Qué pókar

Four Americans friends and their Chinese guide set out in the fall of 2008 traveling by bicycle between China's two largest cities to learn more about the people, culture and the rapidly changing environment in which they live. Filmed at a historic time for China, with Beijing basking in the afterglow of the Olympics and the country emerging as an economic superpower, they capture an intimate and unfiltered look at parts of China that are typically flown over. MAN ZOU makes us all look at how we relate to the people, culture, and the country of China.

Inspired by the recent discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an unlikely boat is built from 10,000 reclaimed plastic bottles and attempts to sail across the Pacific Ocean in hopes of retelling the forgotten, misconstrued, and foreboding story of plastic to our disinterested culture of convenience. The same miracle material that has enabled us to land on the moon, rebuild a human heart, curb epidemics, and alter the course of history, is now showing up in ominous human-fingerprints across the planet: choking our oceans and poisoning our lives. This is a film about an improbable high-seas adventure that captured the imagination of thousands, and the debacle of a forgotten miracle to a world of excess.

Downtown artist Lillian Ball spearheads a successful collusion across the socioeconomic divide with South Bronx youth from the boat and character building non-profit, ROCKING THE BOAT, to transform a polluted stretch of privately owned wasteland along the Bronx River into a wetland and educational community park. Despite initial friction in the end a heavenly choir sings the praises of a rare accomplishment in the realm of functional public art--completion and sustainability. This film is a record and a road map of the creation and maintenance of WATERWASH ABC, a wetland that remediates toxic water runoff from ABC's parking lot before it reaches the river and a public picnic area with signage containing useful environmental lessons.

The story of the Ancient Kingdom of Cambodia, that went from being a Place of wonders to a Genocide leaving the Kingdom littered with land mines and Skulls and Bones by the Khmer Rouge. Now Cambodia reemerges as a phoenix from the flames with the rebirth of the kingdom of wonder and the resilience of the history of a great people.

Brazilian Dream is fruit of reflection on Brazil today. We Brazilians are used to seeing the country as peripheral, subaltern, poor and third-world. But in recent years Brazil has experienced rampant transformation that has reconfigured its archaic social structure. Yet this difficult and paradoxical modernization runs up against problems that seem to be historically determined. In the film we ask: what images can capture this new country? And we chance a few answers, starting with the delirious fable-spinning of a nation drunk on its own progress. These are images and sounds that echo and, at the same time, collide with the grand founding narratives of the national mindset. Through these images we enter into conflict with the messianic vocation of a Brazil eternally pre-destined to be the country of the future. Bodies, machines and landscapes move and shudder. Until the final eclipse.

A story of how large-scale resource extraction negatively impacts communities at opposite ends of our country. Having grown up in Fort Assiniboine, Alberta and Sept-Iles, Quebec respectively, my partner and I realized that the same socio-economic effects were found in both the communities affected by the Alberta Oil Sands and the Plan Nord in Quebec. An excellent example of guerrilla filmmaking; ours is a self-funded, two-person film crew who travelled by plane, greyhound, bicycle, pick-up and horseback to bring you the untold stories behind industrial development. Our travels took us to the metropolitan centres as well as the villages and farming communities across Alberta and the North Shore of Quebec.