For children who have never left their villages, cities are outlandish and scary places. But with rural families no longer able to survive economically, the future of these last village children, and of rural traditions, is ambiguous.

Places contain memories, common joys, sorrows and a history. And in the case of the Presidential Symphony Orchestra’s venue in Ankara, it also contains a very beautiful but unwieldy historic harp that needs to be moved…

In southern Tunisia, the women of Oudhref are as precious as the rain. Behind their looms, they struggle to prove their existence and uniqueness…

Guided by his grandmother’s haunting Sumerian lament, 9-year-old mute Ali takes his sheep, Kirmeta, for sacrifice on a strenuous 400km journey to the shrine of an ancient saint.

The search for the origins of a magnificent Buddhist House Altar in the collection of a Berlin museum uncovers various aspects of the rituals and architecture of the Buddhist altars of Nepal.

A woman with a golden compass, a skeleton buried with a coin, doctor whose kit went along with him to his grave – all stories uncovered by archaeologists that introduce us to the people who lived in ancient Roman Lisbon.

A local historian becomes an enemy of the Soviet system for documenting the traditional culture of the Mari, a Finno-Ugric people of Russia sometimes known as ‘the last pagan population of the West.

A behind-the-scenes visit to a special exhibit of costumes from the National Theatre of Northern Greece offers a visual feast, plus insight into how costume design contributes to the magic of theatre.

Director Sezer Ağgez goes looking for ‘Tahtacı Fatma’, 40 years after Suha Arin’s seminal film documenting the lives of the traditional foresters in the hinterlands of the Turkish Meditteranean.

Director Dilek Kaya takes an ancient car phone on a walk through the streets of Foça, unraveling the memories associated with Kara Vicdanlı (‘Hard-Hearted’) among the locals.

Can one small bone discovered at a site in central Mexico turn our entire understanding of human migration from Asia to the Americas upside-down?

The mesmerizing sounds and visions of a modern workshop in Iran producing glass and pottery in line with age-old traditions.

Ertuğrul Karslıoğlu introduces us to the ancient city of Stratonikeia and the village of Eskihisar, which, per UNESCO, are ‘not independent examples of two different civilizations, but integral parts of a heritage formed by people who lived in different periods’.

Through narration, re-enactments, and a bit of animation, Serdar Yılmaz’s short documentary looks at the theatrical tradition in Pergamon and how it reflected a transition from democracy to authoritarianism.

Follow the more than 70-years of excavations at Kültepe-Kanesh, where archaeologists have unearthed more than 20,000 clay tablets, the earliest known written documents from Anatolia.

This film from Kurtuluş and Hasan Özgen questions the concepts of ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ as it investigates the ‘nomadic’ cultural heritage that the Turks carried with them from Central Asia to Anatolia.

Through archival footage and new interviews, Selim Alan’s film looks at the lives of nomadic Kurdish communities in Turkey’s southeast.

The lifestyle and habits of the sailors of the imperial fleets of Ancient Rome are being rediscovered along with the restoration of mosaics from the ancient port of Ostia.

Archaeologist Wojtek Mazurek is under pressure to complete his research so construction can begin on a new memorial museum at the site of a former Nazi extermination camp in Poland.

Santa Eufemia, in Viesta, Italy, features caves where sailors once made offerings to Venus and a 19th-century lighthouse that still guides today’s sailors through the choppy waters of the Adriatic Sea.

A women’s embroidery collective in Mexico passes down traditional Maya patterns while innovating new designs and expanding gender roles for future generations.

Inspired by the research of a well-known 20th-century Italian archaeologist, a group of enthusiasts set off on a trek along the Ancient Sicilian Transversal, one of the oldest paths in Italy.

Three generations of women Bodrum whose lives are bound together as tightly as the knots in the carpets they weave.

In this short doc from Kadir Uluç, we follow the shepherds of Gordion as they set out with their flocks at the first light of dawn, just as their ancestors have done for millennia.

The LGBT+ community in Silao, Guanajuato finds its voice in “The Marínguía”, a character from a Mexican folk dance that dates back to the 19th century.

A nostalgic walk through pre-1922 Izmir and its famous waterfront, a narrow strip of land on which a great multi-cultural civilization developed.

Embroidered with colorful motifs from Anatolia, the kofi may represent the region, ethnicity, and marital status of the Adiyaman village women who wear them.