Zhang Yinglong, who had been working alone in Beijing, returned to his hometown to visit relatives and learned that due to logging and coal mining, the environment in his hometown had deteriorated from once being a place of abundant water and grass to now being covered in yellow sand. Despite the opposition of his relatives, he resigned from his job as a deputy general manager and sold his house to return to his hometown to fight the desert. After experiencing difficulties and perseverance, he has now become a "national model worker" with green trees lining the streets.
The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off — sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer-director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear — born Anthony Robertson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater — after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s.
In a coastal town in Spain, young Borja is growing up as the father figure to his little brother Erik, helping out his mother Raquel as she struggles daily to pay the bills. Dreaming of fame and a better life, the family sign Borja up for the local School of Bullfighting. Borja trains hard, trying to fulfil his family’s dream that he will debut as a bullfighter at the age of 16, wearing a magnificent “suit of lights”. But the political, financial and social implications of this contentious tradition turns Borja’s hopeful coming-of-age story into a controversial and unpredictable narrative.
Sixty years ago, the late, great Neoclassical Penn Station was razed and replaced with the crowded, subterraneous version of the transit hub New Yorkers now know. Today, an all-too-similar demolition debate has resurfaced over the train station. But while just about every New Yorker can agree they hate Penn Station, no one can agree on how to fix it.
In March 1973, the filmmaker’s grandmother was in an impossible situation when two men held her and her five children at gunpoint in their house. 50 years later, director Mimi Wilcox connects this personal story to the tales of Patty Hearst and Kristin Enmark. Featuring fresh interviews with Enmark, the person most closely associated with the origins of the term Stockholm Syndrome, we explore how human compassion comes into conflict with police aggression and institutional prejudice. Bad Hostage interrogates this misogynist myth and in doing so re-frames falsehoods and decades of pop culture lore.
We see impressive videos of the work of drone operators in the media every day. The painstaking work that is done to prepare for it is usually left behind the scenes. And we are talking not just about organizing the flight, but also such trivial things as, for instance, proper arrangement of positions. A well-dug shelter saves lives - this rule is the same both for infantry and for drone pilots. One day in the life of the strike drone unit of the 47th Magura Separate Mechanised Brigade involves digging trenches, joking, combat missions, eating sandwiches under shelling, and digging trenches again. Because the better a fighted digs, the longer he lives.
Deployments for combat missions for Apache, a tank commander, is a daily routine task. But this time he needs to do a mission with a gunner who is deploying to the confrontation line for the first time. A simple story about the complex work of the tank operators of the 36th Rear Admiral Mykhailo Bilynskyi Separate Marine Brigade - about equipping the tank, preparing the crew, and about the baptism by fire for a gunner who was a civilian just recently.
During a storming mission, a commander has to make quick, unconventional and very risky decisions. One of these decisions has been captured by military documentarians during the counteroffensive in the Zaporizhia Region. A brief consultation at the control and observation point with the commander of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade, Hero of Ukraine Viktor Sikoza, quick planning with deminers and a "big badaboom" which paralyzed several enemy positions.
