Each year Tibetan children are found making a perilous journey across the Himalayas sent by their parents to join the Tibetan Diaspora in Nepal and India. In most cases they will never see their parents again. Beyond the Himalayas is a moving beautiful story of a particular group of Tibetan children who longingly hope to see their parents but who have entrusted themselves to their "mentor" who cares for them. The mentor too has some skeletons in his closet for which he tries to make amends.

You don’t take everything away…you give something back. That is nature.

When the pharmaceutical industry got a hold of what is considered a profitable secret - the hoodia plant - it inspired filmmaker Rehad Desai to travel to the Kalahari to investigate global interest in ancient Bushmen knowledge. He meets Jan van der Westhuizen, a fascinating Khomani San traditional healer.

Jan's struggle to live close to nature is hampered by centuries of colonial exploitation. Unable to survive as they once did hunting and gathering, the Khomani now live in a state of poverty that threatens to see the last of this community. Who will pass on the knowledge of the land to its people and who can protect the plants that hold secrets and are a means to their survival?

This is a story of dispossession of the land, its inhabitants, their cultural and agricultural wealth.

Some people travel to Bolivia to go down the dangerous Silva mines, to witness contemporary medieval working conditions. Are they crawling through the dangerous tunnels to enrich their knowledge or to escape boredom? What does this say about eco-tourism?

An inventive young Palestinian girl will do whatever it takes to buy a birthday cake in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

In the midst of China’s booming industrial revolution, the city of Shanghai provides ample evidence of rising economic prosperity. With many businesses looking towards the future, Mr. Wong prefers to invest in the past. A wealthy Chinese-Canadian billionaire, Mr. Wong is spending his fortune salvaging historical buildings in Shanghai, discreetly under the radar of the Chinese government. His dream is to create a historical utopia, in which artistic and cultural exchange can flourish. Mr. Wong’s world is a compelling and critical look at the ethics, strategies and alliances necessary to preserve China’s past in the modern era.

Jussi, seems lost. A young Saami man in his twenties, he has watched his family sell their reindeer herd against his wishes. Having lived in Lapland his entire life he resents his brother’s decision to move south, abandoning the traditional Saami ways. When his brother comes home for a visit, Jussi is confronted once more with the choices now facing the community and his family. What will he decide? A quirky, bittersweet drama from Lapland, sure to resonate with Canadian audiences.

“I was born beneath this water; I was ten years old when it happened,” says the young narrator.

A village condemned to disappear beneath the rising waters. Voices filled with emotion. Piece by piece their lives are broken down and relocated. All that remains are their memories.

It’s a common fact that people will move at some point in their life. But what happens when a village needs to be relocated and what has caused this momentous decision?

The village is Luz- in Portugal. It had to be relocated because of the construction of the Alqueva dam. Over the course of 6 years the filmmakers documented those most affected by this emotional process.

Do you ever wonder why there is always a line up at women’s public restrooms, and never one at the men’s? In North America, most would argue that it is a simple issue of biology, but in India perhaps it’s more a matter of design…

Q2P is a contemplative study of how gender and class inequalities are revealed through toilets; something we normally take for granted. Set in Mumbai, India, where women going to the loo alone is stigmatized, the film looks at who has to queue to pee, and how urban centre design becomes gendered by this social prohibition.

A young Albanian immigrant experiences repeated visions of an execution. The past veers its way into the present in this drama.

Water is life!

A dire shortage of water leads the people of a sub-Saharan village to pack up their goats and cattle and head off across the sands in search of a more dependable source. Traveling without a map, village school teacher Rahne (Issaka Sawadogo) makes the courageous decision to go east with his wife Mouna (Carole Karemera Umulinga, - HBO’s Sometimes in April, 2005) and their three small children.

Sounds of Sand is a dramatic tale of exodus, survival and hope. It is also a parable about determination that brings us into the footsteps of Shasha. Shasha is a nomad child full of the joys of life, whose tenacity and strength will conquer her father’s love when everything else seems lost. The film is based on the novel Chamelle by Marc Durin-Valois.

Stig-Anders is considered an anomaly by his neighbors and those who know him. With his horses as his main companions, he lives alone on a farm in the southern forests of Sweden, with little connection to the modern world. He romanticizes the past and refuses to give up his old way of life. The horseman falls on hard times when a furious storm hits his beloved forest, causing him to be hospitalized. Away from his farm he has little reason to live, until a friend from the past helps him find his way home. A beautifully shot and intimate portrait study of one mans relationship to the land, and to the past which he refuses to leave behind.

The Lacandones lived for centuries hidden in the immense rain-forest of southern Mexico. A people of many myths, speaking an ancient Mayan language they had a unique knowledge of the forest, its plants and its animals. Recently they have been exposed to evangelical religion and modernizing influences, which has resulted in the loss of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. Bor, an illegal immigrant in the United States returns to his Lacandones family in search of his identity. Knowing little about his past he meets one of the last remaining shamans who provides him with an alternate sense of the world and a spiritual experience. Meanwhile, the ravages of modernity on an ancient culture have left their scars on his immediate family.

A man wakes up to discover that his home and way of life are being destroyed due to urban development. An experimental animated short depicting the harsh displacement of communities in developing nations due to economic progress.

When explorer Robert Peary sojourned to the Pole he not only left a historic legacy but a personal one with tragic implications for the people whose lives he had altered forever. Prize of the Pole follows the sombre contemporary journey of one of Peary’s Inuit descendants who attempts to reconcile the motives and actions of his white ancestor’s quest for glory in an imperial age. This unique film intersects the lives of three men over time and space revealing their own attempts to come to terms with the opposing cultural ties within them. A profoundly moving multi-textured and layered story leaves one confounded by the racist attitudes displayed and the lives destroyed in the wake of the Prize of the Pole.

The Third Ward is a neighborhood in Houston, Texas that was historically populated by African-Americans. However, in the 60’s the city ran a highway through the area isolating 30, 000 people; dividing and wrecking the tight, vibrant community that once was.

Later in 90’s a group of artist developed The Row House Project with a mission to bring life back to the community through the love of art. In the process, these artists-turned-activists transformed lives - starting with their own.

Third Ward TX is a revealing look at a community's struggle to survive - from segregation to the limited promise of integration, from drug wars to the economic challenges of gentrification. It is a story of imagination and hope, passed along person to person through the love of art and community.

Co-existence seems futile between man and tiger; it looks as though the tiger’s time is almost up. Even as it dominates their history, religion and mythology, the tiger is quickly disappearing in India. The demand to accelerate economic progress and development is leaving the tiger more vulnerable than ever. Rising tensions between the tigers and human forest tribes are inevitably volatile, as both populations struggle to survive. The tiger remains a powerful symbol of the natural world to some, but a curse to others; what will become of the Indian tiger?

In Iceland, a landscape is being submerged under 57 square kilometers of water to create a reservoir for the purpose of providing hydroelectric power to a nearby Alcoa aluminum smelter. An irreversible transformation of a pristine wilderness creates a lingering sense of loss and displacement.