Heartbeat of a Nation

Nahuas and Sahrawis

2013

This encounter takes place when an indigenous Nahua family from the Sierra Norte of Puebla, in Mexico, welcomes into their home a Sahrawi arab to share their customs and traditions. During this time spent together, one can recognize there's not only cultural similarities but also similar struggles, feelings and efforts to preserve their mother tongue, their culture and their territory.

Bobi Wine: The People's President

2023

Uganda has one the youngest populations in the world and one of its most flagrantly anti-democratic governments. These are ingredients for revolution, and Bobi Wine and his wife Barbie Kyagulanyi are stirring the pot. When the charismatic Bobi, a musician and member of parliament, announces his campaign for president, Uganda’s youth are ecstatic, filling parks and streets for every speech, and singing Bobi’s anthems of peace and freedom. But then comes the crackdown, orchestrated by Yoweri Museveni, a brutal dictator who has ruled Uganda for 36 years. Bobi and his crew survive arrests, beatings, torture, riots and raids.

Party auf dem Todesstreifen - Soundtrack der Wende

2014

Thaidina, music in the desert

2009

A documentary that shows the current state of territorial limbo in which the Sahrawi people live through the gaze of those who arrive and leave, those who resist, of the occupiers and the occupieds; a multifaceted view of what is behind the facts.

Young Masters: Yingge Boys

2021

Young Masters is an original series commissioned by NOWNESS China focusing on traditional Chinese cultures, and how they continue to be defined by a new generation of the country's youth. Puning City in Guangdong Province is known within China as the 'Cultural Hometown' of Chaoshan, with the folk dance Yingge being one of its most famous customs. Yingge, meaning "Hero's Hymn", combines Nanquan routines and opera acting skills, and is a vibrant and upbeat performance in which dancers don intricate costumes and facial makeup, and play the role of the heroes in Water Margin《水浒传》- an ancient Chinese novel about brotherhood.

Margaret Kilgallen: Heroines

"I especially hope to inspire young women, because I often feel like so much emphasis is put on how beautiful you are, and how thin you are, and not a lot of emphasis is put on what you can do and how smart you are. I'd like to change the emphasis of what's important when looking at a woman." Filmed in San Francisco in 2000, Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001) discusses the female figures she incorporated into many of her paintings and graffiti tags. Loosely based on women she discovered while listening to folk records, watching buck dance videos, or reading about the history of swimming, Kilgallen painted her heroines to inspire others and to change how society looks at women. Three of Kilgallen's heroines—Matokie Slaughter, Algia Mae Hinton, and Fanny Durack—are shown and heard through archival recordings. Kilgallen is shown tagging train cars with her husband, artist Barry McGee, in a Bay Area rail yard and painting in her studio at UC Berkeley (source: Art21).

Song

2014

Song is a story of the last Finnish rune singer and his pupil, and the comforting power of singing.

Dream of the Wild Horses

1960

The horses in Denys Colomb Daunant’s dream poem are the white beasts of the marshlands of the Camargue in South West France. Daunant was haunted by these creatures. His obsession was first visualized when he wrote the autobiographical script for Albert Lamorisse’s award-winning 1953 film White Mane. In this short the beauty of the horses is captured with a variety of film techniques and by Jacques Lasry’s beautiful electronic score.