9500 Liberty (2009)

Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body

A research-based essay film, but also a very personal perspective on the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its dramatic end, and its recent transformation into a few democratic nation states.

Zaineb Hates the Snow

When her mother remarries and her newly blended family moves to Canada, a 9-year-old Tunisia girl's life takes a profound turn as she struggles to find her place and maintain her Muslim identity in a new land.

Hobbyhorse Revolution

A film about teenagers with growing pains, who discover their own voice and talent through riding and grooming toy horses.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

The life and career of the hailed Hollywood movie star and underappreciated genius inventor, Hedy Lamarr.

Ice/Sea

Funny collage of sea, sun and ice. A show from the beach with skiers, tigers, mermaids and much more.

Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing

Shut Up and Sing is a documentary about the country band from Texas called the Dixie Chicks and how one tiny comment against President Bush dropped their number one hit off the charts and caused fans to hate them, destroy their CD’s, and protest at their concerts. A film about freedom of speech gone out of control and the three girls lives that were forever changed by a small anti-Bush comment

Time

Fox Rich, indomitable matriarch and modern-day abolitionist, strives to keep her family together while fighting for the release of her incarcerated husband. An intimate, epic, and unconventional love story, filmed over two decades.

Seven Rivers Walking - Haere Mārire

Documentary about the degraded rivers of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Displaced Perssons

Per Persson left Sweden 40 years ago. In Pakistan he fell in love and became the father of two daughters. Trouble starts when the girls grow up and the family decides to emigrate to Sweden. When they end up living in a caravan outside Hässleholm, all their expectations are dashed.

Free Tibet

A film about the Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco in 1996.

The Salt Mines

Explores the lives of Sara, Gigi and Giovanna, three Latino transvestites who for years have lived on the streets of Manhattan supporting their drug addictions through prostitution. They made their temporary home inside broken garbage trucks that the Sanitation Department keeps next to the salt deposits used in the winter to melt the snow. The three friends share the place known as "The Salt Mines".

The Transformation

Ricardo was once Sara, a homeless HIV positive transvestite, living in the underbelly of Manhattan. Today he is a churchgoing, married man, "saved" by a Dallas ministry. He has renounced his homosexuality, but is his conversion complete? Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio offer an intimate look at Ricardo's transformation.

O Seasons, O Castles

A short documentary on the chateaux of the Loire in France was commissioned by the French Tourist Bureau.

Novena

In 2012, Stephen Vaughan and Kay Ferreter are invited to address the congregation at St. Joseph's Redemptorists Church in Dundalk, Ireland for the Solemn Novena Festival. In a powerful speech, the pair describe their experiences being gay and lesbian in Ireland, feeling excluded by Catholic doctrine, and the importance of a more inclusive church.

Abducted in Plain Sight

A family falls prey to the manipulative charms of a neighbor, who abducts their adolescent daughter. Twice.

Startup.com

Friends since high school, 20-somethings Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman have an idea: a Web site for people to conduct business with municipal governments. This documentary tracks the rise and fall of govWorks.com from May of 1999 to December of 2000, and the trials the business brings to the relationship of these best friends. Kaleil raises the money, Tom's the technical chief. A third partner wants a buy out; girlfriends come and go; Tom's daughter needs attention. And always the need for cash and for improving the site. Venture capital comes in by the millions. Kaleil is on C-SPAN, CNN, and magazine covers. Will the business or the friendship crash first?

Mad Hot Ballroom

Eleven-year-old New York City public school kids journey into the world of ballroom dancing and reveal pieces of themselves and their world along the way. Told from their candid, sometimes humorous perspectives, these kids are transformed, from reluctant participants to determined competitors, from typical urban kids to "ladies and gentlemen," on their way to try to compete in the final citywide competition.

Hold on Tight

A short documentary exploring the ways LGBT couples show affection, and how small interactions like holding hands in public can carry, not only huge personal significance, but also the power to create social change.

The Corporation

Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.

Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face

Documentary portrait of the New York photographer Nan Goldin.

Sisters in the Struggle

This documentary features Black women active in politics as well as community, labour and feminist organizing. They share their insights and personal testimonies on the double legacy of racism and sexism, linking their personal struggles with the ongoing battle to end systemic discrimination and violence against women and people of colour.

Germany in Autumn

The film does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two-month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped and later murdered by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the original leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.

