Catalog Search Results
1) Unity
Summary
100 celebrities narrate this enlightening documentary that re-examines the interconnectedness of all life on Earth, ponders our place in the universe, while taking viewers on an epic journey through the history of civilization and beyond. In this compassionate and inspiring film, your heart and mind are taken on a rollercoaster ride that is inspiring, horrifying and enlightening all at once, the perfect balance between light and shadow. UNITY is a...
Summary
Begin your course with a geographic overview of Eastern Europe, a region that begins at the Baltic Sea in the north and spans 20 countries to the Black Sea in the south. Here, Professor Liulevicius introduces you to the key themes of this course: Eastern Europe’s remarkable diversity, it shifting borders, and its separateness from—and connections with—the West.
Summary
Sub-Saharan Africa has often been overlooked by outside historians who are considering the rise of human civilization, yet nations such as Mali and Ghana and the Bantu and Swahili civilizations all have a rich and fascinating history. Survey the story of Africa with a special focus on sub-Saharan geography, people, and civilizations.
4) Smokin' fish
Summary
Cory Mann is a quirky Tlingit businessman hustling to make a dollar in Juneau Alaska. He gets hungry for smoked salmon, nostalgic for his childhood, and decides to spend a summer smoking fish at his family's traditional fish camp. The unusual story of his life and the untold history of his people interweave with the process of preparing traditional food as he struggles to pay his bills, keep the IRS off his back, and keep his business afloat. By turns...
Summary
Legendary director Jean-Luc Godard returns to the screen with Film socialisme, a magisterial essay on the decline of European civilization. As a garish cruise ship travels the Mediterranean (with Patti Smith among its guests), Godard embarks on a state of the EU address in a vibrant collage of philosophical quotes, historical revelations and pure cinematographic beauty.
Summary
With the tremendous success of his book, A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn radically changed the way Americans see themselves. His friend Noam Chomsky says that Zinn litteraly transformed a generation's conscience. Zinn talks about those who have no voice in the official History : Slaves, Indians, deserters, textile workers, union men.Between 1900 and 1920, more than 14 million immigrants arrived in the United States. They came...
Summary
Spain was once home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews living together and flourishing. Their cultures and beliefs intertwined and the knowledge of the ancients was gathered and reborn, the very seeds of the Renaissance. Cities of Light explores the causes that destroyed the one civilization of pluralism and interfaith cooperation that for a few centuries lit the Dark Ages in Medieval Europe.
Summary
From a beat reporter at the Washington Post to an overnight sensation as the leader of the New Journalism movement, Tom Wolfe was at the forefront of reshaping how American stories are told. Recognizing the importance of overlooked subcultures and communities, Wolfe documented everything from rural stock car drivers to hippies in Haight Ashbury to the Apollo Astronauts, and his ability to bridge cultural and class divides while tackling stories central...
Formats
Summary
MESSAGE FROM HIROSHIMA illustrates the immense suffering and loss that resulted when the world's first atomic bomb detonated in the historic city of Hiroshima. Today, where the Hon and Motoyasu rivers meet, stands the Peace Memorial Park -- the former location of the Nakajima district, which was once home to thousands of people and hundreds of businesses before the bombing.. Survivors and former residents recount their lives before the bombing, accompanied...
10) Faat Kine
Summary
In Faat Kine, Ousmane Sembene, the unquestioned father of African cinema, calls his fellow Africans to a reckoning of the post-independence era at the beginning of a new century. At 77, he sums up 40 years of path-breaking filmmaking with a penetrating analysis of the interplay of gender, economics and power in today's Africa. Sembene accomplishes all this through the deceptively light domestic drama of Faat Kine, a gas station operator born, significantly,...
Summary
The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest tells the remarkable story of a tumultuous thousand-year period. Dominated by war, conquest, and the struggle to balance the stability brought by royal power with the rights of the governed, it was a period that put into place the foundation of much of the world we know today. Taught by Professor Jennifer Paxton, an honored scholar and a professor at The Catholic University of America,...
12) Hard to be a God
Summary
When legendary Russian auteur Aleksei German died in 2013, he left behind this extraordinary final film, a phantasmagoric adaptation of the revered sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky Brothers (authors of the source novel for Tarkovsky's Stalker). Hard to be a God began percolating in German's consciousness in the mid-1960s, and would actively consume him for the last 15 years of his life. He brought the film close enough to completion for his wife and...
Summary
Technological advancement, economic development, population increase - are they signs of a thriving society? Or too much of a good thing? Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese, this provocative documentary explores the concept of progress in our modern world, guiding us through the major "progress traps" facing our civilization in the arenas of technology, economics, consumption, and the environment. Featuring powerful arguments from such visionaries...
15) The pearl button
Summary
The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds the voices of the Earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of a mysterious button that was discovered in its seabed. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline, the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes,...
16) They are we
Formats
Summary
The story of a remarkable reunion, more than 170 years after a family was driven apart by the ravages of the transatlantic slave trade. In Central Cuba, proud members of the Ganga-Longoba, a small Afro- Cuban ethnic group, have kept their unique heritage alive. In early 2013, members of the Ganga-Longoba were finally granted permission to visit Sierra Leone.
Summary
Stuart Hall is a foundational figure in the influential interdisciplinary field known as cultural studies. In this stimulating and eloquent four-hour interview, conducted by the literary journalist Maya Jaggi and directed by Mike Dibb, Hall reflects on his life and career, talking personally and in depth about the trajectory of his work and how it has intersected with broader political movements. In a conversation both intimate and sweeping in scope,...
18) Last sentinel
Formats
Summary
Set in the near future, a skeleton crew of soldiers is stranded at sea on an abandoned military outpost awaiting the arrival of reinforcements or an enemy invasion, whichever comes first.
