The essence of progress in civilization has always been handiwork. In traditional Chinese civilization, the emperor was supreme. Vested with the authority to enjoy the best of handiwork, all crafts used for residence, clothing, food, and travel were the most refined and splendid.
As part of a high-tech forensic probe into the demise of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, scientists use X-rays and CT scans as they attempt to reach a conclusion about just how this famed king died.
In the Renaissance castle of the Polish count - Jan Potocki - in Lancut, the modern traces of a past glory persevere and become visible again at the tones of Krzysztof Penderecki's music and Brothers Quay's imaginary animation.
One Country, Two Systems? No Way! say the youth of Taiwan. But China under President Xi Jinping wants more than ever to bring the island of Taiwan back into the fold, just like Hong Kong.
The rural Taiwanese outer islands of Kinmen sit merely 2 miles off the coast of China. Kinmen attracts tourists for its remains from the 1949 Chinese Civil War.
"The Last Dragon" is a nature mockumentary about a British scientific team that attempts to understand the unique incredible beasts that have fascinated people for ages.
The Kabul National Museum, once known as the "face of Afghanistan," was destroyed in 1993. We filmed the most important cultural treasures of the still-intact museum in 1988: ancient Greco-Roman art and antiquitied of Hellenistic civilization, as well as Buddhist sculpture that was said to have mythology--the art of Gandhara, Bamiyan, and Shotorak among them.
With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world.
Don Muthu Swami is one of Bombay's most fearsome gangsters. On his deathbed, his father forces him to make a promise: that from now on he will lead a decent life.
A human story unfolds when detectives aggravated by a major bust gone wrong are forced to deal with a tormented man thrown into the cage after urinating on the Mayor's limo.
After hundreds of years doing what he was built for, WALL•E— a robot designed to clean up the earth—discovers a new purpose in life when he meets a sleek search robot named EVE.
Three small films for as many reflections on the senses and human knowledge. In the first episode, Emmer reviews with anthological and didactic intent the precepts of ancient philosophy, from Greek to Roman civilization; in the second, working as he did at the beginning of his career on a vast repertoire of pictorial and non-pictorial images, he analyzes the “history of the gaze” in the visual arts, from prehistoric graffiti to medieval altarpieces, from Impressionist and Cubist paintings to modern-day advertising posters; finally, in the third, recounting with irony and lightness a day of solitude in his mountain home, he reflects on the intellectual thinking of writers and great thinkers, relating to his own individual experience as much the words of oral tradition and popular culture as the writings of geniuses such as Shakespeare, Spinoza or Gogol.
