Southeast Asia

Every winter Mikma and her family travel by foot from their village deep in the Himalaya of Nepal to sell local medicinal plants in urban markets. This year, construction of a new highway to China has begun in their roadless valley, and things are never going to be the same. With the new road will come new challenges, new opportunities, and ultimately a new way of being to those who live along its path.

MR. TOILET: The World's #2 Man

To a stranger, he’s a guy obsessed with toilets, but to those who know him he's “Mr. Toilet,” a crusader in global sanitation. A former entrepreneur, Jack Sim uses humor to campaign for something no one dares talk about: shit. It's a crisis that impacts over 2 billion people. In India alone, 200,000 children die each year from lack of safe sanitation. Jack fought for and established UN World Toilet Day, but with recent corporate pushback and thinning resources, he is discovering there is a price to pay for being the world's #2 hero.

RAILWAY SLEEPERS

The first railway line in Thailand was inaugurated in 1893 – a sign of progress and prosperity. Shot over eight years on every active line of the railway system, this extraordinary documentary, produced by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, offers an unprecedented immersion into the country’s past and present.

IN EXILE

Forced to flee his country after filming politically sensitive events such as the Saffron Revolution, a Myanmar filmmaker finds himself a refugee amongst refugees in Thailand, where he discovers the plight of fellow migrants working under slavery-like conditions.

DEAD SLOW AHEAD

An enormous shipping freighter drifts endlessly across the Atlantic Ocean; its' crew toiling tirelessly below. At times resembling a dystopian science-fiction film, this is trenchant commentary on global trade, labor and capitalism.

FROM WHAT IS BEFORE

Lav Diaz' follow up to his acclaimed Norte, the End of History, is an extraordinary epic examining the conditions that led to the rise of the Marcos regime in 1970s Philippines.

BANANA PANCAKES AND THE CHILDREN OF STICKY RICE

When an isolated village in rural Laos becomes a popular destination for Western tourists, it exposes, in microcosm, the economic and social challenges of our modernizing world.

THE DAY BEFORE THE END

A haunting, apocalyptic vision rendered in vivid black & white tableaux, a striking short film from the long-form master, Lav Diaz.

STORM CHILDREN

With striking b&w photography, this acclaimed documentary from Philippine master Lav Diaz takes stock of the devastation caused by typhoon Yolanda.

View All Subjects