University and Freedom (2019)

Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities

A haven for Black intellectuals, artists and revolutionaries—and path of promise toward the American dream—Black colleges and universities have educated the architects of freedom movements and cultivated leaders in every field. They have been unapologetically Black for 150 years. For the first time ever, their story is told.

To Be and to Have

The documentary's title translates as "to be and to have", the two auxiliary verbs in the French language. It is about a primary school in the commune of Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, Puy-de-Dôme, France, the population of which is just over 200. The school has one small class of mixed ages (from four to twelve years), with a dedicated teacher, Georges Lopez, who shows patience and respect for the children as we follow their story through a single school year.

The Night in IV Chapters

A group of students surround their beloved campus. But what they did was unnatural. In general, other people will surround the campus in the afternoon or evening, but they will circle the campus at night, to be more precise, starting at 11 pm. There are various things that they find while circling their beloved campus…

The UFO Movie THEY Don't Want You to See

In an age when misinformation, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories have become mainstream, UFOs have risen to become one of the most-talked about pop culture phenomena. With all of this noise, how can we expect anyone to know how much of this is true? What is in our skies? What do we know, and how do we know it? And most importantly: Are we being visited?

Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

Morgan Spurlock tours the Middle East to discuss the war on terror with Arabic people.

Class of Her Own

A teacher in a disadvantaged community rebels against a system that neglects many of its vulnerable students. Gloria Merriex transforms into a trailblazer, using rap, dance and other innovations to enable children to thrive in school—and beyond.

The Bubble

Diving deep into the true causes of the Great Recession, the financial crisis of the 2010s, renowned economists, investors and business leaders explain what America is facing if we don't learn from our past mistakes. Is the economy really improving or are we just blowing up another Bubble?

Not Even in a Wildest Dream

The challenges of the present, expectations for the future, and the dreams of those who experience the reality of public high school in Brazil. Through the voices of students, principals, teachers and experts, "Not Even In a Wildest Dream" offers a reflection on the value of education.

The Thinnest Line

A fist-person story of the director of the documentary, who talks about the loneliness that entails living with an eating disorder and her vision now thar she is entering into adulthood.

Comprehensive School

The joys of 1960s modern education - as seen at a not-exactly-typical local comp.

School for Hope

Animari and Zlatko's mission is to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds get the best possible care and education. Will they manage to find funding to welcome more children and to start a high school?

Voices at the End of the Line

A group of authentic voicemail messages to Alex over the past 5 years from various friends and family members. It is a poetic lattice weaved with mesmeric audiovisuals, presenting the isolating effects of an ever growing digital world.

Preschool to Prison

Preschool to Prison is a compelling examination of how the United States public school system is built and operated like prisons. Zero-tolerance policies are used to justify suspension and arrests that set up a pathway to send children of color and children with special needs from school to prison. Children are being suspended, restrained, dragged, physically manhandled, and subsequently arrested for minor offenses such as throwing candy on a school bus. These personal accounts from people affected by the school-to-prison pipeline give riveting tales about the generational impact on society.

First Case, Second Case

First Case, Second Case is a documentary about a teacher who sends a group of pupils out of the classroom when one of them does not own up to talking behind the master's back.

American Animals

Lexington, Kentucky, 2004. Four young men attempt to execute one of the most audacious art heists in the history of the United States.

Finding the Money

FINDING THE MONEY follows economist Stephanie Kelton on a journey through Modern Money Theory or “MMT”. Kelton provocatively asserts the National Debt Clock that ticks ominously upwards in New York City is not actually a debt for us taxpayers at all, nor a burden for our grandchildren to pay back. Instead, Kelton describes the national debt as simply a historical record of the number of dollars created by the US federal government currently being held in pockets, as assets, by the rest of us. MMT bursts into the media with journalists asking, “Have we been thinking about how the government spends money, all wrong?” But top economists from across the political spectrum condemn the theory as “voodoo economics”, “crazy” and “a crackpot theory”. FINDING THE MONEY traces the conflict all the way back to the story we tell about money, injecting new hope and empowering countries around the world to tackle the biggest challenges of the 21st century: from climate change to inequality.

Behind Our Walls

In America, the prison system has become a place of retribution, not restoration. Inmates are often treated as sub-human, and often find themselves feeling hopeless. But a small midwest college decides to give inmates an opportunity to earn a bachelor's degree. Experience the journey of the resilient inmates as they fight incredible odds to change their lives – and change the system.

Waiting for "Superman"

Gripping, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful, Waiting for Superman is an impassioned indictment of the American school system from An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim.

