Film Year: 2020

Short films return to ACT in 2020 with two programs. Program 2 features five short films covering stories from Tiajuana, the United States, Hong Kong and Japan. Program 2 line-up includes: Abortion Helpine: This Is Lisa (13 min) – Colorado premiere The Claudia Kishi Club (16 min) – Colorado premiere –Watch free online for a limited time Do […]

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 […]

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 RSVP HERE 

“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 […]

What is the Hyde Amendment and why has its repeal become a litmus test for progressive politicians? In 1976, only three years after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, the Hyde Amendment was enacted with the explicit intention of denying poor individuals—those receiving Medicaid—access to abortion. Abortion Helpline, This Is Lisa gives […]

With procedural precision and a bold blend of dramatic reenactments and news interviews, filmmaker-video artist Mario Pfeifer’s Again examines the events leading up to and following a Kurdish immigrant’s death in the Saxony region of Germany three years ago. The man, a 21-year-old refugee from Iraq named Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz, had been living in the […]