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Glas won the master filmmaker Bert Haanstra a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Short Documentary in 1959. The film contrasts the production of handmade crystal from the Royal Leerdam glass factory with automated bottle-making machines in the Netherlands. An industrial film with a bebop heart, its lyrical use of light and sound still looks and sounds fabulous, some 60 years after it was made.
Producer and Director: Bert Haanstra
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The environment
Photographs of rainforests dissolving in acid strike a beautiful note of warning
10 minutes
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Technology and the self
Adaptive technologies have helped Stephen Hawking, and many more, find their voice
5 minutes
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Ecology and environmental sciences
Experience the dazzling displays that fireflies create when humans are far away
5 minutes
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Stories and literature
Solaris and beyond – Stanisław Lem’s antidotes to the bores of American sci-fi
7 minutes
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Ecology and environmental sciences
To renew Yosemite, California should embrace a once-outlawed Indigenous practice
6 minutes
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Music
Before the Beatles dropped acid, a BBC workshop was creating far-out sounds
6 minutes
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Art
Is paying with hand-drawn banknotes artistry or forgery? The knotty case of J S G Boggs
10 minutes
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Human rights and justice
Portugal stole Goa’s lands and narratives. Can they ever truly be returned?
19 minutes
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Biology
In the jungle of Suriname, Maria Sibylla Merian discovered insect metamorphosis
4 minutes