Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
to
to
Exclude
Only includes titles with the selected topics
to
In minutes
to
1-2 of 2
- Filmed with unprecedented access to the activities of both pickpockets and police, "Journals of a Wily School" takes viewers inside the world of the petty thieves who ply their trade on the streets of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), and the detectives who try to control them. Azad, the eldest of five children, is 22 years old and lives with his family. A brilliant young man, his father encourages him to enter the family business-wholesale fish trading. Yet Azad has chosen a different path, and becomes a skilled pickpocket at an early age. Day after day he practices his profession across the length and breadth of the crowded streets, lightening the loads of unsuspecting passengers on sweltering city buses. And just like any other dedicated artist, Azad passionately hones his skills under the tutelage of a master, taking classes at the local school for pickpockets. The master of the wily school teaches students the pilfering arts, such as how to lift a coin from the bottom of a water bucket with nary a ripple on the surface. He also shows the skills of a surgeon as he precision-cuts a piece of cloth laid on a melon with a razor blade and without ever piercing the skin of the fruit. Azad is successful and skilled, yet even he comes under scrutiny from the watchful eyes of Police Detective Bidhan Saha. Once caught, Azad is offered a deal: go to jail or help the police catch other pickpockets. Given a second chance and the hope for respectability, what choice will Azad make? Collaboration or incarceration proves a difficult choice for Azad, and the lure of the city streets is powerful.
- Committing oneself to saving vultures may not be everyone's idea of a life vocation. But for 33-year-old Arnab Basu, based India's state of Assam, it is a serious mission with global health ramifications. Over the last 10 years, the population of vultures in India and Pakistan has reduced by 95 per cent - they are now at risk of extinction. Vultures have an important ecological role in the Asian environment, where they have been relied upon for millennia to clean up and remove dead livestock and even human corpses. The decline in vultures is creating serious health concerns. The carcasses of dead animals, rather than being "tidied up" by scavenging vultures, now tend to lie rotting. The rotting carrion supports booming populations of feral dogs, which in turn spread rabies. India already has the world's highest rate of rabies. Reports also suggest human anthrax in India may be linked to the decline of vultures. Medical experts in India confirm these diseases have spread to neighbouring countries and may even spread westward into the Middle East and Europe. This film follows Arnab Basu as he campaigns for a ban on those livestock drugs which, consumed by vultures when they eat a carcass, have been blamed for the drastic fall in the vulture population.