The Making of a Japanese

Intimately following 1st and 6th graders at a public elementary school in Tokyo, we observe kids learning the traits necessary to become part of Japanese society.

Sparni

It’s the second semester of junior year for Pierce “Sparni” Sparnroft, a gifted jazz vibraphonist studying at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Sparni’s prospects on the vibes were rejuvenated by their new professor, the world-renowned Steve Nelson, and are to be showcased during a student-driven recital in May 2023. But all the while, Sparni must face a crisis within.

On ne naît pas féministe

Discovering your womanhood at 33 when you're a feminist is like exploring a new continent as an adventurer. It sparks a desire to embark on a journey, to understand the world around us, to search for ourselves, over and over again. To engage in the new sexual revolution and trace the roots of sexism and gender, questioning whether sexual education in France can prevent future generations from the patriarchy. But are we ready to deconstruct everything?

The Hunting Ground

A startling expose of rape crimes on US campuses, their institutional cover-ups, and the devastating toll they take on students and their families. The film follows the lives of several undergraduate assault survivors as they attempt to pursue—despite incredible push back, harassment and traumatic aftermath—both their education and justice.

Dad... Can I Borrow the Car?

A live-action short, using many avant-garde film techniques, that looks at American car culture in the late 1960s. The main section deals with the many trials and obstacles a teenager must face on the path to being able to drive. Surviving the driver's education class is only the first step, as the teenager must then pass his driving test, and then finally get permission to borrow the family car.

The Magnet Has Secrets

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Teach Me If You Can

The three teachers Svetlana, Sandrine and Taslima teach children and young people in places that are hardly accessible for “normal” lessons - in a nomad tent under the snow cover of Siberia, in a hut in the bushland of Burkina Faso and on a school boat in Bangladesh. They share a common goal: to enable their students to have a better future through education.

The Big Squeeze

The computer game chain GameStop created so much chaos in the stock market that it forced large hedge funds to their knees. How could it happen? Here we follow different people who were brought together during 2020 because of their interest in GameStop's future. Some had invested in the chain's stock, others wondered about it. While the chain's employees trusted that the company would pay their salaries at a time when millions of people went bankrupt and became unemployed.

Laissez-faire

A historical perspective to understand Neoliberalism and to understand why this ideology today so profoundly influences the choices of our governments and our lives.

A School for Life!

A satirical presentation of the public school debate, exhibiting three different teaching methods. First, the authoritarian education system of old; Second, a more modern form, combining theory and practice; and finally, the teacher's nightmare, where children are taught only the necessities for modern life: sales techniques, status symbols, and how to (quite literally) elbow your way to the top.

Euller Miller Between Two Worlds

Euller Miller is a young native Brazilian of kaiwá ethnicity who leaves his small village just outside of Dourados (MS) to study dentistry at a public university in the crowded capital city of the state of Paraná. The film follows the complex transition between two very different worlds and the search for new horizons without abandoning his indigenous roots.

Education Week

Young scholars get busy for Newcastle-on-Tyne's 'Education Week' in the tour of Tyneside classrooms.

The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire

At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it behind obscure financial structures in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth may be hidden in British offshore jurisdictions and Britain and its offshore jurisdictions are the largest global players in the world of international finance. How did this come about, and what impact does it have on the world today? This is what the Spider's Web sets out to investigate.

The Forbidden Education

An analysis of the logics of modern schooling and the way of understanding education, while showing different, non-conventional educational experiences that raise the need for a new educational paradigm.

So Much for So Little

Little Johnny Jones, to be born in the next year, is shown growing to a ripe, healthy old age, thanks to the efforts of his local public health officers. But without them, he might be one of the 5% or so that dies in the first year. The price for the public health service: about 3 cents a week. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.

Life and Death in A Pond

An educational film about the life cycles of various types of pond life.

State of Exception

Estado de Excepção is a documentary about CITAC (Coimbra Theater Initiation Circle), a university theater group, revealing history since it was constituted in 1956 until the aftermath of the 1974 revolution. It is the history of the theater group university and, through it, the history of theater in Portugal, revealing two remarkable decades of the History of Portugal. Through the Academy of Coimbra, the documentary reproduces student life, the position of women in society, and the change in mentalities of being and being in the world. It reproduces the existing censorship and the fight against the dictatorship, the resistance to an exhausted regime, as well as the emerging contradictions of the democratic revolution. CITAC has a heritage of 50 years of experience in Coimbra. It carries with it the possibility of the theatrical and civic formation of thinking bodies, constituting a proper ball of a possible model, generation by generation, between studies, theater, and social drama.

Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain

Hacktivist and blockchain expert Lauri Love fights extradition in TRUST MACHINE—his computer skills a threat to the US government. Tech innovators strike a raw nerve as banks and network pundits rush to condemn volatile cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology. Why are banks terrified while UNICEF embraces it to help refugee children? Award–winning filmmaker Alex Winter reveals that proponents of blockchain—a verified digital ledger—are already using the technology to change the world; fighting income inequality, the refugee crisis and world hunger.

First Graders

A documentary film about a boys school in Iran. The film shows numerous, funny and moving interviews of many different young pupils of this school summoned by their superintendent for questions of discipline. The man is not severe, but clever and fair. He teaches loyalty, fellowship and righteousness to these boys. Besides these interviews, we see scenes of this school’s quotidian life.

Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment

During a two-day period before and after the University of Alabama integration crisis, the film uses five camera crews to follow President John F. Kennedy, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, Alabama governor George Wallace, deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach and the students Vivian Malone and James Hood. As Wallace has promised to personally block the two black students from enrolling in the university, the JFK administration discusses the best way to react to it, without rousing the crowd or making Wallace a martyr for the segregationist cause. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1999.

School Town King

It follows two teenage rappers in Bangkok who use their musical talent to navigate their difficult circumstances.

He Named Me Malala

A look at the events leading up to the Taliban's attack on the young Pakistani school girl, Malala Yousafzai, for speaking out on girls' education and the aftermath, including her speech to the United Nations.

Reach for the SKY

Can one day shape the rest of your life? A feature documentary on the South-Korean education system.

On the Way to School

These children live in the four corners of the earth, but share the same thirst for learning. They understand that only education will allow them a better future and that is why, every day, they must set out on the long and perilous journey that will lead them to knowledge. Jackson and his younger sister from Kenya walk 15 kilometres each way through a savannah populated by wild animals; Carlito rides more than 18 kilometres twice a day with his younger sister, across the plains of Argentina; Zahira lives in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains who has an exhausting 22 kilometres walk along punishing mountain paths before she reaches her boarding school; Samuel from India sits in a clumsy DIY wheelchair and the 4 kilometres journey is an ordeal each day, as his two younger brothers have to push him all the way to school…

Final Score

In this documentary, four boys spend their senior year of high school studying for college-entrance exams that only one in five students will pass.

Sticky: A (Self) Love Story

"Sticky" is everything your mother was too embarrassed to tell you about masturbation, in one stimulating documentary. Full of candid interviews from celebrated figures to everyday people, health care professionals, sex therapists, zoologists, anthropologists, and religious figures, this feature length doc answers age-old questions like: What is masturbation? Will it make me go blind? Is it "normal"? Is it wrong? And why are we so afraid to be caught in the act? In a world where confusion about sexuality remains at the root of so many societal problems - rape, sexual abuse, and the threat of sexually transmitted diseases - "Sticky" will help shatter misconceptions and myths surrounding this intimate aspect of human sexuality.

Precious Knowledge

Disenfranchised high school seniors become academic warriors and community leaders in Tucson, Arizona's embattled Ethnic Studies classes while state lawmakers attempt to eliminate the program.

Playboy: College Girls

Year in, year out, Playboy magazine's college pictorials are a big hit. Now, for the first time ever, our course in collegiate beauty comes to video with some of the most beautiful student bodies in the nation.

The Whole Gritty City

Young members of 3 New Orleans school marching bands grow up in America's most musical city, and one of its most dangerous. Their band directors get them ready to perform in the Mardi Gras parades, and teach them to succeed and to survive.

Acadia Acadia?!?

In the late 1960s, with the triumph of bilingualism and biculturalism, New Brunswick's Université de Moncton became the setting for the awakening of Acadian nationalism after centuries of defeatism and resignation. Although 40% of the province's population spoke French, they had been unable to make their voices heard. The movement started with students-sit-ins, demonstrations against Parliament, run-ins with the police - and soon spread to a majority of Acadians. The film captures the behind-the-scenes action and the students' determination to bring about change. An invaluable document of the rebirth of a people.

Misa's Fugue

The true story of one boy's journey as a victim of Nazi oppression. While exposed to some of the most horrific events of the Holocaust, Misa was able to endure the atrocities of genocide through his love of art and music.

Our People Will Be Healed

Legendary documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin provides a glimpse of what action-driven decolonization looks like in Norway House, one of Manitoba's largest First Nation communities.

Research and Crime: the Reich University of Strasbourg

Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?