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“Only One Earth” (只有一个地球) is a pioneering Chinese environmental documentary series presented in four parts. The project was produced by CCTV with support from state environmental authorities (then the National Environmental Protection Agency, now the Ministry of Ecology and Environment), but it did not pass censorship and was not permitted to air. (It was originally planned to premiere on the first celebrated Earth Day in China in 1990.) It approaches ecological crisis through an experimental, essayistic lens shaped by the concerns of reform-era Chinese intellectuals, confronting the toll of global industrialization. Directed by Chen Jue (a member of SWYC, the same collective behind the following year's banned Tiananmen series), Only One Earth uses literary, academic, and archival materials alongside a visual style influenced by experimental cinema.
Teacher An has spent nearly thirty years teaching the children of fishing families on Hongze Lake, carrying education from boat to boat while sacrificing his own life ashore. After a professional evaluation shakes his faith in the value of his work, he is forced to confront the cost of his devotion: his late wife, his children, and the possibility of a new family with Yueying, a woman who seems willing to share his hardships. As local officials and former students try to arrange a successor and a better school boat, An struggles between personal happiness and the weight of responsibility to his students.
Overseas Chinese making a life for themselves in Chicago. A Chinese-U.S. joint production, shot in 1993 and released in 1996.
A documentary produced to disseminate historical truth about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre to international audiences. It records the Shorinji Kempo Organization of Japan’s 40th-anniversary visit to China, but rather than serving as a simple travelogue, it uses the 299 participants’ journey—beginning in Nanjing—as a confrontation with the facts of Japan’s wartime aggression and the choices demanded in the present. Through Chinese filmmakers’ perspectives, testimony, archival images, and narration addressing the Nanjing Massacre, nuclear war, militarization, and historical responsibility, the film asks viewers to reject indifference, self-justification, and the concealment of inconvenient history. It argues that peace cannot remain an abstract ideal or be left to governments and power-seekers; each person must begin from the shared human right to survival, face history honestly, and choose concrete action toward mutual understanding and peace.
The definitive 3½-hour documentary about the troubled creation and enduring legacy of the science fiction classic 'Blade Runner', culled from 80 interviews and hours of never-before-seen outtakes and lost footage.
A documentary about how a dominant cultural and demographic institution both sustains their traditional activities and adapts to the digital revolution.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
A documentary about the making of David Fincher's 2008 film THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. Virtually every element in the evolution of the Fincher's film is documented here, from the project's attachment to numerous other directors during the 1990s, to its shoot in 2006 and 2007 in New Orleans, to its complex, CGI-intensive postproduction process.
A chronicle of the rise and fall of O.J. Simpson, whose high-profile murder trial exposed the extent of American racial tensions, revealing a fractured and divided nation.
The most comprehensive retrospective of the '80s action film genre ever made.