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Why do we put others and ourselves at risk when we get behind the wheel of a car? Every year, more than one million people die in automobile accidents around the world. We blame the machine, the weather and the road conditions, and we bet our lives on our ability to predict the behaviour of other drivers. However, the mistakes we often think of as accidents are not always due to mere mishaps; they are mistakes we make again and again.
A luxury cruise boat motors up the Yangtze, navigating the mythic waterway known in China simply as "The River." In the biggest engineering endeavour since the Great Wall, China has set out to harness the Yangtze with the world's largest mega-dam.
Meanwhile at the river's edge Yu Shui says goodbye to her family and turns to face the future. From their small patch of land, her parents watch the young woman walk away, her belongings clutched in a plastic shopping bag. The waters are rising.
Canada went into Afghanistan with lofty goals, promising to fulfill the basic needs of its citizens, and vowing to rid the world of a regime that terrorized and brutalized its people. The costs to Canada, both human and material, are considerable: more than 80 soldiers and a diplomat have been killed, and hundreds of millions of Canadian tax dollars have been committed.
The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, NO END IN SIGHT is a jaw-dropping, insider's tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality.
Tar Sands: The Selling of Alberta captures the intersecting storylines of a remarkable cast of characters eager to cash in on the oil boom in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Washington lobbyists, Newfie pipefitters, Chinese investors and Norwegian industrialists descend on tar-soaked "Fort McMoney", a modern-day Eldorado, where rents are sky rocketing and cocaine abuse is four times the provincial average. Up for grabs - a stake in a $100 billion energy bonanza and Canada's economic sovereignty.
What happens when a small First Nations town goes cold turkey and gives up sugar and junk food for a year? My Big Fat Diet is a one-hour documentary that reveals how members of the Namgis First Nation return to a traditional-style of eating for one year to deal with an escalating problem of obesity and diabetes.
If you could get one person off the street, would you? Could you? Devil Plays Hardball is a radical interventionist documentary by Paperny Films that seeks to answer this question. Four well-established Vancouver residents have 10-months to mentor homeless individuals from various Vancouver neighborhoods who have the desire - but not necessarily the means - to re-enter mainstream society. What ensues is a complicated journey that provides an up-close and intimate look at the people most of us choose to ignore - Canada's homeless.
Take a trip around the world and back in time to discover its geologic hotspots.
