Urban Forests (2025)

Wild Amsterdam

The city from the unique perspective of the many wild animals and plants that inhabit it. Seen through the eyes of the adventurous urban cat, Abatutu.

One Crow Sorrow

A personal city symphony where an eco-anxious soul explores the intersections of natural and artificial. The filmmaker’s internal conflicts are reflected through the contradictions of early spring. This experimental short documentary invites the viewer to take the time and truly pay attention to one’s surroundings.

Mr. Bug Goes to Town

The happy tranquility of Bugville is shattered when the populace learns that a colossal skyscraper is to be built over their tiny town.

Unbreakable: The Jelena Dokic Story

The incredible true story of how Jelena Dokic became a tennis star while surviving war, bullying and extreme domestic violence at the hands of Damir Dokic, the tennis father from hell.

Un carnevale dei pazzi, dei sedotti e degli abbandonati

Plot unavailable

Mamus

A stunning and intimate portrait of the Arhuaco indigenous community in Colombia. In 1990, in a celebrated BBC documentary, the Arhuaco made contact with the outside world to warn industrialized societies of the potentially catastrophic future facing the planet if we don’t change our ways. Now, three decades later, with the advances of audio/visual technology, we go back to the Snowy Peaks of Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria to illuminate their ethos against the backdrop of an increasingly fragile world.

Time in the Sun

Second attempt to create a feature film out of the 200,000-plus feet of film which Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein shot during 1931-32 in Mexico for American socialist author Upton Sinclair, his wife and a small company of investors. The projected film, to be called "Que Viva Mexico", was never completed due to exhaustion of funds and Stalin's demand that Eisenstein return to the USSR (he had been absent since 1929). The first attempt at editing the footage, in the USA, resulted in "Thunder Over Mexico", released in 1934. In 1940, Marie Seton, from the UK, acquired some of the footage from the Sinclairs in an attempt to make a better cutting according to Eisenstein's skeletal outline for the proposed film. This film has apparently been lost.

Nossos Sonhos pela Janela

In a dystopian Midwestern future, five children embark on a journey to an abandoned school to find a long-lost treasure. In the present, the same children learn about environmental preservation and reflect on their own futures.

Hannah Arendt, la liberté d'être libre

In a time of resurgence of social protests, political radicalization and distrust of power, Arendt's thought has never been more relevant: A critical thinker according to some or a conservative according to others, this great figure of the intellectual world remains, in many ways, an enigma. Who was Hannah Arendt?

DER INNERE RUF

Plot unavailable

Our Body

In a Parisian public hospital, Claire Simon questions what it means to live in women’s bodies, filming their diversity, singularity and their beauty in all stages throughout life. Unique stories of desires, fears and struggles unfold, including the one of the filmmaker herself.

The Found Photo

Pierre Primetens was born on 22 April 1974, three days before the Carnation Revolution which put an end to the Portuguese dictatorship. He spent the first years of his childhood in Chaville, not far from Versailles and regularly took family trips to Portugal, until the death of his mother. Then his life takes another turn. Memories pile up, and photos of his childhood and his family get lost or destroyed. Retracing and understanding the events that marked his biography and determined his being become a fundamental step for him to survive. Consequently, he decides to tell his story by borrowing the images of others.

Prinzessinnenbad

A film about three teenagers - Klara, Mina and Tanutscha - from the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. The trio have known each other since Kindergarten and have plenty in common. The three 15-year-olds are the best of friends; they are spending the summer at Prinzenbad, a large open-air swimming pool at the heart of the district where they live. They're feeling pretty grown up, and are convinced they've now left their childhood behind.

The Big One

The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.

Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp is a Christian summer camp where children hone their "prophetic gifts" and are schooled in how to "take back America for Christ". The film is a first-ever look into an intense training ground that recruits born-again Christian children to become an active part of America's political future.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Michael Moore's view on how the Bush administration allegedly used the tragic events on 9/11 to push forward its agenda for unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Backyard

Lightbulbs, fire, barbed wire, mousetraps, staple guns, thumbtacks and glass are weapons of choice in The Backyard. This undercover documentary takes you deep into the controversial arena of backyard wrestling where the limits are constantly being tested...and broken. The Backyard follows several backyard wrestlers in different countries as they pursue their dream to become professional wrestlers.

Roger & Me

A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.

An Inconvenient Truth

A documentary on Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.

Carla

Carla Beck looks back on the rocky road which led her from being womanizing rock n' roll front man Carl Beck, lead singer of "Rubyat" to becoming a woman, finding love and happiness.

The Connection

The Connection is a film about how frontier research is proving that there is a direct connection between your mind and your health.

Night Will Fall

When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".

Three Heroines

Follows the legendary female pilots Raskova, Osipenko, and Grisodubova in their failed but magnificent attempt to make the first nonstop trans-Siberian flight. Using documentary reenactments, Vertov depicts the flight, the crash, the rescue, and the women’s heroic return to Moscow, where crowds shower them with flowers, and leaders with speeches.

Twin Peaks

While working as a delivery driver, artist Al Wong became captivated by the meditative qualities of the looping roads around San Francisco’s Twin Peaks. But rather than a simple documentation of these journeys, this long-form structural film utilises Wong’s conceptual explorations to create a stunning, sensual work of pure cinema that continually upends our perceptual expectations. On the soundtrack, we hear the continual lapping of ocean waves. A student of the legendary Sōtō Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Al Wong here creates a film which perfectly symbolises the endless cycles discussed in Zen Buddhist philosophy. A monumental, largely-unseen masterwork 1970s avant-garde film, restored in 16mm by the Pacific Film Archive.

Infinite Rainbows

They've captured our imagination and are a source of childlike wonder, but what exactly are rainbows? Learn the science behind these weather phenomenon and how one day they might help pinpoint habitable planets in deep space.

Fifty Years Later

After an initial meeting in 1964 interrupted by military dictatorship and a new meeting in the early 1980s to end the film "Twenty Years Later", Eduardo Coutinho once again find Elizabeth Teixeira, survivor of peasant struggles.

Sobreviventes de Galileia

In January 2013, Eduardo Coutinho back to Pernambuco to rediscover two of the characters in "Twenty Years Later" (1984): Cicero and João José.

Eddie Cochran & Friends: C'mon Everybody

Plot unavailable

Capturing the Friedmans

An Oscar nominated documentary about a middle-class American family who is torn apart when the father Arnold and son Jesse are accused of sexually abusing numerous children. Director Jarecki interviews people from different sides of this tragic story and raises the question of whether they were rightfully tried when they claim they were innocent and there was never any evidence against them.

Wattstax

A documentary film about the Afro-American Woodstock concert held in Los Angeles seven years after the Watts riots. Director Mel Stuart mixes footage from the concert with footage of the living conditions in the current-day Watts neighborhood.

Rize

A documentary film that highlights two street derived dance styles, Clowning and Krumping, that came out of the low income neighborhoods of L.A.. Director David LaChapelle interviews each dance crew about how their unique dances evolved. A new and positive activity away from the drugs, guns, and gangs that ruled their neighborhood. A raw film about a growing sub-culture movements in America.