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Churning The Sea Of Time
One of the mythic journeys of our time, through the exquisite, complicated, surprising terrain of Vietnam and Cambodia to the great ruins at Angkor - the magnificent Khmer temples being painstakingly restored deep in the Cambodian jungle. It is a high definition odyssey up a river far distanced in time from the corridor into the heart of darkness portrayed in Francis Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."
Director Les Guthman travels by boat up the Mekong Delta, along the river whose raw beauty and power were celebrated by Marguerite Duras in the 1920s. But in our time it became known as "the river of evil memory" as it coursed through Southeast Asia in the second half of the 20th Century.
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Pico Iyer, Essay, "Why We Travel"
"We travel to lose ourselves - and we travel next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. And we travel, in essence to slow time down and get taken in, and to fall in love once more."Share Your Own Stories
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'Darfur Now' is a story of hope in the midst of one of humanity's darkest hours - a call to action for people everywhere to end the catastrophe unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. In this documentary, the struggles and achievements of six different individuals from inside Darfur and around the world bring to light the tragedy in Sudan and show how the actions of one person can make a difference to millions.
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'Angels in the Dust' is the story of a courageous, self-sacrificing, fiercely loving woman who chooses a spiritual path over a material one; it tells of the life-changing power of one compassionate heart. For a nation overwhelmed by an epidemic of HIV/AIDS, orphans, rape, violence, and Apartheid's legacy of social and political unrest, the film offers a clear pathway of hope and a replicable paradigm for the future.
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On his first weekend back after serving in Iraq, Mike Deerfield (Jonathan Tucker) goes missing and is reported AWOL. When Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), a former military MP and his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) get the phone call with the disturbing news, Hank sets out to search for their son. Local police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) reluctantly helps him in his search and soon finds herself in a fight with the military brass. When the truth about Mike's time in Iraq finally begins to emerge, Hank's entire world is challenged and he's forced to reevaluate long-held beliefs to solve the mystery behind his son's disappearance.
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"I can still hear him hollering and coaching.."
-- William Haley (L) and his brother Glen remember their father, Joseph Howard Haley, founder of Jackie Robinson West Little League in Chicago. More
'Fears of Your Life', by Michael Bernard Loggins, read by Tom Wright
What are you afraid of? Michael's afraid of exactly 183 things. He counted. More
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John Stubbs, World Monuments Fund
"On my first trip to Angkor in 1991, it was very edgy. no one from the West had really been here to see what the situation was. We worried that the place had been leveled by the Khmer Rouge. No one knew."
John Sanday, World Monuments Fund
"When we arrived I'll never forget walking through [the temple ruin of] Preah Khan. I mean, Preah Khan was totally covered in the jungle. The French had left 20 years prior to our arrival. And we came into Preah Khan wandering through very narrow pathways. There were two major concerns: One was obviously landmines. And the other was people with guns. "
Kin-Po Thai, Cambodian Expert on Angkor
"The four faces of the towers at Bayon according to Mahayana Buddhism mean loving kindness, sympathy, compassion, equality. So King Jayavarman VII treated the people in an equal way. Probably, he broke the caste system in Angkor."
Simone Kaufmann, Swiss Businesswoman based in SE Asia
"How can I understand their way of thinking and the way, above all, the Cambodians tell you their stories, which are mostly very cruel, very terrible stories, still with a smile on their lips? That's very hard to understand at first. But you have to learn that actually with a smile, they just try to hide their real feelings. And if you understand that, you can more and more understand the people as well."
Milton Osbourne, Author, 'The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future'
"Phnom Penh was a city that many thought was the most attractive in the whole of SE asia. The streets were lined with Frangipani trees in a nostalgic effort by the French to recall their homeland, an echo of Provence."
John Sanday, World Monuments Fund
"The Khmers were basically carpenters. all their domestic structures were made of wood. And then slowly, slowly, they began to understand the value of stone as a building material. They took the concept of design and decoration from south India, or from the Indian architectural style, and it?s rather like taking the ball and running with it, because they basically disobeyed all the rules of stone structures -- but they produced these really quite remarkable structures as a result."