Up the Yangtze

The director Andrés Kaiser combines hundreds of amateur films and photographs from the treasure trove of images belonging to his migrant grandparents creating a cinematic firework of analogies.

Her own family history from a female perspective, told as a fragmentary, personal stream of memories. Great-grandma, grandma and mother have to come to terms with the conditions of their time, the difficult prospects for a self-determined life in the working class. Some dreams are shattered, but love for each other catches them all. Collecting shells, summer in the garden, cuddling together. The big is in the small.

America may be ready for a blind woman who has a career or is raising a family, but is it ready for a blind woman who doesn't conform to the norms of proper behavior?

The director follows her family through three different lands, speaking and eating with her grandma along the way

A look at the unusual process used in the making of the film Shortbus (2006) featuring interviews, behind the scenes footage and clips from the feature film. Director John Cameron Mitchell starts with the concept of using real sex in a film with a positive message. The cast of unknowns is selected from homemade audition tapes and then a callback audition workshop. More acting workshops are used to develop the characters and script. The project overcomes a number of obstacles and the rest of the film's development is followed up until its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

Chronological look at the fiasco in Iraq, especially decisions made in the spring of 2003 - and the backgrounds of those making decisions - immediately following the overthrow of Saddam: no occupation plan, an inadequate team to run the country, insufficient troops to keep order, and three edicts from the White House announced by Bremmer when he took over.

An intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in the French Alps (Chartreuse Mountains). The idea for the film was proposed to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. The Carthusians finally contacted Gröning 16 years later to say they were now willing to permit Gröning to shoot the movie, if he was still interested.

Can a secret change who you are? Mysterious events unfold and reveal how Martha, a Polish holocaust survivor, managed to lead a double life in Australia. The vivacious Jewish artist and doting mother, died without ever revealing her secret. The film follows Martha’s daughter Eve, over a decade, as she unlocks the mystery behind the streets named Eve and Martha. Clues are found in old recordings and Martha’s home movies revealing a mystery man gazing into the lens. Eve’s investigation leads her to the Sobieski castle in the Ukraine, the site of a massacre where her grandmother died, and the Eichmann trial as she explores her parents’ holocaust survival and her father’s heroic escape from a concentration camp. When a ‘doppelgänger’ contacts Eve, her life is forever altered, as she uncovers lies, tracks down her mother’s young lover and reveals the family secret that led her to rewrite her entire life.

A thoughtful exploration of gypsy culture, an intimate portrait of flamenco guitar player Yerai Cortés and a healing family exorcism through music. Antón Álvarez (aka C. Tangana) makes his filmmaking debut with this documentary.

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.

The free, almost naive view from the perspective of a child puts the "68ers" in a new, illuminating light in the anniversary year 2008. The film is a provocative reckoning with the ideological upbringing that seemed so progressive and yet was suffocated by the children's desire to finally grow up. With an ironic eye and a feuilletonistic style, author Richard David Precht and Cologne documentary film director André Schäfer trace a childhood in the West German provinces - and place the major events of those years in completely different, smaller and very private contexts.

A short animated documentary featuring archival recordings of the filmmaker's Volga-German Great-Great-Grandmother, Mary Frank Lind, in which she recalls key memories of childhood—her father's windmill, warm rains, wolf sightings, bone trading, and her passion for carpentry, which broke gender norms but was supported by her father.

An intimate portrait of a peasant-turned oil painter transitioning from making copies of iconic Western paintings to creating his own authentic works of art.

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.