Asian Studies

The time of the Samurai in ancient Japan was unique and violent; a life filled with tradition, honor, and legend. This is the story of their life and of a culture unfamiliar to most of the Western world.

Brave New Men is an extraordinary triple-portrait of charismatic, top-notch geneticists from the wildly different “gene cultures” of Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

Welcome to Alang , India, the site of a gargantuan scrap yard where oceangoing ships come to die. Forty thousand Indians live and work here, dismembering and scavenging the hulks of 400 vessels every year.

The Angry Skies is a compelling documentary which follows Blake Kerr-a New York based doctor, author, and human rights activist –as he travels to Cambodia to uncover the truths behind the rise of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and its legacy that remains today.

This documentary is about five women in China from different age, social and economic groups whose lives reflect the lives of many women all over China today.

Chronicles the efforts of international mediator Dr. Dudley Weeks to negotiate a peace process between warring factions of Indian (Sikh) and Pakistani (Muslim) youths in West London, showing how peacemaking skills utilized in South Africa and Bosnia can be applied at a community level.

Faced with widespread conditions of mass unemployment, poverty, urban crowding, and governmental crisis, more than a billion people in some 100 underdeveloped nations throughout the Third World have developed their own 'informal economy,' a parallel lifestyle operating on the margins of the society's formal economy and legal system, which provides them with a means of survival.

Examines the adoption of Chinese children by U.S. parents, profiling six diverse families who share their adoption stories, meeting a parent who worked inside an orphanage before ever planning to adopt, one who lived through China's Cultural Revolution, and another who has spent over twenty years researching adoption in China. It is a video about building families, as well as overcoming cultural myths and misunderstandings.

This video looks at South Korea's uncomfortable but growing acceptance of North Korea over a two-year period.

Offers a remarkable first-person account of the life of Lian Shengde, who was born during the Cultural Revolution in China, a time, as he says, "when millions of the people were organized by the Chinese Communist Party and its leader Chairman Mao to fight and kill each other.

This documentary portrays the lives of motorcycle taxi drivers who live and work out of a courtyard in a working-class neighborhood of Bangkok.

Examines UN efforts to encourage governments to develop policies supporting sustainable development and the improvement of the quality of people's lives without destroying natural resources.

Examines the impact of Islamization on women in Pakistan, revealing the oppression and injustice which has led Pakistani women to the forefront of the political struggle for equal rights.

Examines the extensive damage to the Vietnamese environment and people by the war, including the bombing which cratered the landscape and left thousands of unexploded bombs, and the use of defoliants such as Agent Orange which devastated the country's eco-system and are now resulting in cancer and deformed births among the populace.

Examines the plight of Filipino peasants who have been forced to flee their homes as a result of the Aquino government's military offensive against rebels of the New People's Army, with the evacuees facing an uncertain future in crowded, makeshift camps.

Profiles some of the key women involved in the grassroots organizing of the `People's Power' revolution in the Philippines which brought down Ferdinand Marcos and swept Corazon Aquino to power in 1989.

Filmed on location in the People's Republic of China under clandestine conditions, this documentary re-creates the remarkable experience of student leader Zhang Boli after his flight from Beijing in the repressive aftermath of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1989.

An inside look at the last generation of Vietnamese to remember the horrors of the Vietnam War and the first to hope for an end to the country's isolation by increasing trade and communication with the West.

When photographer Elaine Briere visited Portuguese East Timor in 1974, she found a highly developed, centuries-old culture with a refined aesthetic and social sensibility. Her photos would become the last record of a people about to face virtual annihilation, because, when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the world looked the other way.

Blending archival footage and contemporary interviews, this documentary chronicles the true story of the Chinese invasion and brutal occupation of Tibet, a country where hopes for democracy and religious freedom are routinely punished by imprisonment and torture, a continuing tragedy which the Chinese government bars international human rights groups from investigating.