America Today

One of the key works in creating the American social documentary film, this 1934 newsreel compilation crams a lot of information into just 11 minutes. Skillfully edited, the picture captures a panorama of international events centered on the labor movement. Scenes include Mussolini, Hitler and FDR preparing for war, Nazi soldiers persecuting German Jews, a political strike in Paris, the Scottsboro demonstration in Washington, DC, police violence against striking steelworkers in Pennsylvania and union members stopping scab workers from delivering milk during a dairy farmers strike in Wisconsin. Under the direction of pioneering documentarian Leo Hurwitz, the images are edited together to create a powerful image of a world that, in his view, desperately needed radical change.

1934-01-01 | en

Wanda Gosciminska – A Textile Worker

The life of a female weaver is thrown onto the socio-political canvas of pre-war and post-war communist Poland through the use of expressive allegorical and symbolic imagery in this imaginative take on the documentary form.

1975-06-16 | pl

All in My Family

After starting a family of his very own in the United States, a gay filmmaker documents his loving, traditional Chinese family's process of acceptance.

2019-05-03 | en

North China Factory

This documentary from 1980 depicts a factory community in China where over 6000 workers process, spin and weave raw cotton into 90 million yards of high-quality cloth per year. Also seen are the workers' residential, social, recreational and educational facilities, all located on factory property. The film presents an engrossing study of a lifestyle that is very different from that of the Western world.

1980-01-01 | en

The Road to Fame

China's top drama academy stages the American musical "Fame," China's first official collaboration with Broadway, as the graduation showcase for its senior class. During the eight-month rehearsal, five students compete for roles, struggle with pressure from family and authority, and prepare to graduate into China's corrupt entertainment industry.

2013-06-12 | en

Bikes for Africa

Bikes for Africa is an entertaining, insightful and moving documentary following the life adventures of Hap Cameron and Mandy Todd, and their attempt to help implement a self sustainable bike workshop in rural Namibia with a container load secondhand donated bikes from Melbourne. The film investigates how a bicycle can fundamentally change the lives of rural Africans, and brings to focus the great works of two-wheeled charities Bicycles for Humanity and the Bicycling Empowerment Network Namibia.

2013-05-15 | en

Mad About English!

The amazing story of 1,000,000,000 people and their MAD MAD MAD rush to learn English! China 's love affair with the English language has reached feverish proportions. With half a million or more visitors descending on Beijing for the Games, can the Chinese pull it off with their newly-acquired English? Mad About English! follows the inspiring and heart-warming efforts of a city preparing to host the world by learning a once-forbidden tongue.

2008-01-01 | en

After Breaking the Silence

4, April, 2014. Worker's who worked in "SaengTak" are get to the struggle to require adjust of working environment for safely food, and guarantied a Three Right of labors. Then. Worker's tried to record there's own struggle and launch forth to street, However, Law, Capital, unconcern of crowd and avoid of famille are swallow up them.

2016-05-08 | ko

The Pharmacy: Shanghai

Joris Ivens and wife Marceline Loridan took their cameras into Pharmacy No. 3 in Shanghai, which in addition to dispensing drugs manages an outreach program of medical services, an extension of the pharmacy’s in-house medical care center.

1976-03-10 | fr

Plastic China

This film tells a story about an unschooled 11-year-old girl Yi-Jie, she's a truly global child who learns the world through the United Nations of Wastes while working with her YI minority parents in this recycle workshop thousand miles away from their mountain village home town

2017-01-20 | zh

Draussen bleiben

2007-10-24 | de

Berlino

What do Italian guest-workers do when they get home, after a hard day's work on one of the many new building sites in Berlin? They talk, get bored, phone home. They try to survive. Berlino is a moving documentary about displacement.

1999-01-01 | it

Crude Oil

Filmed in the Inner Mongolian portion of the Gobi Desert, this film follows a group of oil field workers as they go about their daily routine.

2008-01-17 | zh

Manufactured Landscapes

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.

2006-09-09 | en

I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story

A documentary about Caroll Spinney who has been Sesame Street's Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since 1969. At 78-years-old, he has no intention of stopping.

2015-05-06 | en

Crocodile in the Yangtze

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.

2012-04-12 | en

Como a China encobriu a pandemia de COVID-19

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Huhu

Lao Zha’s film examines rural life in Haiyuan County, in Ningxia Province. Unlike the rapidly globalizing urban centres, here life remains largely unchanged for the Hui people, a Muslim ethnic group, whose diverse cultural roots incorporate Arabic and Persian influences that arose out of the Hui’s proximity to the Silk Road. In a remote Hui village, a little boy named Huhu is growing up under the watchful eye of his grandparents, and, occasionally, his less-than-reliable mother. (Dorothy Woodend, DOXA Documentary Film Festival)

2014-05-07 | en

A Hakka Song

A song is heard in the distance. It comes from the Hekeng village, famous for its ancient earthen buildings, also called tulou. It is where the last original Hakka families live amidst the exodus of those looking for a more modern environment. Among them there is Zhang Zhouyin, an elderly man concerned about the state of the village's temple; or her daughter-in-law, Wei Yi, who spends her entire day guiding tourists through these awe-inspiring houses. And then there’s young Zhang Weibo, her son, who manages to find joy even in the simplest of things... Hekeng: a place frozen in time whose songs have endured for centuries.

2024-04-28 | zh

Journey to the East

Could our mounting modern problems have ancient solutions? Travel to the depths of China to find out.

2021-05-30 | en