The film documents the English heavy metal band Black Sabbath's final show of their farewell concert tour, The End Tour. The performance was held at the Genting Arena in Birmingham, England, hometown of the band's founding members: vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward. Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler performed this final concert with session drummer Tommy Clufetos in place of Ward, as well as Adam Wakeman on keyboards and guitar. The concert opens with a performance of the song 'Black Sabbath'. The film goes on to show the band performing 'Fairies Wear Boots', 'Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes', 'Into the Void', 'Snowblind', 'War Pigs', 'Hand of Doom', 'Iron Man', and 'Children of the Grave'; at the end of the setlist, the band performs the song 'Paranoid' as an encore. Interspersed with the final concert are interviews with Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler, in which they talk about their careers and past drug addictions. Additionally, Iommi's 2012 lymphoma diagnosis, which impacted the band's 2012–14 reunion tour and the recording of their 2013 album 13, is discussed. The film also features footage of 'The Angelic Sessions'—the band's final studio recordings, which took place in the days following the final show. Of these recordings, the film shows Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler performing 'The Wizard', 'Wicked World', and 'Changes'.
A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home: these scenes and others are woven into Cameraperson, a tapestry of footage collected over the twenty-five-year career of documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. Through a series of episodic juxtapositions, Johnson explores the relationships between image makers and their subjects, the tension between the objectivity and intervention of the camera, and the complex interaction of unfiltered reality and crafted narrative. A hybrid work that combines documentary, autobiography, and ethical inquiry, Cameraperson is both a moving glimpse into one filmmaker's personal journey and a thoughtful examination of what it means to train a camera on the world.
China's last empire, the Qing, lasted from 1644 to 1912. It began in violence and war as the Manchus swept down from the north, but invaders became emperors, with three generations of one family ruling the country. Among them, Michael Wood argues, was China's greatest emperor - Kangxi.
Under the Qing, China doubled in size to include Xinjiang in the far west, as well as Mongolia and Tibet, creating the essential shape of China today. The new dynasty tolerated a diversity of cultures and religions, including Islam. In Kaifeng, Michael visits a women's mosque with a female imam, a delightful scene that ends with laughter and selfies! The Qing also undertook huge cultural enterprises. At a traditional printing house where the wood blocks are hand-carved, we see how the Complete Tang Poems were reproduced - all 48,000 of them. We travel through the wintry countryside to a remote village where a hardy audience watch open-air opera in the snow and visit a painter's studio, and 'storytelling' houses in Yangzhou. In the 18th century, China was arguably the greatest economy in the world, and we get a fabulous sense of the rich culture that came with prosperity. But then came the clash with the British, in the first Opium War, when a British expedition destroyed the Qing navy and extracted territory and trading rights. We leave with a glimpse of the future. 'Every dynasty has risen and declined,' says Michael, 'and has needed new life to regenerate, and this time the catalyst was the British.' Among the ports China ceded was an almost uninhabited island, Hong Kong, one of today's greatest financial centres, and Shanghai, a small town then but now one of the greatest cities in world.
Between 1850 and 1950, three cataclysmic revolutions shook China to the core, but out of them, today's China emerged. The film begins in Canton with the meeting of a US missionary and a Chinese student. Inspired by the Christian story and calling himself God's second son, Hong unleashed the bloodiest war of the 19th century, the Taiping Rebellion. As imperial China weakened, foreign influence grew. Treaty ports expanded, bringing growth and wealth, trams, railways and western sensibilities. But this provoked another surge of violence, the Boxer Rebellion, an attack against the foreigners, which was crushed by those same foreigners, who extorted a huge indemnity - $60 billion in today's money. Then in 1912, the empire fell, and many groups contested China's future. In World War I, China sent 100,000 men to the western front, only to be humiliated at Versailles when German colonies in China were handed to Japan. Between the two world wars, the disparity between rich and poor, city and countryside increased. We visit Hong Kong's Peninsular Hotel in the jazz age and then follow Mao on the Long March to Yan'an, the heartland of revolution. World War II came to China two years earlier than it did in the west. Wood talks to a survivor of the Japanese massacre of Nanjing in 1937 and then charts the triumph of the communists, before ending the story with Mao's death and the boom time of the last 30 years. The series ends with the warmth of the Chinese family and, at Beijing's Altar of Heaven, a final haunting glimpse of eternal China.
A war story unlike any ever seen. A story of what happens when one ordinary man, Time magazine war correspondent Michael Ware, transplanted into the Middle East by the reverberations of 9/11, butts into history. Ware handpicked and given a shattering video tape by the most feared, most hated terrorists on the planet to announce his arrival of the world stage sets out on an epic journey into the deepest recesses of the conflict as he seeks answers. Answers that he thinks will lead him to the Truth.
The invasion of Iraq has ended, and the Americans are celebrating victory. The year is 2003. Alone and in secret one man, Abu Musab al Zarqawi is planning the real war. Step- by-step he lays out his plan in a letter to Osama bin Laden: the suicide truck bombings; the bloody horrors of the civil war; the televised beheadings. He carries out his grand design to transform the invasion into one of the most brutal conflicts our time and a catastrophe for the planet...and he does it all on camera. He gives the tape to Michael Ware. The tape sets our correspondent off on an epic voyage as he seeks answers. As he seeks what he thinks will be the Truth.
Syria Civil Defense (SCD), also known as the White Helmets, is a volunteer civil defense organization that operates in rebel-controlled Syria during the Syrian Civil War as a response to indiscriminate bombardment of civilian communities. This group of indomitable first responders risk their lives to rescue victims from the rubble.
The concert opens with a performance of the song 'Black Sabbath'. The film goes on to show the band performing 'Fairies Wear Boots', 'Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes', 'Into the Void', 'Snowblind', 'War Pigs', 'Hand of Doom', 'Iron Man', and 'Children of the Grave'; at the end of the setlist, the band performs the song 'Paranoid' as an encore.
Interspersed with the final concert are interviews with Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler, in which they talk about their careers and past drug addictions. Additionally, Iommi's 2012 lymphoma diagnosis, which impacted the band's 2012–14 reunion tour and the recording of their 2013 album 13, is discussed. The film also features footage of 'The Angelic Sessions'—the band's final studio recordings, which took place in the days following the final show. Of these recordings, the film shows Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler performing 'The Wizard', 'Wicked World', and 'Changes'.