Guranay
2021 · 72m · Documentary
This film is a realistic record of a sixty-year-old couple living in a remote village (Gurenay) in the Badain Jaran Desert of Alashan, Inner Mongolia plant thousands of mu of ammodendron and euphratica to fight against expanding deserts.
More Like This
Prime Farmland
2020
This documentary film follows farmers and activists fighting together to stop the Indiana Enterprise Center, a mega-sized industrial park planned west of South Bend, Indiana
More info →
The Man Who Stopped the Desert
2010 · ★ 7.5
As a child in Burkina Faso, Yacouba was sent away from home to study the Qur'an, where he and his classmates were almost starving. The young boys would trek across miles of wilderness, only to fall and beg at a straw hut for meagre rations. It is from this harsh background that the young farmer became determined to develop techniques that would bring exhausted soil back into production. His efforts have outdone the work of the world's leading scientists and technological advances costing millions of pounds. They may also yet prove crucial to the future of the world's rapidly growing population and global food demands.
More info →
In the Wake of the Flood
2010
On the eve of her 70th birthday, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood set out on an international tour criss-crossing the British Isles and North America to celebrate the publication of her new dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood. Rather than mount a traditional tour to promote a book's publication, Atwood conceived and executed something far more ambitious and revelatory--a theatrical version of her novel. Along the way she reinvented what a book tour could (and maybe should) be. But Atwood wasn't selling books as much as advocating an idea: how humanity must respond to the consequences of an environmentally compromised planet before her work of speculative fiction transforms into prophesy.
More info →
Nostalgia for the Light
2010 · ★ 7.4
In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers peer deep into the cosmos in search for answers concerning the origins of life. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones, dumped unceremoniously by Pinochet's regime.
More info →
Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie
2011
David Suzuki, iconic Canadian scientist, educator, broadcaster and activist delivers a 'last lecture' — what he describes as "a distillation of my life and thoughts, my legacy, what I want to say before I die". The film interweaves the lecture with scenes from the places and events in Suzuki's life — creating a biography of ideas — forged by the major social, scientific and cultural events of the past 70 years.
More info →
The Two Shovels
2017
After "Old Tang Tou", Xu Tong continued to film the family of Old Tang Tou's son, Tang Laosan, in Northeast China. Tang Laosan was sent to prison for a murder case, and Tang Laosan's son, Xiaobao, unexpectedly encountered such a change in the year of his high school entrance exams, which made the fates of father and son both unpredictable.
More info →
Steve Backshall's Royal Arctic Challenge
2025
50 years on from the event, environmentalist Steve Backshall retraces a young Prince Charles' Arctic adventure and uncovers dramatic changes to our planet alongside an urgent need for action.
More info →
Way of Fortune
2007
"Mazu" or "The Sea God" has been the most important religious belief of ordinary people in my hometown for four hundred years. Along the coast of China and even in the Nanyang region, there is at least one temple dedicated to Mazu in various seaside cities-this geographical and historical distribution coincides with the contemporary economic or industrial area of Chinese society. It is frustrating that rapid economic development has led to global warming. The factories located on the coast of southern China from all over the world will eventually cause flooding and inundate these temples dedicated to Mazu. This is indeed a very ironic discovery for our civilization, "We", not only Chinese or all human beings, now or in the past, how can we Chinese avoid this upcoming tragedy?
More info →
In Memory of the Land and People
1977
“…It is a film that tells in hurried film sequences and a resonant musical score juxtaposing the sublime, funereal despair of Bartok agains tthe gut-bare tones of folk music. Gates has through his filming technique and meticulously selected mining sites, captured all the outrage and sorrow and indignity to the land and its people that strip mining represents. The film is one that all Americans should see, for it shows extremely well the price we have to pay for strip mined coal.” - Dale A. Burk, The Montana “Missoulian”
More info →
Twenty Two
2017 · ★ 7.7
Follow the lives of the elderly survivors who were forced into sex slavery as “Comfort Women” by the Japanese during World War II. At the time of filming, only 22 of these women were still alive to tell their story. Through their own personal histories and perspectives, they tell a tale that should never be forgotten to generations unaware of the brutalization that occurred.
More info →
Anthropocène, l’implacable enquête
2025 · ★ 7.5
For several decades, geoscientists have been observing that the Earth is changing rapidly due to human intervention. This action has such a great impact on the biological, geological and atmospheric processes of the Earth that some scientists speak of the dawn of a new epoch: the Age of Man or the Anthropocene.
More info →
Springtime in Wushan
2003 · ★ 8
Zhang Ming went back to his hometown Wushan to record the last images before it being changed forever by the upcoming Three Gorges Dam.
More info →