American Vice-President Dick Cheney has walked the corridors of world power for three decades. Cheney’s remarkable life story involves the relentless accumulation of power in every form. Elected for a second term, he continues to be one of the most powerful and well-connected men in the world. The fifth estate will show how he accomplished this, what it involved in terms of costs for others and wh
In May 2007, Odyssey announced the discovery of the "Black Swan," a Colonial period site located in the Atlantic Ocean. Yielding over 500,000 silver coins weighing more than 17 tons, hundreds of gold coins, worked gold, and other artifacts, it is believed that this recovery constitutes the largest collection of coins ever excavated from a deep-ocean site. Odyssey Marine Exploration has completed
Google’s meteoric rise to internet stardom is one of the great business sagas of our time. The sons of college professors, Larry Page and Sergey Brin – two brainy Stanford University grad students who founded the company – say their goal was to make the entire world’s information searchable and instantly accessible. At last count, they were answering 200 million queries a day. As with the inventio
Sun Ra was born on the planet Saturn some time ago. The best accounts agree that he emerged on Earth as Herman Blount, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, although Sun Ra himself always denied that Blount was his surname. He returned to Saturn in 1993 after creating a stunningly variegated and beautiful assemblage of earthly and interplanetary music, most notably with his fervently loyal Arkestra
Chronos is an abstract film made in 1985 and directed by Ron Fricke, created with custom-built time-lapse cameras. Chronos has no actors or dialog. The soundtrack consists of a single continuous piece by composer Michael Stearns. Filmed in dozens of locations on five continents, the film relates to the concept of time passing on different scales — the bulk of the film covers the history of civiliz
Powaqqatsi, or Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, is the 1988 sequel to the experimental 1982 documentary film Koyaanisqatsi, by Godfrey Reggio. It is the second film in the Qatsi trilogy.Powaqqatsi is a Hopi word meaning “parasitic way of life” or “life in transition” . While Koyaanisqatsi focused on modern life in industrial countries, Powaqqatsi, which similarly has no dialogue, focuses more
A short documentary made about the survivors of the earthquake and tsunami that occurred in Japan in March 2011."We visited a town on the east coast called Ishinomaki, part of which was completely erased by the tsunami. Made up of interviews with survivors, Then and Now lets the survivors tell us about their experiences during the event and the progress of the recovery that has been taking pla
Why is the lifestyle of consumerism a source of such rage today? How come the privilege of buying goods does not automatically lead to happiness? Why all this emptiness despite our wealth?Erik Gandini’s approach through Surplus is to portray this issue from an emotional rather than a factual perspective.Shot in the US, India, China, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Canada and Cuba during three year
Cataplexy is a sudden and transient episode of loss of muscle tone, often triggered by emotions. It is a rare disease, but affects roughly 70% of people who have narcolepsy. Cataplexy can also be present as a side effect of SSRI Discontinuation Syndrome.Cataplexy manifests itself as muscular weakness which may range from a barely perceptible slackening of the facial muscles to the dropping of th