Circle of Dreams: The Making of the Seabreeze Carousel

The Richardson Olmsted Campus, a former psychiatric center and National Historic Landmark, is seeing new life as it undergoes restoration and adaptation to a modern use.

Puy du Fou has won hearts in 45 years. Voted best park in the world in 2012 and 2014 in the United States, the famous Vendée park continues to attract more and more visitors each year, and to develop internationally, with a new park in Spain, shows in Holland and soon in the United States. If the stories developed by Puy du Fou seduce, it is thanks to the emotions they convey, but also to the engineering treasures deployed by the teams. The teams do not hesitate to call upon the best talents in the aeronautical or automobile industries to guarantee the reliability and robustness of the mechanisms that contribute to making the park a global flagship of innovation in the service of the show.

The mavericks who pioneered the modern pit stop made it a raceday staple that takes less than two seconds.

Narratives of ecologists and conservationists are pitted against the human tendency to engineer and control in this probing documentary on the lucrative salmon-hatchery industry.

They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers.

Few amateur films with sound were produced in the 1930s and fewer remain extant. A charming artifact that demonstrates the expressive possibilities and technical limitations of amateur talkies, "The Spider and the Fly" includes a backyard Labor Day gathering, a trip to the Riverview Amusement Park, and a homemade Halloween parade of witches and ghouls.

THE STRAIT GUYS follows Czech-born mining engineer, George, and his fast-talking protégé, Scott, along the proposed route of the InterContinental Railway through Alaska, to the Bering Strait and onward to Russia. The “Strait Guys” endeavor to convince international governments, corporations, and indigenous tribes to green-light their $100 billion railway project, which would provide ground-based infrastructure across the continents, relieve overcrowded Pacific ports, improve global supply chains, and ease tensions between the superpowers. The US and Russia have been successfully collaborating in space for decades. Now the Strait Guys are out to prove it is also possible down here on earth.

Vienna’s Prater is an amusement park and a desire machine. No mechanical invention, no novel idea or sensational innovation could escape incorporation into the Prater. The diverse story-telling in Ulrike Ottinger’s film “Prater” transforms this place of sensations into a modern cinema of attractions. The Prater’s history from the beginning to the present is told by its protagonists and those who have documented it, including contemporary cinematic images of the Prater, interviews with carnies, commentary by Austrians and visitors from abroad, film quotes, and photographic and written documentary materials. The meaning of the Prater, its status as a place of technological innovation, and its role as a cultural medium are reflected in texts by Elfriede Jelinek, Josef von Sternberg, Erich Kästner and Elias Canetti, as well as in music devoted to this amusement venue throughout the course of its history.

70 is definitely the new 20 in this heart-warming 1960s documentary portrait of the Darby and Joan Club for elderly Cockneys.

Dwarves Kingdom is a documentary film about a theme park featuring performances by little people with dwarfism who live in a fantasy recreation of a magical empire. Built by a wealthy Chinese businessman, this other-worldly kingdom, officially called World Ecological Garden of Butterfly and Little People Kingdom, is located in the mountains surrounding the city of Kunming in Western China.