Global Voices: Season 1

The famous fighting monks of China’s ancient Shaolin Temple have seen a resurgence in recent years – aided in part by popular movies and music – that has taken them throughout the world. The documentary Shaolin Ulysses follows the odyssey of a group of five Shaolin kungfu monks who came as immigrants to America during the 1990s. Their stories are as individual and varied as they are. All were Buddhist monks and kungfu stars at the famous Shaolin Monastery – the birthplace of Zen Buddhism and kungfu – but each has made a pilgrimage to America in search of something different. From Vegas shows to Olympic dreams to temples in Flushing, Queens, the film explores the cultural interface of Shaolin kungfu, Zen Buddhism, and America. Obliquely it poses the question, will Shaolin change America, or will America change Shaolin?

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

The child sex trade is a highly organized syndicate that rivals the drug trade in profitability. The industry has formed a pipeline which starts in the villages of Nepal and feeds a continuous supply of girls to brothels in Bombay’s nightmarish red-light district, where over 200,000 young women and children are held in captivity. Recruiters capture the girls, smugglers transport them, brothel owners enslave them, corrupt police betray them, and men rape and infect them. Every person in the chain profits except for the girls, who pay the price with their lives: 80 percent become infected with HIV. THE DAY MY GOD DIED presents the stories of young girls whose lives have been shattered by the child sex trade. The film weaves the stories of children, and their stolen hopes and dreams, into an unforgettable examination of the growing plague of child sex slavery. These girls describe the day they were abducted from their village and sold into sexual servitude as, “The Day My God Died.”

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

T-SHIRT TRAVELS takes us on a journey from our local charity bin to the remote fishing villages of Southern Africa where our donations are put to use. Focusing on Zambia, this documentary investigates the secondhand clothes business and seeks to understand and illuminate the growing inequalities between the North and the South. The film explores how a continent rich with natural resources and human potential has become the dumping ground for our old clothes and other discarded goods, and uncovers an enduring spirit and resilience to survive. We meet Luka, who at 19 years old must support his family by selling and trading clothes in remote western Zambia. Through his story we see how our old clothes constitute the backbone of Zambia’s growing informal economy and provide a livelihood for many. The film gives voice to Africans and allows them to explain the challenges they face in a global economy, while also exploring the underlying reasons why so many Africans remain in poverty.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

How could the most important artifact of the last half century completely disappear? A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, virtually nothing of the concrete structure has been left. Gone is the barrier between East and West, Communism and Capitalism, but not the conflict. This documentary searches for the Wall's traces and the psychological scars upon those who lived in its shadow. The filmmakers encounter a psychotherapist with a backload of patients still too frightened to even cross into the West, a Reverend who saves the only intact section of the Wall remaining in Berlin, a Stasi Captain who now plays himself on a set with a styrofoam "Wall" in a feature film, and English homeopaths who prescribe pulverized Berlin Wall for depression, oppression and split personality. AFTER THE FALL is a portrait of a city, exquisitely filmed, recounting the story and disappearance of the most absurd of constructions: the Berlin Wall.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

This is Israeli filmmaker David Fisher’s chronicle of his attempt to solve a personal mystery and bring a troubled family together. He makes use of a portable camera, a skillful crew and especially his four reluctant brothers to undertake an emotionally challenging search to find a long lost sister. In a creative documentary style with revealing moments of grief and humor, Fisher leads his brothers to uncover the dark secrets of the past, going back 50 years when the state of Israel has just been created and unlawful deeds and wrongdoing were part of its birth pains. Their sister’s disappearance from the hospital two days after her birth was kept a family secret for years. Throughout her life, their mother felt the baby girl had been abducted, but she did not disclose her innermost feelings and fears. In the course of the search, the camera uncovers a unique and intimate but troubled family fighting for its existence.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

FATHER ROY follows the fight against the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) from the gates of Fort Benning to the halls of congress. Susan Sarandon narrates this revealing account of the controversial Father Roy Bourgeois and his struggles against the SOA. A Vietnam vet, former missionary and leading grassroots activist, Father Roy’s interest in human rights was spurred by the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador. He focused his aim on the SOA when it was revealed that those responsible for Romero’s death—and hundreds of other atrocities across the region—had trained at the school. According to one congressman, the SOA has "the nefarious distinction of being the place in the United States where the worst human rights abusers in the Western Hemisphere come to learn military tactics”—tactics that many claimed included the use of torture. FATHER ROY shows how one person, risking his own life and freedom, can ultimately use the system to make a difference.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English