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Michael is disabled and uses a wheelchair to go about his daily life in California. But it’s on the ocean atop his custom surfboard that he feels most free and lucid – a sensation he describes as his ‘birthright’. Sean Mullens’s modest yet moving film chronicles his friend Michael as he goes about his everyday surfing ritual, and explores the essential human desire to transcend limitations.
Director: Sean Mullens
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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