Ouaga Girls

A group of young women from Ouagadougou study at a girl school to become auto mechanics. The classmates become their port of safety, joy and sisterhood, all while they are going through the life changing transition into becoming adults in a country boiling with political changes. In a country with youth unemployment at 52 percent, jobs are a hot issue. The young girls at a mechanics school in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou are right in the middle of a crucial point in life when their dreams, hopes and courage are confronted with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be. Using interesting narrative solutions, Theresa Traore Dahlberg depicts their last school years and at the same time succeeds in showing the country’s violent past and present. This is a feature-film debut and coming-of-age film with much warmth, laughs, heartbreak and depth.

The Devil Came on Horseback

While serving with the African Union, former Marine Capt. Brian Steidle documents the brutal ethnic cleansing occuring in Darfur. Determined that the Western public should know about the atrocities he is witnessing, Steidle contacts New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, who publishes some of Steidle's photographic evidence.

Dear Thirteen

A nuanced portrait of a new generation, Dear Thirteen is a cinematic time capsule of coming of age in today’s world. Through the eyes of nine thirteen-year-olds, we see how pressing social, geographical and political challenges are shaping, and being shaped by, young people: rising anti-Semitism in Europe, guns in America, gender identity and racial divisions across Australia and Asia. With no adult commentary outside the filmmaker, Dear Thirteen offers an intimate view into the universal uncertainty inherent in growing up.

Wilt Chamberlain: Borscht Belt Bellhop

In 1954, before his senior year of high school, Wilt Chamberlain took a summer job that would change his life, working as a bellhop at Kutsher's Country Club, a Jewish resort in the Catskill Mountains. An unexplored and pivotal chapter in the life of one of basketball's greatest players, and a fascinating glimpse of a time when a very different era of basketball met the Borscht Belt in its heyday.

Monk with a Camera

Nicholas Vreeland walked away from a worldly life of privilege to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Grandson of legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland and apprentice of photographer Irving Penn, Nicholas' life changed drastically upon meeting one of the Dalai Lama's teachers. Soon thereafter, he gave up his glamorous life to live in a monastery in India, ultimately returning to his roots in photography to help his fellow monks rebuild their monastery.

Out in the Night

Under the neon lights in a gay-friendly neighborhood of New York City, four young African-American lesbians are violently and sexually threatened by a man on the street. They defend themselves against him and are charged and convicted in the courts and in the media as a 'Gang of Killer Lesbians'.

Indigo Girls: It's Only Life After All

An intimate look into the lives of one of the most iconic folk-rock bands in America - the Indigo Girls. With never-before-seen archival and intimate vérité the film dives into the songwriting and storytelling of the music that transformed a generation.

The Wrong Light

A charismatic activist leads a globally-regarded NGO that provides shelter and education for girls rescued from brothels in Northern Thailand. But as the filmmakers meet the girls and their families, discrepancies begin to emerge and the story takes an unexpected turn.

I Have Tourette's But Tourette's Doesn't Have Me

This insightful Home Box Office documentary profiles some American children afflicted with Tourette's syndrome -- a hereditary neurological disorder manifested by recurrent, involuntary vocal and motor tics. More than a dozen youngsters ranging from ages 6 to 13 discuss the stigma of Tourette's, what it's like to grow up with the condition, control measures and the challenges they face to be viewed as normal.

Summer of Love

American Experience presents Summer of Love, a striking picture of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district during the summer of 1967 -- from the utopian beginnings, when peace and love prevailed, to the chaos, unsanitary conditions, and widespread drug use that ultimately signaled the end. Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco (Daughter from Danang) examine the social and cultural forces that sparked the largest migration of young people in America's history.

Underwater Dreams

Underwater Dreams, narrated by Michael Peña, is an epic story of how the sons of undocumented Mexican immigrants learned how to build underwater robots. And go up against MIT in the process.

Pure Love: The Voice of Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald's voice is a phenomenon and unrivalled to this day. She had the perfect pitch and perfect intonation. Ella's voice spanned three octaves, her phrasing seemed effortless. There is almost no style of music, in which she did not excel, and her numerous - now legendary - recordings of the 'Great American Songbook' with pieces of US composers such as George and Ira Gershwin, Harald Arlen, Cole Porter or Duke Ellington, remained a benchmark for the "right" interpretation of those songs for generations of singers. In the film the focus will be on the voice of Ella Fitzgerald. We want to unravel the secret of her voice through many different people (musicians, singers, critics etc.), who will tell about what impact her voice had on them and still has. We want to learn more about Ella´s life to find out what made her sing like she did and only she could.