Film Year: 2020

The story starts in 2015 with a fire at the Bucharest nightclub Colectiv. The tragedy killed 27 people on site and injured over 100 more. Romania’s Health Minister promised the burn victims would get the highest-quality treatment, but, in subsequent months, dozens more perished. What was going wrong inside the hospitals? Director Alexander Nanau follows […]

Winner of the prestigious Amnesty International Award at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Filipina documentarian Alyx Ayn Arumpac’s Aswang offers an unflinching look at the human rights crisis that has affected tens of thousands of lives in her home country over the past four years. Since the 2016 election of President Rodrigo Duterte, who soon thereafter […]

Charting the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of Bell Pottinger, a British public relations firm founded in 1998 by the recently deceased Lord Timothy John Leigh Bell, this riveting documentary reveals the extent to which advertising has become “weaponized” in recent years and put to political use through the subverting of democracies and the propping […]

Today, sixty years after their country gained independence, many people living in the West African country of Burkina Faso are victim to unfair labor practices and are forced to contend with dangerous, slave-like work conditions that leave many of them feeling helpless, if not hopeless, in the face of governmental apathy. As in the United […]

“Hurt people hurt people.” Those words, spoken by Sonya Shah (founder of a restorative justice program called the Ahimsa Collective), are later repeated by Sam Johnson, Sr., an inmate at San Quentin State Prison who is shown working through his trauma — and the grief that he has caused others — in this emotionally devasting […]

In college classrooms across the United States, it is not unusual to hear someone’s stomach grumbling during moments of relative silence — an audible reminder that students might not be receiving the nutritional care or institutional support that was once such an ingrained part of academic life, years before food insecurity was a widespread problem […]

Pushing boundaries for 70 years, this portrait of artist Betye Saar shows she isn’t done fighting inequality in her personal and powerful work. Inside her LA studio, Saar talks about collecting objects, African American history, art as a weapon, and making people think. WATCH THE FILM ONLINE  

Following a simple conversation between a CSU student and staff member, events are set in motion that lead to building a school in a rural village in Uganda. The film follows the student and various staff members to connect across cultures and see how they can make a difference for Ugandan children.

This Dutch production provides an eye-opening look at the human costs of prison privatization, giving former inmates, security guards, and other staff at the Mangaung Prison an opportunity to shed light on a type of rights violation that has largely been underreported by the mainstream press. Directed with methodical rigor by the filmmaking sisters Ilse […]

In Japanese, there’s a specific word for an unborn life. Mizuko, which means “water child,” is used to refer to both miscarried and aborted pregnancies. In addition to this word, there’s a ritual for grief that allows women to metaphorically return their water children to the sea. Narrated by a Japanese American woman, Mizuko tells […]