To the end of the world

Struggling with his profession as a teacher, Ugyen is sent to Lunana in northern Bhutan for his final year of training. With a warm welcome, the local children try to win him over but they do not have much time...

Coming of age in Barrow, Alaska - the northernmost community of the United States - has become a little more complicated for the local youth than it was for their ancestors who originally named this place “Ukpiagvik” (“where we hunt snowy owls”). They are the twenty-first century descendants of a culture that has endured for millennia on this isolated, but rapidly changing tundra. The harvest of the agvik (bowhead whale) remains the heart of their culture. "Children of the Arctic" is a year-in-the-life portrait of Native Alaskan teenagers navigating between both being modern American teenagers and the inheritors of an endangered culture.

The origins of the Colombian drug trade, through the epic story of an indigenous Wayúu family that becomes involved in the booming business of selling marijuana to American youth in the 1970s. When greed, passion and honour collide, a fratricidal war breaks out that will put their lives, their culture and their ancestral traditions at stake. «A film of both gangsters and spirits. A family film, an ensemble story of strong, intuitive, resilient and powerful women, who wait at home for unconscious, impulsive, fearful men, as they talk, they negotiate, they run around. Intuition vs reason, innocence vs vengeance, word vs honour. All in telling the great tragedy that would curse us forever. The great taboo that we are not allowed to discuss. Told, for once, in an intimate, personal way. Our own way. That soft breeze that seemed to come to refresh, and became the ravaging storm that showed us the true face of capitalism, its purest form. Our Jayeechi, our birdsong.» Cristina Gallego/Ciro Guerra

The mountain massif of Cutucú in the south of the Amazon region in Ecuador was a kind of defense against the environmental destruction for the native population but in the same time an obstacle. The people had no access to the modern world outside. The road through the Cutucú now allows mobility in order to exploit the fossil resurces but it grants the natives a way to reach the so called civilized world. The process happens in an unspectacular way. Where progress starts it cannot be stopped anymore: Escavating, digging, shovelling, grubbing, selling and buying: everyday madness. Excerpts from the film «Shuar, People of the Sacred Waterfalls» (1986) recall us, how in the traditional culture of the Shuar nature was an integrated part of life and mobility was achieved in the hallucinogenic ecstasy with no bounds. Today the natives are transporting wooden boards with horses to civilization. Wood is the fastest business, other products must first be created. Now the jungle disappears in everyday madness.

Amongst the pythonic mountains of landlocked Lesotho, an 80 year old widow winds up her earthly affairs, makes arrangements for her burial and prepares to die. But when her village is threatened with forced resettlement due to the construction of a reservoir, she finds a new will to live and ignites a collective spirit of defiance within her community. In the final dramatic moments of her life, Mantoa’s legend is forged and made eternal.

In a traditional tribal society in the South Pacific, a young girl, Wawa, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an intertribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal. The young lovers run away, refusing her arranged fate. They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.