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Arnold Drake World works some beguilingly simple magic at a communal table in a bookstore café in Portland, Oregon, masterfully folding paper hand towels into ‘botanically correct flowers’. It is a distinctive craft he’s perfected through thousands of iterations over some eight years and, though he’s full of playfulness, he takes every step in the process very seriously, from finding just the right papers towels, to making the precise creases, to aiming to impress with each completed creation. With a touch as light and deft as Arnold’s, the US director Riley Hooper offers a tiny, breezy portrait perfectly exuding the joy and exuberance of its subject.
Director: Riley Hooper
Co-Director: Mo Scarpelli
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
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Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
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Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Childhood and adolescence
The police camp where tween girls enter a sisterhood of law and order
28 minutes