Globalization

Filmed over five years, in fifteen countries, director Jodie Mack places textiles against surprising backgrounds, editing the imagery to a homemade pop soundtrack. Following components,systems, and samples in a collage of textiles, tourism, language, and music, the film investigates recurring motifs and how their metamorphoses function within a global economy.

The implantation of African trade 
in Guangzhou is a recent phenomenon, on which Marie Voignier reports through her interlinking portraits of Jackie, Julie, Shanny who have come to set up their business on site. Amidst the monstrous accumulation of merchandise on the endless markets of the megacity, the film follows these African business women grappling with the globalised Chinese economy.

In the Mexican village of Milpillas, deteriorating economic and social conditions have led to a wave of suicides among its young people. The remarkable new documentary Cabellerango, from filmmaker Juan Pablo González, examines one such case, relying on conversations with family members and townspeople to piece together the factors that led to this tragic incident, and in the process, reflect upon the changes occurring across much of the country.

Deep inside a pristine forest, we hear the sudden sound of a chainsaw felling a fir tree. So begins this breathtakingly photographed, puzzle-like documentary which follows the mysterious journey of the tree’s lumber entirely through thirteen 360° panning shots; a wide-angle picture of the role nature plays in a world defined by globalization.

In the late 1950s, a large American-Swedish company established a mining operation in the remote highlands of Liberia and built a sprawling, modernist city, a “true America,” for its employees and their families. Today, all that remain are abandoned buildings and empty pools. Exactly what happened involves mythical beasts, the environment, the promise of industrialization, and the last remnants of colonialism.

One of the year’s most bracingly original debuts, The Human Surge is a global journey that jumps from Argentina to the Philippines to Mozambique, a road movie that fuses fiction and documentary for a portrait of today’s youth at a time of economic uncertainty and illusory hyper-connection.

Using found snapshots, diary entries and 16mm Chinese melodramas, filmmaker Jason Byrne resurrects the ghosts of a decommissioned cargo ship - once used to carry coal along the Yangtze - as it crosses the Indian Ocean to be salvaged for scrap.

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.

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.

An in-depth look at the secretive world of trend forecasting - how a small group of individuals predict (or in some cases, engineer), the cultural and social trends of tomorrow.