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Joe Wells is a practising Catholic who believes that his work as a shepherd gives him something of a window into the divine, with each day exposing him to cycles of life and death. But although he finds a meaningful resonance between his job and his faith, the day-to-day realities of his all-consuming work are unromantic at best and brutal at worst, leading him to conclude: ‘It’s a world you manipulate but you don’t control.’ The US filmmaker Vern Moen’s The Shepherd profiles Wells as he tends to his sheep in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. With Wells himself providing a rustic violin score, the sparse and poignant short captures how this millennia-old line of work quietly endures, in many ways unchanged, even in the most industrialised countries.
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Design and fashion
The mundane becomes mesmerising in this deep dive into segmented displays
14 minutes
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Architecture
Tour the European architecture that dreamed of a wondrous, fictitious China
16 minutes
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Spirituality
Trek alongside spiritual pilgrims on a treacherous journey across Pakistan
6 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
Photographs offer a colonialist window to the past – one that must be challenged
14 minutes
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Animals and humans
An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’
5 minutes
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Mathematics
How a curious question about colouring maps changed mathematics forever
9 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
The world turns vivid, strange and philosophical for one plane crash survivor
16 minutes
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Cities
The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith
18 minutes
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Art
Inside the unique creative space where ‘outsider’ artists find their form
14 minutes