Global Voices

Every spring, millions of migrant factory workers in China attempt to return to their rural home villages by train. It is an epic spectacle that tells us much about China, a country discarding traditional ways as it hurtles towards modernity and global economic dominance. Last Train Home draws us into the fractured lives of a single migrant family caught up in this desperate annual migration.

Shot over six years, Oil & Water is the true story of two boys coming of age in the middle of one of the world’s worst toxic disasters. Hugo fights for the survival of his Amazonian tribe, while David attempts to revolutionize the oil industry. Will David clean up one of the world’s dirtiest industries?

In Morocco, women are being employed as religious leaders — called Morchidat — for the first time, offering advice and guidance in mosques, schools, prisons, and orphanages around the country. Casablanca Calling follows three of these exceptional women as they teach an Islam based on tolerance, compassion, and equality, and try to change people’s perceptions of its true teachings.

Zarqa, Jordan, is a rundown, industrial metropolis and birthplace of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, mastermind of al Qaeda operations in Iraq who was killed by American forces. Recycle reveals distinct yet intertwined stories of three native sons of Zarqa, mainly Abu Ammar, who has to choose between collecting recycling to support his family, being a jihadist, or going abroad to make money.

He is not their uncle, and his name is not Joe. But to the old ladies of An-dong, a rural community in southeastern Korea, Uncle Joe is almost the only contact they have with the modern world. With younger generations leaving for school or higher paying jobs in the cities, the elderly are left behind. Wooyoung Choi’s film shows how Joe serves these communities with humor and attention.

No one gets to Antarctica by accident. For the few scientific teams who brave this beautiful and silent landscape, it feels like another planet. Their discoveries yield secrets about the Earth’s past and future, and prompt questions about our place in the world. Ice People captures the experience of vastness and claustrophobia, of excitement and waiting, and of a life set to nature’s rhythm.

Using exclusive 8mm footage and rare television archival clips, an Israeli filmmaker explores his family’s dramatic experiences in Iran in the late ‘70s. Before the Revolution tracks one of the first great modern first popular uprisings in the Middle East through the people who experienced it firsthand without realizing its historic import or its ongoing consequences.

This video extra from the documentary Before the Revolution explores the story of the rare archival footage that was gathered for the film. Director Dan Shadur found visual inspiration for the documentary from both precious photo albums of his family and startling home movies shot by both his parents and other Israelis living in Iran before the revolution in 1979.

This video extra from the documentary Diamond in the Dunes goes behind the scenes of this film shot in China’s Xinjiang Province. Filmmaker Christopher Rufo and producer Keith Ochwat talk about the tense ethnic relations in this unique region and what drew them to the story of how baseball brought together two typically segregated groups.

China’s Xinjiang Province is a region harshly divided between an indigenous Muslim minority and the ruling Han Chinese. Diamond in the Dunes follows Parhat Ablat, a 20-year-old Uyghur shepherd, as he attends the region’s racially segregated Xinjiang University and forms an integrated baseball team. For Parhat, baseball is more than a game; it’s a vehicle for spiritual transformation.

Past and present collide as award-winning filmmaker Natalia Almada brings to life audio recordings she inherited about her controversial great-grandfather Plutarco Elias Calles, a revolutionary general who became Mexico’s president in 1924. Once called “El Jefe Maximo” (the foremost chief), he is more recently remembered as a dictator who ruled through puppet presidents until exiled in 1936.

My So-Called Enemy follows six Palestinian and Israeli teenage girls committed to justice and mutual understanding after participating in a women’s leadership program. Emmy Award-winning director Lisa Gossels documents how the young women’s transformative experience of knowing their “enemies” as human beings while in the USA meets with the realities of their lives back in the Middle East.

My Perestroika follows five ordinary Russians living in extraordinary times — from their structured Soviet childhood, to the collapse of the Soviet Union during their teenage years, to the constantly shifting political landscape in the new Russia. Together, these childhood classmates paint a complex picture of the dreams and disillusionments of those raised behind the Iron Curtain.

In this video extra from the documentary The Mosuo Sisters, one of the sisters — Juma — visits her Tibetan boyfriend’s family back home. She finds herself caught between his parents’ wishes (in a culture where sons frequently live at home with their family and where daughters live with their mothers) and those of her own family’s.

Two spirited daughters from China's last remaining matrilineal ethnic minority lose the only jobs they've ever known. Determined to keep their family out of poverty, one sister sacrifices her dream of an education to farm, while the other tries her luck in the city, where rich Chinese businessmen, lecherous gangsters, Tibetan monks, and fledgling pop stars lead her on a precarious path.

The Oath is the story of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, and Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay Prison and the first man to face the controversial military tribunals. Filmed in Yemen and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the film captures a fateful encounter in 1996 set them on a journey that would lead to Osama bin Laden, 9/11, Guantanamo Bay Prison, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Filmed before, during, and after the Egyptian revolution, Before the Spring, After the Fall is the story of remarkable young people seeking the freedom to define themselves. In 2008, a film crew began documenting a group of young heavy metal musicians in Egypt. Oppressed by massive social forces beyond their control, the kids saw music as their outlet. Then everything burst wide open.

Meet three young boxers — two men and one woman — from Bukom, Ghana, a unique town with a unique boxing culture. The Fighting Spirit follows their extraordinary journeys to triumph and defeat, in and out of the glittering prizefighting rings of Europe and America, and intimately portrays what home, culture, love, and loyalty mean to modern Africans.

May 2009: Rodrigo Rosenberg, a wealthy Guatemalan lawyer, went cycling, and was murdered. Even more extraordinary: He’d left behind a video on YouTube accusing the president of his murder. For a government on public trial, a special prosecutor began an investigation: a journey into Rosenberg's soul and Guatemala's hell that, after multiple twists and turns, reached a stunning conclusion.

In the 1960s, a South Korean orphanage switched the identities of two orphans when an American family adopted one of them. Filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem goes on a quest to search for her “double” — a girl named Cha Jung Hee — in an attempt to resolve a case of mistaken identity, in the process exploring the complexities of international transracial adoptions.