The best of VOD

A Country of Resistance

Riace, Calabria. After 20 years of harmony, this village, which had made welcoming migrants its future, became the target of the populist wave consuming Italy. The venom has spread and Domenico Lucano, its mayor, is the object of a cabal and forced into exile. After months of painstaking destruction, Riace faces a dilemma: resist or disappear.

Maël et la révolution

Nothing predisposed 17-year-old Maël, a working-class kid raised on the 24 Hours of Le Mans, to become involved in climate activism. At the AgroCampus de la Germinière in the Sarthe region, where he is preparing a professional horticultural baccalaureate, he faces peers who don’t share his convictions—and are sometimes fiercely opposed to them. As a budding revolutionary, whether at protests or...

K-Family Affairs

Filmmaker Arum Nam's parents are part of the proud 386 generation, which played a significant role in achieving democratization in South Korea. Eager to pass on a better world to Arum, her father became a public servant, and her mother, a feminist activist. But Arum’s perspective shifts at 18 with the Sewol ferry disaster. Also reflecting on events like #MeToo and impeachment, Arum ponders her ...

Tonratun: The Armenian History told by women

In an Armenian village, five women from different generations tell their stories and discuss life and war as they prepare _lavash_. This fine bread whose dough is simply made from flour, wheat and water is an Armenian tradition – and since 2014 it has been inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It's in the _tonratun_ (the bakehouse), devoted e...

14 paintings

The Chinese village of Dafen was once a place where thousands of professional painters made reproductions of Western masterpieces. At the government’s instigation, these artists now paint their own original works. Their paintings hang all over China, in a wide variety of settings, from hospitals to museums, and from offices and commercial buildings to outdoor public locations.

Fausto

On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literatu...