Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Mauritania, on the northwest coast of Africa, is characterised by arid desert plains that make most of the country non-arable. Beneath the surface, however, the land is rich in the iron ore that sustains the Mauritanian economy. Since 1963, the Mauritania Railway, running 704 kilometres (roughly 440 miles) across unforgiving terrain, has connected the country’s inland mining centre, Zouérat, with the port city of Nouadhibou. With decades of drought forcing much of Mauritania’s once-nomadic population into urban areas, the railway has become increasingly vital to the country of four million, as food, goods and people join the iron ore onboard.
This short documentary by Los Angeles-based filmmaker Miguel de Olaso (aka Macgregor) casts the railroad as the backbone of the country. De Olaso combines a visually rich survey of its operations with information that supplements and sometimes undercuts the aestheticised cinematography, offering a compellingly immersive journey on transport, resources and demography.
Video by Macgregor
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes