"It’s not easy to find a foster family for you," an orphanage supervisor explains to nine-year-old Alicia. "After all, you are a very special girl." Alicia is crying. "I’m not special. I’m just a girl." This disturbing scene sets the tone for this film about Alicia, who was taken away from her teenage mother by the Child Welfare Bureau when she was 12 months old. She’s been living in an orphanage since the age of five, and they have never managed to find a foster family for her. In Alicia, we watch as she becomes a teenager, still craving safety and love. Over the course of three years, filmmaker Maasja Ooms follows her daily life up close. Alicia's yearning and powerlessness are palpable in these observations, which painfully reveal the effects of having no prospects.
An epic aerial journey covering the whole length of China’s Great Wall. Across 2500km, for the first time ever, this triumph of Ming dynasty architecture has been captured in its entirety from the air. With expert narration from William Lindesay, official protector of the Wall, travel from the Yellow Sea in the East to the Gobi Desert in the far West.
Look into the personal lives of women currently awaiting execution on Death Row. Though each woman is convicted of committing society's ultimate crime, there is often another side of the story.
The Chinese company Huawei wants to expand 5G worldwide and is well advanced in the development of the technology. With the help of 5G, entire communities can function wirelessly, self-driving cars become possible and advanced medical care can be performed remotely in real time. However, many are worried that Huawei is incorporating backdoors that allow vast amounts of data to be collected and then used by China for espionage.
This moving documentary profiles a former Buddhist monk who runs a home for orphaned children in the Himalayas, and his relationship with its newest arrival, troubled five-year-old Tashi.
Chai Jing's documentary about the massive smog problem in China. Chai Jing started making the documentary when her as yet unborn daughter developed a tumour in the womb, which had to be removed very soon after her birth. Chai blames air pollution for the tumour. The film, which combines footage of a lecture with interviews and factory visits, has been compared with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in both its style and likely impact. The film openly criticises state-owned energy companies, steel producers and coal factories, as well as showing the inability of the Ministry of Environmental Protection to act against the big polluters.
Under the sun, the heavenly beauty of grasslands will soon be covered by the raging dust of mines. Facing the ashes and noises caused by heavy mining , the herdsmen have no choice but to leave as the meadow areas dwindle. In the moonlight, iron mines are brightly lit throughout the night. Workers who operate the drilling machines must stay awake. The fight is tortuous, against the machine and against themselves. Meanwhile, coal miners are busy filling trucks with coals. Wearing a coal-dust mask, they become ghostlike creatures. An endless line of trucks will transport all the coals and iron ores to the iron works. There traps another crowd of souls, being baked in hell. In the hospital, time hangs heavy on miners' hands. After decades of breathing coal dust, death is just around the corner. They are living the reality of purgatory, but there will be no paradise.
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain an estimated four million children have found themselves living on the streets in the former countries of the Soviet Union. In the streets of Moscow alone there are over 30,000 surviving in this manner at the present time. The makers of the documentary film concentrated on a community of homeless children living hand to mouth in the Moscow train station Leningradsky. Eight-year-old Sasha, eleven-year-old Kristina, thirteen-year-old Misha and ten-year-old Andrej all dream of living in a communal home. They spend winter nights trying to stay warm by huddling together on hot water pipes and most of their days are spent begging. Andrej has found himself here because of disagreements with his family. Kristina was driven into this way of life by the hatred of her stepmother and twelve-year-old Roma by the regular beatings he received from his constantly drunk father. "When it is worst, we try to make money for food by prostitution," admits ...
A further investigation into the arrest of three teenagers convicted of killing three young boys in Arkansas who spent nearly 20 years in prison before being released after new DNA evidence indicated they may be innocent.
An unsettling and eye-opening Wall Street horror story about Chinese companies, the American stock market, and the opportunistic greed behind the biggest heist you've never heard of.
This documentary takes the "Innocent Man on Texas Death Row" tale to a dark corner feared by all - - proving that an innocent man has been executed by the State. A clash between good and evil strikes up on the High Plains of Texas when Johnny Frank Garrett, a 17 year old retarded boy is arrested, convicted and ultimately executed for the Halloween night rape, mutilation and murder of Sister Tadea Benz. The 76 year old nun was attacked while she slept in her room at the St. Francis Convent in Amarillo, Texas. Garrett claimed his innocence from the time of his arrest until his dying breath. Sixteen years after Garrett's execution new evidence rose up from the cold case grave of the Amarillo Police Department proving they executed the wrong man! During interviews with key players the case of Johnny Frank Garrett unfolds like a recipe for executing the innocent.
When a teenager from a political family in the Philippines is accused of a double murder, the country’s entire judicial system is put to the test after years of alleged corruption.
Adult men grapple with social stigmas to pursue their passion for wrestling. Includes an in-depth look at wrestling homoeroticism and homophobia.
The story of Pastor Lucy and her husband Duncan Ndegwa, who began feeding and sheltering children from the streets of Nairobi, Kenya in 1996.
Livestreaming your life to a devoted audience is big business. What happens when the cameras are off?
Part Two: SMALL HAPPINESS - Despite the tremendous advances women in China have made, serious problems continue. Long Bow women talk about love, marriage, work, birth control, birth customs and the now outlawed custom of foot binding. Truly moving interviews with Lingqiao and her mother-in-law draw us into their lives.
In the 19th century, China held the monopoly on tea, which was dear and fashionable in the West, and the British Empire exchanged poppies, produced in its Indian colonies and transformed into opium, for Chinese tea. Inundated by the drugs, China was forced to open up its market, and the British consolidated their commercial dominance. In 1839, the Middle Empire introduced prohibition. The Opium War was declared… Great Britain emerged as the winner, but the warning was heeded: it could no longer depend on Chinese tea. The only alternative possible was to produce its own tea. The East India Company therefore entrusted one man with finding the secrets of the precious beverage. His mission was to develop the first plantations in Britain’s Indian colonies. This latter-day James Bond was called Robert Fortune – a botanist. After overcoming innumerable ordeals in the heart of imperial China, he brought back the plants and techniques that gave rise to Darjeeling tea.
150 underprivileged and orphaned students in the remote jungle of Thailand attending the country's first democratic school prepare a special celebration to honor their remarkable adoptive mother on Mother's Day.
Scott Panetti was tried for the capital murder of his parents-in-law on September 8, 1992 in Gillespie County, Texas. He was subsequently sentenced to death on September 22, 1995. Panetti has an extensive history of mental illness, including schizophrenia, manic depression, auditory hallucinations and paranoia. Panetti was hospitalized, both voluntarily and involuntarily for mental illness fourteen times in six different hospitals before his arrest for capital murder in 1992. Following his conviction, Panetti’s former wife, and daughter of the victims, Sonja Alvarado, filed a petition stating that Panetti never should have been tried for the crimes as he was suffering from paranoid delusions at the time of the killings.