Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca (2010)

This documentary examines ayahuasca shamanism near Iquitos (a metropolis in the Peruvian Amazon), and the tourism it has attracted. The filmmakers talk with two ayahuasqueros, Percy Garcia and Ron Wheelock, as well as ayuahuasca tourists and local people connected with the ayahuasca industry.

The London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony took place at 9pm on 27 July 2012. Titled 'Isles of Wonder', the Ceremony welcomed the finest athletes from more than 200 nations for the start of the London 2012 Olympic Games, marking an historic third time the capital has hosted the world’s biggest and most important sporting event. The Opening Ceremony reflected the key themes and priorities of the London 2012 Games, based on sport, inspiration, youth and urban transformation. It was a Ceremony 'for everyone' and celebrated contributions the UK has made to the world through innovation and revolution, as well as the creativity and exuberance of British people.

During a harsh Montréal winter, an elementary-school class is left reeling after its teacher commits suicide. Bachir Lazhar, a charismatic Algerian immigrant, steps in as the substitute teacher for the classroom of traumatized children. All the while, he must keep his personal life tucked away: the fact that he is seeking political refuge in Québec – and that he, like the children, has suffered an appalling loss.

Desperate to recover from his depression, Dave travels from his home in British Columbia, Canada to Peru in order to experience the healing effects of the sacred medicine ayahuasca. After Dave spends some time in the country, a Shipibo healer begins to teach him how to work with the medicine more deeply.

Benito Arévalo is an onaya: a traditional healer in a Shipibo-Konibo community in Peruvian Amazonia. He explains something of the onaya tradition, and how he came to drink the plant medicine ayahuasca under his father's tutelage. Arévalo leads an ayahuasca ceremony for Westerners, and shares with us something of his understanding of the plants and the onaya tradition.

Plant Explorer Richard Evans Schultes was a real life Indiana Jones whose discoveries of hallucinogenic plants laid the foundation for the psychedelic sixties. Now in this two hour History Channel TV Special, his former student Wade Davis, follows in his footsteps to experience the discoveries that Schultes brought to the western world. Shot around the planet, from Canada to the Amazon, we experience rarely seen native hallucinogenic ceremonies and find out the true events leading up to the Psychedelic Sixties. Featuring author/adventurer Wade Davis ("Serpent and the Rainbow"), Dr. Andrew Weil, the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir and many others, this program tells the story of the discovery of peyote, magic mushrooms and beyond: one man's little known quest to classify the Plants of the Gods. Richard Evans Schultes revolutionized science and spawned another revolution he never imagined.

The 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony was held at the Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest. It began at 8:00 p.m. China Standard Time (UTC+8) on August 8, 2008, as 8 is considered to be a lucky number in Chinese culture. Featuring more than 15,000 performers, the ceremony lasted over four hours and cost over $100 million USD to produce.

Aya: Awakenings' is an experiential journey by journalist Rak Razam into the world and visions of ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic plant medicine from the Amazon, capturing the experience and the western dynamic around it in unprecedented detail.

SHAMANS OF THE AMAZON is a personal account of filmmaker Dean Jefferys as he returns to the Amazon with his partner and one year old daughter. They journey deep into the Ecuadorian rainforest to learn about and experience the ancient ayahuasca healing ceremony. The film brings to the viewer an intimate and fascinating look at the shamans of the Amazon, and the life that is threatened by ecological destruction.

Filmed in the jungles of Peru, shaman Don Jose Campos introduces the practices and benefits of Ayahuasca, the psychoactive plant brew that has been used for healing and visionary journeys by Amazonian shamans for at least a thousand years.

After years of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, six US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan travel to Peru on a quest for healing. With the help and guidance of three brothers who are traditional healers, they take ayahuasca and other plant medicines during a 10-day retreat in the Amazon rainforest.

The secrets about unlocking the mysteries of consciousness by plant-drugs. The related chances and risks involved in this shamanism.

Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics took place at the Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi, Russia, on 7 February 2014. It began at 20:14 MSK (UTC+4) and finished at 23:02 MSK (UTC+4) This was the first Winter Olympics and first Olympic Games opening ceremony under the IOC presidency of Thomas Bach. The Games were officially opened by President Vladimir Putin. An audience of 40,000 were in attendance at the stadium with an estimated 2,000 performers. The ceremony touched upon various aspects of Russian history, and included tributes to famous Russians, such as Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), Ukrainian-born Russian humourist, dramatist, and novelist Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950), and patron of arts, and founder of Ballet Russes, Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929).

A portrait of Peruvian curandero Agustin Rivas-Vazques, revealed primarily through stationary-camera interviews.

Shipibo healer Ricardo Amaringo describes how he prepares, teaches, and shares the plant medicine ayahuasca. Olivia and Julian Arévalo sing examples of icaros (healing songs) in the Shipibo language.

Herlinda Augustin is a Shipibo healer who lives with her family in Peruvian Amazonia. Will she and other healers be able to maintain their ancient tradition despite Western encroachment?

Hamilton Souther is the founder of Blue Morpho Tours, a company that caters to ayahuasca tourists in the Peruvian Amazon. Souther talks about the events that led him to Amazonian shamanism. Five first-time ayahuasca drinkers on a nine-day retreat with Blue Morpho relate their experiences.

Four Westerners with various ailments travel to Peruvian Amazonia to drink ayahuasca, a traditional medicine renowned for its healing powers.

