An uplifting, boots-on-the-ground chronicle of ten first-time triathletes grinding toward Ironman 70.3 Swansea: dawn swims, wind-chewed bike rides, and long, lonely runs that turn strangers into a squad. Guided by local coaches and an irrepressible community spirit, they juggle work, family, injuries, and self-doubt while learning that endurance is as much about heart as it is about heart-rate. Shot with brisk intimacy and a clear love for its subjects, the film leans into small victories—clipless-pedal triumphs, cold-water courage—and the way a race can remake a life. By race day, the question isn’t who podiums—it’s how far determination, teammates, and a town’s backing can carry ordinary people beyond their limits.
The documentary tells the story of several families as they attempt to escape oppression in North Korea, revealing a world most of us have never seen. They grew up believing their land was paradise. Now, they risk everything in escaping it. In an unforgettable film, follow them on a treacherous journey to defect from their homeland of North Korea, as the threat of severe punishment and possible execution looms over their passage. Directed by Madeleine Gavin, the documentary centers around Pastor Seungeun Kim, a South Korean human rights activist and director of the Caleb Mission, which has rescued over 1,000 North Korean defectors since 2000.
Americans define themselves in the superlative: we are the biggest, strongest, fastest country in the world. They reward above all else: winning – at sport, at business and at war. Metaphorically is a nation on steroids. Is it any wonder that so many of their heroes are on performance enhancing drugs? A film that unflinchingly explores our win-at-all-cost culture. Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a first-person narrative, including US Congressmen, professional athletes, medical experts and everyday gym rats. When you discover that your heroes have all broken the rules, do you follow the rules, or do you follow your heroes?
In the past few decades, scientists have learned that the basis of everything they thought they knew about bird brains—that they were largely comprised of the most primitive and instinctual of brain structures—was wrong. Fully 75 percent of the brains of parrots and thousands of other species of birds is actually made up of a sophisticated information processing system that works much the same way as the locus of human higher-mindedness, the cerebral cortex. The film shows scientists putting birds to the test. Can they solve problems? Can they cooperate? Do they feel emotion? New research demonstrates just how clever they can be.
And epic film by Adam Curtis that explains why the big stories that politicians tell us have become so simplified that we can’t really see the world any longer. The narrative goes all over the world, America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia, but the country at the heart of it is Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is the place that has confronted our politicians with the terrible truth, that they cannot understand what is going on any longer". The coumentary reveals the forces that over the past thirty years rose up and undermined the confidence of politics to understand the world. And it shows the strange, dark role that Saudi Arabia has played in this. But Bitter Lake is also experimental. Curtis has taken the unedited rushes of everything that the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan - and used them in new and radical ways. He has tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan. A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.
Where big data meets big brother -- The story of how governments manipulate the internet to censor and monitor their citizens, and how those citizens are fighting back. This battle for control of cyberspace will challenge our ideas of privacy, citizenship and democracy to the very core. The film is a look at the global impact the internet has on free speech, privacy and activism.
By race day, the question isn’t who podiums—it’s how far determination, teammates, and a town’s backing can carry ordinary people beyond their limits.