Senior High School self-defence corps during the incident, and the families of those who were killed, gathering memory from everyday life to restore the paths of lives caught in historical catastrophe, and bearing witness among military ruins to the bloodied youth of the men who built them. As the survivors pass away, telling and looking become a form of resistance to forgetting; memory grows out of the land like a stubborn fruit.
Based on the true story of Maureen Kearney, a union representative at a French multinational nuclear company who became a whistleblower after exposing a highly secret deal in the French nuclear industry. Alone, she takes on the government, industry executives and an entire system, determined to bring the scandal to light and defend the jobs of more than fifty thousand union members. Then one day she is violently assaulted in her own home — and finds herself treated by the police as a suspect who staged the attack. From there the story turns, opening onto a deeper truth and the darker workings of power.
A film that could not be made in China, let alone shown there. Spanning borders and beliefs, it follows an American journalist on the outside and a group of young Tsinghua University students as they expose the truth about an unprecedented campaign of persecution. When an entire country sinks into lies and silence, would you still dare to say one true thing?
Based on real events, the film centres on the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal crackdown on more than a hundred million citizens. An exhausted foreign reporter who will not abandon his conscience, and students hungry for the truth, risk everything to challenge lethal propaganda and fight for freedom and human rights. What they face is not only prison and torture but the threat of death, and the choice they must make is whether to speak the truth or stay silent before brutal power.
Even in a contemporary society where Christianity is widespread and medicine is advanced, traditional belief remains indispensable for Indigenous people. When a family wants to know the wishes of the dead and what they left unfinished, the answer and the comfort often still come through a shaman’s divination and ritual.
Yet the shamans who can carry the will of the ancestors are growing fewer under the pressures of modernisation. They nonetheless hold their place at the front line of ritual and belief, working to remain the bridge between the living and the ancestral spirits. Afterwards, both those who come seeking ritual and the shamans who conduct it must still return to their own difficulties — a tension between what tradition answers and what modern life demands, running through their lives without resolution.
The residents of the Shapira neighbourhood are relatively disadvantaged socially and economically. This diverse district of Tel Aviv dates back to 1924, when it was founded by a Jewish community. Its first residents included Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, Mizrahi Jews from Turkey and Afghanistan, Greek Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. Over time Shapira also absorbed migrants, migrant workers and refugees from many places — Palestinians, people from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan, and Arab residents — making it one of the most ethnically varied and structurally complex neighbourhoods in Tel Aviv.
That diversity also marks a gap in status: the distance between Shapira and the wealthy north of the city is plain. Close to the centre and relatively cheap to rent in, it has drawn many young people, so its population keeps shifting. People from different cultural backgrounds bring their own traditions and values, weaving a delicate, moving balance.
It is in this social and cultural setting that the Shapira neighbourhood school was founded — established to answer the needs of these disadvantaged groups, in the hope that education could help the next generation out of poverty and open a more hopeful road for a community living with difference.
Over the past twenty years China has steadily used intelligent technology to build a new world of big-data surveillance, a development the pandemic accelerated. From the hundreds of millions of cameras of the Skynet system to nationwide community grid management and the social credit system, social control has tightened step by step. Filming three cases of human rights abuse at close range, the camera follows rights lawyers and their families and independent journalists who risk everything, giving a view of ordinary life under round-the-clock state surveillance.
Seventy years ago the director’s grandfather was conscripted into the Takasago Volunteers and sent to fight American forces in New Guinea. Fifty years ago his father left home in the tide of capitalism to make a living far away. Today Dulan has become another battleground, contested between the state and corporations. Three generations of one family meet and come to understand one another through their lives, in the foreign ground of New Guinea.