Déjà vu

Somewhere in a subtropical country white visitors crowd around dark-skinned plantation workers emptying their harvest baskets. They look curious, as if wanting to test the quality of the tea leaves. Everywhere tourists take out their cameras ­ whether in front of large animals in the wild or camel riders, whether in the face of decorated human bodies or daily work routines. Now and again they look into the camera themselves. For later, for when they will proudly show their 'exotic' finds at home. This posing contains a model of western travels and picture making which is over a century old. The fascinated gaze on the foreigners fixes them in pre-formed frames. Lisl Ponger follows the trail of that gaze by taking amateur found footage material and linking it together in new ways.

The Market

In a slum in Chennai, India, a young mother of two, wants to sell her kidney so she can pay off the crippling debts of her family. If she sells Hema will be the fifth member of her family to sell a kidney for an amount that represents several years' wages. Across the world in Nanaimo, Canada, forty year old single mom Sandra's kidneys are failing and she has been on a waiting list for 5 years now. Two different people. Two journeys.

Grizzly Man

Werner Herzog's documentary film about the "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell and what the thirteen summers in a National Park in Alaska were like in one man's attempt to protect the grizzly bears. The film is full of unique images and a look into the spirit of a man who sacrificed himself for nature.

The Mirage

Join us for a series of films which explore the highs and lows of long distance trail running. In this thrilling collection brought to you by adidas TERREX, watch the world’s best runners test the limits of resilience and endurance to live the sport they love, and be united with their families at the finish line. As well as following pro athletes Sabrina Stanley, Stephen Kersh, Ruth Croft and Pablo Villa, it’s a chance to watch the UK premiere of ‘The Mirage’ with ultra runner Timothy Olson, documenting his attempt to run 50 miles a day for 50 days to break the fastest known time on the Pacific Crest Trail. Braving record high temperatures and impending wildfires, he must outrun nature to reach the trail's end before the birth of his daughter. Being present in the moment, finding your purpose, and pushing through the pain are what all runners chase after. On the world’s longest trails, these brief moments of joy can be the only thing keeping you going.

Rhino Man

RHINO MAN follows the courageous field rangers who risk their lives every day to protect South Africa's rhinos from being poached to extinction.

Béton Boréal

The Great Invisible

Penetrating the oil industry's secretive world, The Great Invisible examines the Deepwater Horizon disaster through the eyes of oil executives, explosion survivors and Gulf Coast residents who were left to pick up the pieces when the world moved on.

Vessel

A fearless sea captain, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, sails a ship through loopholes in international law, providing abortions on the high seas, and leaving in her wake a network of emboldened activists who trust women to handle abortion on their own terms.

Butterfly Girl

At first glance, it is not obvious that Abbie Evans lives with a life-threatening skin disease. She is a typical teenager: moody, rebellious, irreverent, and is also strikingly beautiful. But her life is the antithesis of normal. Abbie grew up in hospitals, cared for by her protective mother. She then came into her own in honky tonks, selling merchandise for her father’s band. But just like any other 18 year-old, Abbie yearns for an identity of her own. Butterfly Girl charts Abbie’s journey towards a new understanding of how she must balance her past with her future, her parents with her independence, and her disease with her desires. But what price must she pay for that freedom?

Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story

A former U.S. Navy Seal seeks life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness living life as a transgender woman.

Wicker Kittens

Every January, the country's largest jigsaw puzzle contest is held in St. Paul, Minnesota. Choose your favorite team and watch them try to put the pieces back together.

Evaporating Borders

Evaporating Borders is a poetically photographed and rendered film on tolerance and search for identity. Told through 5 vignettes portraying the lives of migrants on the island of Cyprus, it passionately weaves themes of displacement and belonging.

Dieses schöne Scheißleben

In the macho world of Mariachi music, very few women can hold their own. Just like the songs they play, this film is a snapshot of life, death and the things in between - seen from a bird's-eye perspective.

L'Homme aux serpents

It is with an old bus an about thirty snakes that Franz Florez struggles for the preservation of nature in Colombia, one of the most environmentally diverse country in the world. His snakes are his pass to enter the deep jungle, where guerrillas fight the regular army and where narco-traffickers meet coca growers. Facing the threat of the industrial exploitation of these preserved areas, he tries to gather support among the population, including the armed actors.

Here to Climb

Follow professional climber Sasha DiGiulian as she rises from child prodigy to a champion sport climber, and ultimately makes her mark by taking her talents to the biggest walls on the planet with a series of bold, first female ascents. Confronting both physical and mental obstacles head on, Sasha charts her own course in a sport where a path didn’t exist, enabling her passion to become a viable profession.

Prater

Vienna’s Prater is an amusement park and a desire machine. No mechanical invention, no novel idea or sensational innovation could escape incorporation into the Prater. The diverse story-telling in Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater” transforms this place of sensations into a modern cinema of attractions. The Prater’s history from the beginning to the present is told by its protagonists and those who have documented it, including contemporary cinematic images of the Prater, interviews with carnies, commentary by Austrians and visitors from abroad, film quotes, and photographic and written documentary materials. The meaning of the Prater, its status as a place of technological innovation, and its role as a cultural medium are reflected in texts by Elfriede Jelinek, Josef von Sternberg, Erich Kästner and Elias Canetti, as well as in music devoted to this amusement venue throughout the course of its history.

City of Borders

Interviews with the owners and diverse patrons of a Jerusalem gay bar called "Shushan."

Lost Heroes

Lost Heroes is the story of Canada's forgotten comic book superheroes and their legendary creators. A ninety-minute journey to recover a forgotten part of Canada's pop culture and a national treasure few have ever heard about. This is the tale of a small country striving to create its own heroes, but finding itself constantly out muscled by better-funded and better-marketed superheroes from the media empire next door.

Die koreanische Hochzeitstruhe

Ulrike Ottinger’s provocative mélange of ethnography, stunning tableaux and baroque vignettes was inspired by what she calls the “well-stocked miracle” of Korean wedding chests, assembled according to time-honored customs. This exploration of love and marriage in South Korea looks closely at ancient and present-day rituals, revealing what is old in the new and new in the old. Her inquiry leads us from shamans, temples and priests, to the enchanted maze of 21st-century Seoul, where vendors of medicinal herbs co-exist with high-tech beauty salons for wedding couples and secular marriage palaces. Using film much like a canvas, Ottinger creates a modern fairytale flush with mythological heroes, traditional rites, ancestral symbolism, dreams of eternal love, and a whole lot of Western kitsch. One of her most acclaimed documentaries, it captures the amazing phenomenon of new mega-cities and their contradictory societies caught in a balancing act.

낮은 목소리 3 - 숨결

"My Own Breathing" is the final documentary of the trilogy, The Murmuring about comfort women during the World War II directed by BYUN Young-joo. This is the completion of her seven years work. BYUN's first and second documentaries spoke of grandmothers' everyday life through the origin of their torment, while My Own Breathing goes back to their past from their everyday life. Deleting any device of narration or music, the camera lets grandmothers talk about themselves. Finally, the film revives their deep voices trampled by harsh history.