Film Year: 2017

The legendary American photojournalist W. Eugene Smith once said of his profession that it was “documentary photography with a purpose.” Like Smith, whose work has been celebrated worldwide for its humanism, the four photojournalists featured in Alexandria Bombach and Mo Scarpelli’s gripping first feature Frame By Frame are resolute in…

Nearly seventy-five years after being forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army, the few surviving individuals whose life-shattering experiences as “comfort women” continue to haunt them wait for an apology. The film’s titular expression of regret on the part of Japan’s current government has been slow to come,…

Most U.S. audiences have had no exposure to contemporary urban youth cultures in Iran, a country that is often the subject of depressing news coverage and mainstream media representations conveying little about the actual lives of its people. Although recent UN reports indicate that human rights violations have worsened under…

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court established women’s basic reproductive rights in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, anti-abortion crusaders operating under the guise of evangelical authority have made significant inroads in the legal and political battle over women’s bodies. In recent years, nearly 300 Targeted Regulation of…

Winner of the Amnesty International Film Prize at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival (in addition to numerous other awards), Iranian director Mehrdad Oskouei’s Starless Dreams is one of the most poignant and aesthetically rigorous explorations of stolen childhood ever made. Set primarily inside a girl’s “rehabilitation center” near Tehran,…

In addition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), several multilateral UN treaties, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), include articles that call for the protection of children’s basic right to education, which…