It was the world's largest, most beautiful and fastest cruise ship. Built in Saint Nazaire in 1932, the "Normandie" was the pride of France. But it took only a few hours, amidst the chaos of World War Two, for this dream of grandeur to lie broken in New York harbour.
An account of the last two centuries of the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. How human beings have progressed so much in such a short time through war and the selfish interests of a few, belligerent politicians and captains of industry, damaging the welfare of the majority of mankind, impoverishing the weakest, greedily devouring the limited resources of the Earth.
Amos Gitai returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary FIELD DIARY. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai's film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.
In February 2013 a film crew led by documentary filmmaker David Sington will leave Montevideo in Uruguay for a voyage across the South Atlantic into the stormiest waters on Earth. Their destination will be a rendezvous with the Saga Sea, a high-technology trawler operating in the Antarctic Ocean. It will be a voyage to the latest and possibly last frontier between industrial civilization and the natural world, in search of a mysterious sea creature which for decades has held the promise of transforming human nutrition: krill. Could the exploitation of krill improve diet across the globe, or will it simply lead to the collapse of one of the most important ecosystems on the planet?
A French documentary or, one might say more accurately, a mockumentary, by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick.
In 2001, the lucrative chocolate industry, due to pressure from NGOs, committed itself to putting an end to child labor in cacao plantations before 2006. 18 years later, has that promise been kept? The Ivory Coast, the world's largest cacao producer, made a real effort to eradicate this scourge on the country. They built schools and trained farmers. Television adverts even reminded populations that child labor is illegal. So why does child exploitation still exist? Further into isolated areas of the forest, at the end of near-impassable roads, Paul Moreira discovered child slaves, forced to work in plantations, their incomes often seized by traffickers. These child slaves are separated from their parents and sometimes resold onto other traffickers.
