In the 21st century, many ancestral beliefs are struggling to survive in a hostile, fast-changing world. In southeast Ivory Coast, some Akan communities still contact the spirits through Komians or animistic priests who go into a trance and are possessed by the spirits of the Forest and the Waters. Jean Marie Addiaffi (1941-1999), a writer and intellectual from Ivory Coast, fought to conserve the Akans' oral literature, myths and legends, and the traditional knowledge and uses of plants. In Return to the Land of Souls, Yéo Douley, a disciple of Jean Marie Addiaffi, sets out on a journey to visit his master's grave and carry out a ritual libation. On his travels, he attends the initiation rites of three people chosen by the spirits and witnesses one of them proclaimed as the new Komian, or high animistic priest.

At first glance, SecondLife appears to be a videogame, but it is more than that: it is a virtual world. Over a million people are registered inhabitants of this place, where they can meet, chat, walk together... In The Cave and The Double, José Saramago had written about the importance of reality and human beings' eagerness to find places to which they can escape. Here, the Portuguese intellectual reflects on SecondLife on radiocable.com

Nondualism is the philosophical, spiritual and scientific idea of non-separation and of intrinsic and basic unity. Science and Nonduality is a journey, an exploration of the nature of consciousness, the essence of life that everything flows from and into which everything eventually merges.

An hour north of Dublin, by the seaside, there is a bizarre-looking collection of grey cement buildings with brightly painted doors, and rusting fairground rides. This is Mosney - Ireland's Coney Island. A former Butlins holiday camp, Mosney was once a world fully equipped for entertainment, with arcades, fairground rides, holiday chalets. It was a place where Irish families would escape the daily grind of work in order to relax, to dance, enjoy themselves.

Traditionally considered to be a postmodern city, Dubai is actually a confrontation between two ways of life. The most densely populated part of the city lives in what could be considered a “modern” architecture and society. The other part, the one that is better known, is based on the postmodern philosophy that Jeremy Rifkin has described so well. SelfFiction reveals these contrasts.

Short Cut to Nirvana is a film about the Kumbh Mela, the biggest gathering of people in the history of humanity – although few in the West have ever heard of it. More than 70 million pilgrims attend this spiritual festival which has been held every twelve years near Allahabad, India, for over two millennia.

One of the funeral rites commonly practiced in Tibet is the Sky Burial, an ancient tradition that reveals a profound respect for nature and understanding of life. The Sky Burial ritual is known "jha-tor", which means the giving of alms to birds. The bodies of the dead are offered to vultures in a gesture of kindness towards living beings... a final act of generosity. We witness this funeral ritual from the Drigung Monastery in northern Tibet. To the Tibetans, merging with the sky after death is a holy event that replaces the sufferings of this world with peace.

In one of the least populated regions of the world, a few men lead lives in total solitude, spending months and months alone. This documentary tells the story of three of these men. Isolated from the world for different reasons, they survive in a suspended time of their own in one of the harshest environments of the world.

This documentary produced in 1973 is a remarkable document on traditional Islamic culture in Afghanistan before the country met with the disasters of ideological struggles and civil war. To a Muslim sensibility, its importance goes much further. It is an objective and respectful testimony to the profound, essential aspects of the spiritual culture of Islam, captured by a Western filmmaker.