How do we heal our deepest wounds? Two combat veterans, suffering from severe trauma, abandon pharmaceuticals in order to seek healing through psychedelic medicines. Recent scientific research has shown that these substances can help people to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Beyond the personal stories, From Shock to Awe raises fundamental questions about war, the pharmaceutical industry, and the US legal system.

In 1977 France, the Ministry of the Future chooses two “normal,” white, middle-class citizens, Claudine and Jean-Michel, for a national experiment. They will be monitored and displayed on television for six months in a model apartment outfitted with state-of-the-art products and nonstop surveillance—the template for “a new city for the new man".

A holocaust survivor now living as a respected writer in Manhattan is the only person who can identify a suspected Nazi back in his native Austria. When a beautiful reporter eager for a scoop tries to lure him back, Geburtig must decide whether to confront his past.

An account of the major political events that took place in Santo Domingo from the government of Juan Bosch in 1963, until the rise to power of Dr. Joaquin Balaguer in 1966. The military outbreak in April 1965 and the subsequent U.S. invasion are treated in detail.

A biographical documentary on the life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Public Housing is Wiseman’s unflinching portrayal of life at the Ida B. Wells housing project in Chicago, a raw exposition of the daily conflicts between residents and the bureaucratic machinery to which they are continually subjected. With intimate detail and an abiding dedication to his subject, Wiseman unearths the hidden facets of institutions to find humanity and sites of unexpected beauty.

This film, dramatizing Weininger's life, is an adaptation of the 1982 play Soul of a Jew by Israeli writer Joshua Sobol. Weininger's last despondent hours are depicted in a dramatic furioso. His whole life passes by like distorted images in a mirror. The young genius fights a desperate battle against time, his fellow men - and against himself.

A young, idealistic female Israeli military investigator confronts an elite commander with accusations of unnecessary violence in the Occupied Territories. Her integrity and determination are put to the test as the case proves less black-and-white than it originally seemed.

Werner Schroeter's rhapsody of excess leaps from 1949 Cuba to contemporary France to points in between, while its feverishly shifting visual style evokes and parodies everything from kitschy Mexican telenovelas to silent French art films.

Morning of the Earth is a classic surfer film from 1971, created by Alby Falzon and David Elfick. The film has a soundtrack created by Australian musicians including Brian Cadd, and is set in Bali, Hawaii and Australia's north-east.

Western drama directed by Rod McCall. Henry deserted his family years before, Henry (James Brolin) kicks up a storm when he shows up to see his youngest daughter before her wedding. He has ulterior motives, including a divorce from wife Jenny (Sally Kirkland), but her new beau, Tom (Kris Kristofferson), throws his plans off the rails. Meanwhile, Sally's older daughter must choose between love with a cowboy and life in New York.

The influence that artists Pablo Picasso and George Braque had on the world of cinema is the subject of this documentary from filmmaker Arne Glimcher. A lifelong lover of film, Picasso was intrigued by the machines used to create moving pictures, as well as the images they produced. In this film, artists such as Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, Chuck Close, and the late Robert Rauschenberg reveal how Picasso and Braque's shared love of film helped to create some of the greatest art of the 20th Century. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Private Diary documents photographer Pedro Usabiaga working with a variety of amateur models. The audience sees how the relationships between the photographer and the subjects changes during their time together, as well as how the individual photographs begin to take shape. Pedro Usabiaga is a well-established Basque photographer whose chief concerns are figurative photography and whose passion in photographing the Spanish male. In this hour long conversation with the artist we are given entry into that process of selecting models (none of the models he uses for this book to be titled 'Private Diary' are professional, but instead are randomly chosen as Usabiaga observes athletes in action) and then allowed to follow Usabiaga and his crew as they photograph these men in natural settings and natural light.

A struggling, indebted business man leaves his family immediately after Christmas to pursue a lucrative property deal that could solve all of his problems: buying foreclosed properties from banks at a fraction of their value, refitting them for a minimum cost, and then selling them for a large profit. He hires a local chauffeur for 24 hours to drive him around the mountainous area but, as night sets in and the weather worsens, the car is trapped on an icy road and the men face an uncertain fate.

A hotel for women-only and catering to working girls is the setting for not being able to get a USA PCA seal-of-approval for this French-film, but New York City's 55th Playhouse played it anyway. Along the way the audience meets the girl who sneaked her lover into her no-men-allowed room and her patch soon turns blue; a young lady with a passionate intensity who chooses another young lady as the object of her affections; the blindly-misguided director of the hotel, another lady of real easy virtue who is not the one who smuggled her lover into her room; and a girl who is only there as a procurer for a slavery ring.

Ming a marriage consultant who runs into the charming but blind Yeuk through a little help of a guardian angel. The wheel of fortune is set in motion after the lonesome Ming discovers that he is blind one day. Nobody else than Yeuk who is used to make her way through the labyrinth of the metropolis without relying on the power of sight every day becomes Ming's loyal helper. Will Ming's gift of seeing ever return and if so, will he stay together with Yeuk?

Julia and Moises fell in love and got married when they were young, idealistic, and passionate; now in their 30s, their marriage has cooled and their lives have sunken into the mediocrity they had sought to avoid. This realization inspires a quest to regain the lost dreams of their youth, which is complicated when a handsome student begins to pursue Julia. She begins an affair with the fiery young activist that may just put the excitement back into her marriage. This is a funny and insightful exploration of the intricacies of relationships, love, and idealism, and Jesus Ochoa as Moises turns in a stellar performance.

An act of kindness leads to the destruction of two lives in just thirty miles, when a hitchiker and his ride let down their guards and reveal intimate, dark secrets about their pasts