Movies Like Balance of the Five Elements

A King Like Me

2024

Follows members of the Zulu Club, New Orleans’ first Black Mardi Gras, as they work to bring the Zulu parade back to the streets for Mardi Gras Day 2022, in the face of a global pandemic, hurricane Ida and the loss of members due to COVID and gun violence.

Amazing Marriage Customs

1987

Shows special features of various Chinese ethnic marriage customs.

Baraka

1992

A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life.

Babylone, la cité des merveilles

2021

A Journey

2017

A cinematic journey through the world. Non-verbal.

The Drunkmen’s Marseillaise

2024

In the summer of 1961, a group of young Italian anthropologists made a clandestine journey through Spain, in order to record popular songs that supported anti-Franco resistance. As a result of their work, they were prosecuted and their recordings were censored. Sixty years later, and guided by Emilio Jona, aged 92, the last living member of that group of travellers, we recover the unpublished recordings and reconstruct the journey, today, across an emotional and political landscape, regaining historical memories through these songs, as relevant today as they were then.

Bruce Lee, the Legend

1984

The Official Golden Harvest tribute to the Master of the Martial Arts Film, Bruce Lee.

13th

2016

An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.

The Last Igloo

2019

Documentary that follows a lone Inuit as he hunts, fishes and constructs an igloo, a way of life threatened by climate change.

Modern Life

2008

For ten years, Raymond Depardon has followed the lives of farmer living in the mountain ranges. He allows us to enter their farms with astounding naturalness. This moving film speaks, with great serenity, of our roots and of the future of the people who work on the land. This the last part of Depardon's triptych "Profils paysans" about what it is like to be a farmer today in an isolated highland area in France. "La vie moderne" examines what has become of the persons he has followed for ten years, while featuring younger people who try to farm or raise cattle or poultry, come hell or high water.

The Making of a Japanese

2024

Intimately following 1st and 6th graders at a public elementary school in Tokyo, we observe kids learning the traits necessary to become part of Japanese society.

The Last of the Sea Women

2024

On the shores of Jeju Island, a fierce group of South Korean divers fight to save their vanishing culture from looming threats.

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

2012

A journey into the labyrinthine heart of ideology, which shapes and justifies both collective and personal beliefs and practices: with an infectious zeal and voracious appetite for popular culture, Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek analyzes several of the most important films in the history of cinema to explain how cinematic narrative helps to reinforce prevailing ethics and political ideas.

Up the Yangtze

2007

At the edge of the Yangtze River, not far from the Three Gorges Dam, young men and women take up employment on a cruise ship, where they confront rising waters and a radically changing China.

Chasing the Equinox

2019

The ancients hid the secrets of their incredible knowledge of astronomy in their temples and palaces, built to align with the sun, on the same day, all over the world. Revealing our species' obsession with the sun, across thousands of years and every continent, this is architectural magic on a cosmic scale.

Purgatory

1999

An outlaw band flees a posse and rides into Refuge, a small town where no one carries a gun, drinks, or swears. The town is actually Purgatory, and the peaceful inhabitants are all famous dead outlaws and criminals such as Doc Holiday and Wild Bill Hickok who must redeem themselves before gaining admittance to Heaven... or screw up and go to Hell.

The Echo

2024

In the remote village of El Echo that exists outside of time, the children care for the sheep and their elders. While the frost and drought punish the land, they learn to understand death, illness and love with each act, word and silence of their parents. A story about the echo of what clings to the soul, about the certainty of shelter provided by those around us, about rebellion and vertigo in the face of life. About growing up.

Profils paysans : le quotidien

2005

Second documentary of a trilogy produced on the long term (together with Profils paysans: l'approche (2001) and Profils paysans: La vie moderne (2008)), showing the simple lives of farmers in contemporary Southern France.