Maa Tere Manalen is the result of Tere Recaren's two trips to Mali. It all began the day the artist discovers that in Mali, her name means something like “destiny.” So Recarens sets off to Africa to explore all the possible meanings of her name for the Bamanan, the country's most numerous ethnic group. Maa Tere Manalen (someone with a lighted Tere) took shape during her second visit. After her trip to Estonia, where she had discovered that “Tere” meant “good day,” she embarks on a similar exploration avoiding the classic tourist trip. Faithful to her habits, she promotes other kinds of exchanges and experiences; so in Mali she works in a textile factory where she designs and produces her own fabric with prints of drawings and phrases related to her name. Once this was done, she cuts it up and swaps it for photos of everybody who has helped her in some way, filming the whole process. The work draws attention to the gift itself, and the artist's constant availability. Recarens “builds” a room, which functions as a space in which to exhibit her work: she fills it with fabric that she finds or swaps things for, with motifs that refer to public or private moments, ideal for talking about different kinds of families. A space that is halfway between aesthetic and functional, where Recarens displays her own images.

The social treatment of poverty is progressively replaced by repression. The poor, sometimes immigrant, being a victim to start with, becomes a potential criminal. The director observes the social violence and the stigmatisation which keep a whole social class in oblivion. He discovers, far remote from EU's democracy, the reality and the functioning of a social apartheid.

Young women in St. Petersburg are going back to school. They want to learn how to seduce, marry and control men. They try to find a path to stability, happiness and prosperity. They want to learn how to be a successful bitch. Bitch Academy is a tragicomic documentary of early Russian capitalism, which determines the dreams and intimacies of its young generations, in at atmosphere of fear and hope.

This video brings us the voices and minds of Farmers from Cuzco, Peru. They explain what school they want for their children, what education is needed for life to flourish and for the strength of ancestral times to be carried over to new generations. Over the past decade the Nucleus for Andean Cultural Affirmation CEPROSI has been working in Cusco with groups of rural teachers and parents in order to attain an understanding of education and cultural diversity. The reflections they make on the way in which Andean children learn of both worlds, western and Andean, lead them to unexpected conclusions that deserve to be listened to and taken into account.

A fragmented road trip through Britain on the peripheries. Down empty roads, off in the wilderness, a few lone stragglers. My first stop, geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, talking about the Earth in one-hundred millions years time.“What would be left of human action, human traces, human constructions, human buildings and the wider ripple effects of humans after that length of time… assuming that humans disappear in the geologically near future.”

In the 1960s and 1970s thousands of hippies journeyed east to India in search of enlightenment. Indian peasants assumed that a severe drought in the West was the reason for their migration. India's holy men saw it as a search for spirituality. Most moved back to their home countries after a few months or years while others stayed for good. Hippie Masala is a portrait of Western ex-patriates: Robert from Holland, a gifted painter, lives with jos wife and young children. Meera, a hermit, seeks enlightenment on her own, while Cesare, an Italian expatriate, strives for spiritual liberation through back-breaking yoga. Hanspeter, a man originally from Switzerland, runs a small farm in the Himalayas. Erica and Gillian, South African twins, sew hippie handicrafts by day and party tirelessly at night...

Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries is a series of video recordings which relate personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East. In these works, which play upon chance and co-incidence, the hotel room is employed as a 'found' film set, where the architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker's small adventures are linked to major world events. Works in the series include Frozen War (Ireland, 2001), Museum Piece (Germany, 2004), Throwing Stones (Switzerland, 2004), B & B (England, 2005), Pyramids/Skunk (The Netherlands 2006/7), Dirty Pictures (Palestine 2007) and Six Years Later (Ireland 2007).

Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan Buddhist monk since childhood, was arrested by the Chinese communist army in 1959. He spent the next 33 years in prison for the “crimes” of demonstrating peacefully and refusing to falsely denounce his teacher as an Indian spy. He was tortured, starved and forced to perform hard labor. He watched his nation and culture destroyed, his teachers, friends and family displaced, jailed or killed by the Chinese occupiers. Despite this, he remained unbroken, keeping the flame of his spirit ablaze.

Concrete Coast is about the social, cultural and environmental effects of the last section of un-urbanized Spanish Mediterranean coast being built up for residential tourism in the Region of Murcia. Agriculture is disappearing along this 230 km stretch of coastline and being replaced by 60 golf courses, marinas, freeways and new large-scale planned communities with 1,000,000 residences, mainly for sunseeking British retirees who are set to double the population of Murcia within few years. The impacts of these large-scale economic and political forces are illustrated by a Spanish farming family having their land expropriated and a retired British couple embarking on their new life in a country where they do not even speak the language. How will all of this change the culture of the region? Will the populations integrate? Will these and other Spanish farmers have to emigrate?

Like a puzzle, this film works on different elements: a guided tour in the waste lands of three cities (Brussels, Hamburg, Roma), a documentary about stray cats and the people who food it, some choreography of daily gesture, a question about cartography (and the common using of space), like a “wink” about the human Order and Chaos... and a statement on the present difficulties of the Inutility!