Ellen Bruno

A mind-boggling "coincidence" leads the filmmaker to track down his fifth grade class – and fifth grade teacher – to examine their memory of and complicity in a bullying incident fifty years ago.

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Each year thousands of young girls are recruited from rural Burmese villages to work in the sex industry in neighboring Thailand. Held for years in debt bondage in illegal Thai brothels, they suffer extreme abuse by pimps, clients, and the police. The trafficking of Burmese girls has soared in recent years as a direct result of political repression in Burma. Human rights abuses, war and ethnic discrimination has displaced hundreds of thousands of families, leaving families with no means of livelihood. An offer of employment in Thailand is a rare chance for many families to escape extreme poverty. Sacrifice examines the social, cultural, and economic forces at work in the trafficking of Burmese girls into prostitution in Thailand. It is the story of the valuation and sale of human beings, and the efforts of teenage girls to survive a personal crisis born of economic and political repression.

The personal testimonies of the courageous Buddhist nuns who have led the nonviolent resistance against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Sky Burial follows the ritual of "jha-tor", the giving of alms to birds in a northern Tibetan monastery - where the bodies of the dead are offered to the vultures as a final act of kindness to living beings. At the Drigung Monastery lamas chant to call the consciousness from the body. Juniper incense is burned to summon the vultures. Special body breakers, or "rogyapas", unwrap the bodies and cut away the flesh. The bones are crushed and mixed with tsampa, roasted barley flour. The entire body is consumed by the birds, assuring the ascent of the soul. The sky, or the universe, is where the sacred world lies. To merge with the sky after death is a holy event, one that replaces the sufferings of this world with peace.

A poetic and personal cinematic meditation on displacement and loss, SKIN OF GLASS follows filmmaker Denise Zmekhol’s journey after discovering that her late father's most celebrated work as an architect, a modernist glass skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, Brazil, has become occupied by hundreds of homeless families.

Leper provides a rare and intimate glimpse into a contemporary society of lepers in a remote village in Nepal. Villages speak openly and emotionally about their relationship to their sickness, to the "healthy" community outside the village boundaries, and the myriad stigmas and misunderstandings which surround a disease that has marked their bodies and their lives.

Made as a relief worker's master's thesis, this documentary chronicles the difficulties of rebuilding a community in post-Pol Pot Cambodia

Into the Current: Burma’s Political Prisoners is about Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner who works to free his colleagues in Burma against the backdrop of the country’s non-violent political movement.