Orem Library

In many Tibetan communities, the loss of Tibetan language has reached a crisis level. An elder generation is passing away, leaving behind fewer young Tibetans who can understand their own native language. The trend is most accelerated in villages at the outer edges of the Tibetan cultural sphere, where Chinese has become the dominant language of business and education. Hualong County, whose name translates to "Valley of the Heroes", is one such community....

When Peter Gwasdauskis, a child with Down syndrome, was mainstreamed into a public school, he had a lot to learn about dealing with differencesand so did his classmates. Filmed over the course of the third-grade school year, this 1992 Academy Award-winning documentary vividly captures Peters achievements and frustrations as he makes a place for himself among his peers. The program features interviews with Peters parents, teachers, fellow students,...

As a society we seem to alternate between worship of and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, as a generation of children have grown up with a smart phone in hand, connected to the digital world 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Public discourse seems to revolve around ‘grooming’ and ‘privacy’, two issues that embody the fears and concerns of adults. What is less discussed is what it means to always be on, never alone, and bombarded...

"Ousmane Sembène ... made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot--about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally--into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set...

This film follows the lives of the people who live in a slum, built in a garbage dump. A mentally disabled boy is obsessed with streetcars, driving an imaginary streetcar around, chanting "Dodes'ka-den! Dodes'ka-den!"--Mimicking the sound of the wheels. Some of the neighbors are a young woman living with her lecherous uncle; a pair of friends who get drunk and swap wives; a possibly mentally ill beggar and his son who live in a deserted car; and a...

A series of ten short films that come together to celebrate the one hundred years since the Mexican revolution. A powerful and multifaceted compilation that expresses the rich culture and customs of contemporary Mexican society. Stories include the journey of a young Mexican-American woman bringing back her father's body to Mexico for burial, a tuba player living in a small village, children rescuing a priest that they find hanging upside down in...

Moussa Sene Absa's latest work pushes the formal boundaries of African cinema to explore the complex interplay of history and psychology in contemporary Africa. Intensely personal and at the same time deeply political, Ainsi meurent les anges combines the elegiac lyricism of his Ça twiste à Poponguine with the acerbic social critique of Tableau Ferraille. What is perhaps most surprising is that this creative freedom was won precisely by working...

Made for the United Nations, this documentary chronicles the logging damage that has taken place in the forests of Finnish Lapland over the past 50 years. Home to the indigenous Saami peoples, these Northern old growth forests are essential to Saami reindeer herding, a traditional way of life that the Saami hope to continue into future generations. Population growth in Finland has created economic pressure - prompting migration to the Saami lands...

Investigate some of today's most exciting advances in scientific research. The science of picky eaters: Neil deGrasse Tyson sets out to find out more about the science of taste, and discovers you can't understand taste without also getting into smell. Just when he thinks he's got it, HHMI scientist Bob Margolskee throws him a curve ball: taste receptors are turning up in parts of the body no one ever imagined finding them! Smart sea lions & talking...

"In the early decades of cinema, some of the most innovative and celebrated filmmakers in America were women. Alice Guy-Blaché helped establish the basics of cinematic language, while others boldly continued its development : slapstick queen Mabel Normand (who taught Charlie Chaplin the craft of directing), action star Grace Cunard, and LGBTQ icon Alla Nazimova. Unafraid of controversy, filmmakers such as Lois Weber and Dorothy Davenport Reid tackled...