Program 1: Bomb Harvest

From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped a planeload of cluster bombs (about 100 per sortie) onto Laos every eight minutes, day and night – the equivalent of more than half a ton of bombs for every man, woman, and child. Many of these bombs still litter the Laotian landscape and remain live, rendering the largely poor, rural population vulnerable to explosions 25 years after the CIA-funded secret war has ended. Filmmaker Kim Mordaunt and producer Sylvia Wilczynski follow Australian Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technician Laith Stevens as he trains young Laotians to become certified bomb technicians themselves, learning to recognize and neutralize the estimated 30 percent of unexploded ordinance (UXO) still lying in wait. As these young technicians learn their new trade, we meet the villagers haunted by the effects of this illegal war and encounter the new economy that prizes UXO for its scrap metal value.

Program 2: The Lost Colony (De Verloren Kolonie)

The Sukhum Primate Center in Abkhazia, the oldest primate research laboratory in the world, is crumbling. This once prominent facility has been hailed for its strides in medical research and space exploration. Founded in the 1920s, the institute now strives for relevance amid Abkhazia's struggle for independence from Georgia, dwindling funds, and the loss of a large portion of its animals to a modern lab in neighboring Russia. On the cusp of its 80th anniversary, filmmaker Astrid Bussink visits the lab as it prepares for a conference designed to drum up support in the scientific community. Meanwhile, one guard searches the surrounding forests for any sign of members of the monkey colony thought to have escaped from the lab during the 1992 military conflict. Archival footage of the center's glory days and present-day activities captured at a detached remove are combined with stunning images of the decaying buildings and grounds. Now, with recently renewed fighting between Georgia and Russia over Abkhazian and South Ossetian independence, Bussink's ironic take on this seemingly hopeless situation becomes prescient.

Program 3: Peace with Seals (Mír s Tuleni)

Monk seal specialist Emanuele Coppola and director Miloslav Novák are on the hunt for any trace of a real, live Mediterranean monk seal. Conversations with marine biologists and philosophers as well as the beachgoers on the Mediterranean shores who have supplanted the seals lead them to believe that the only monk seals left are those preserved in Coppola's extensive collection of archival footage. Presented as a wistful documentary fable, the film might well stand as a warning sign for more ominous things to come.

Preceded by:

Don't Let It All Unravel

A short animated tale about the environment.

Program 4: River of No Return

Frances Djulibing wants to become a movie star. As a child growing up in the remote community of Nangalala in Australia's Northern Territory, Frances recalls idolizing Marilyn Monroe for her "sweet voice." When she is cast in the film Ten Canoes, the 42-year-old takes it as a sign of things to come and begins to cultivate her acting career. Her desire to leave her community and study acting at the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts in Queensland conflicts directly with her desire to stay in Nangalala and help raise her grandchildren the way she was raised, steeped in cultural traditions. River of No Return is a story of transformation as Frances learns to navigate two oppositional worlds, the ancient life of her people, the Yolngu, and the modern world of balanda, or white culture.

Program 5: Stone Pastures

Director Donagh Coleman uses the Himalayas as a backdrop to follow a family of goat and yak herders as they spend a year preparing pashmina wool for market. Their livelihood depends on the income from the wool, and every member of the family, from young children to grandparents, helps with the painstaking process of nurturing the baby goats through the harsh winter, sheering their bellies, separating the wool one strand at a time, and finally weaving blankets. The family struggles to send two boys to school. They successfully drop their inquisitive seven-year-old Kunsang at boarding school far from home, but fourteen-year-old Padma finds his way back home to the grueling work and the family he loves.

Program 6: Today the Hawk Takes One Chick

The Lubombo region of Swaziland suffers from the world's highest prevalence of HIV and a life expectancy that has dropped to 32 years. In this small, landlocked country in southern Africa, a generation of parents has died, leaving the grandparents in charge of the children as well as responsible for retaining the threads of the fraying traditional life. Presented without an overt narrative structure or narration, the film's drama emerges from the steady accumulation of details that tell a greater story of family in a world dictated by AIDS.

Program 7: Umbrella (San)

An umbrella that is carried across a wheat field in central China or the rainy streets of Shanghai is made in a factory in Guangdong and sold wholesale farther up the coast in Zhejiang Province. Tracking the life of an umbrella from factory to market, filmmaker Du Haibin shows how the lives of farmers in rural China have changed since the economic reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" couched the upturning of the ideals of the Cultural Revolution in nationalist terms to soften the blow dealt to farmers once glorified by the state. Haibin is part of the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmaking, which has proven unafraid to confront China's dictatorial policies in the wake of Tiananmen Square. With a pace that belies the speed with which these farmers and their families have to adjust to these new changes, he shows us factory workers, soldiers, students, merchants, and hold-out farmers as they scramble for livelihoods and respect in the rush toward modernization and the glorification of wealth over traditional ideals.