Yung Chang • China • 2008 • A human dimension to the wrenching changes facing humanity.
The Three Gorges Dam, once completed, will be the largest hydroelectric project in the world. It also requires blocking the Yangtze, an enormous river that runs through the heart of China, and upon whose shores more than two million people live. Fengdu, a sixteen year old girl, has been sent by her peasant parents to work aboard a luxury cruise liner that shepherds wealthy tourists up and down the river on a farewell tour of a waterway that has existed for millions of years. Back home, her parents are forced from their home by the impending floods, and into the maw of consumer society.
Filmed in a neorealist style, Up the Yangtze documents the human and ecological costs of the country’s largest engineering project since the Great Wall of China. Yung Chang’s first documentary premiered at Sundance, Reykjavik, and San Francisco, where it won Best Documentary.
Martin Provost • 2013 • France
A portrait of writer Violette LeDuc, protégé of Simone de Beauvoir.
Born the illegitimate daughter of a housemaid, Violette too is determined to write, and out of both talent and pers...
Iram Haq • 2017 • Norway • Nisha is sent to live in a small village 200 miles from Islamabad.
Sixteen year-old Nisha lives in Oslo. At home, she adheres to the conservative values of her Pakistani family...
Aditya Assarat • Thailand • 2007 • A tranquil romance amid unhealed wounds of the 2004 tsunami.
Na works as an inn-keeper in Takua Pa, a seaside town in southern Thailand. She is young and pretty, and soon catches the eye of one of her guests, a young architect from Bangkok named Ton. Their...
