The Devil’s Fire

Explore the 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the second deadliest disaster in California history. A colossal engineering and human failure, the dam was built by William Mulholland, a self-taught engineer who ensured the growth of Los Angeles by bringing the city water via aqueduct. The catastrophe killed more than 400 people and destroyed millions of dollars of property.

Report from a fire in a match factory on June 16, 1913.

For 200 years, coal mining had been a way of life in Cape Breton. By 1920 things were looking up: miners were unionized and paid decent wages. Then the British Empire Steel Corporation arrived and bought every single steel and coal company in Nova Scotia. BESCO cut wages by a third, setting off a bitter labour dispute. The miners settled in for a long strike. Finally, in 1925, the military ended the unrest with brute force. But the miners, in one sense, had won. They broke up the monopoly and provided an example to workers across the country.

A group of friends reunite in the north of Scotland during summer.

On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 went down as it was leaving Iranian air space. All 176 people on board were killed, many of them Iranian Canadians. For weeks Iranian authorities vociferously denied responsibility, but foreign governments and agencies were certain the plane was shot down by Iranian military, a fact Iran’s government eventually admitted. There were no answers as to why the plane was fired on or even why it was allowed to take off, since hostilities had broken out in the region in preceding days.

Hindenburg Disaster: Probable Cause

A haunting fire prevention film about keeping matches out of the hands of children.

When Umi and Dwipa left Indonesia to work in an Ontario greenhouse as part of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program, they hoped the jobs would provide the opportunity and income for a better life. They didn't expect that fixers and false promises would lead to deception and exploitation. Sadly, their story is not uncommon. Min Sook Lee continues to speak truth to power with her commitment to providing a voice to the silenced, fulfilling documentary's capacity as a powerful tool for social change.

A remarkable documentary that delves deep into the mysterious and murky circumstances surrounding the Kursk submarine sinking.

María and Isabel are two women in their fifties who, like many others, recycle in Quito, where there is no recycling system. María leads a collective fight for basic labor rights; while Isabel transmits her knowledge of environmental care while she raises her daughters.

On March 25, 1911, a catastrophic fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City. Trapped inside the upper floors of a ten-story building, 146 workers - mostly young immigrant women and teenage girls - were burned alive or forced to jump to their deaths to escape an inferno that consumed the factory in just 18 minutes. It was the worst disaster at a workplace in New York State until 9/11. The tragedy changed the course of history, paving the way for government to represent working people, not just business, for the first time, and helped an emerging American middle class to live the American Dream.

After the raging fire, landmarks are rediscovered, artificial frontiers carved into the earth. They are stones founded in history by almost extinct ways of doing, where word is law. As nature renews itself, Helena reestablishes the limits of her property and preserves a legacy in which the material is mixed with the human, returning to the roots of an intangible fortune.

On May 30, 1889 the South Fork Dam, which maintained a pleasure lake for wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists and their families, failed due to very heavy rains and poor maintenance by the dam's owners. The burst dam sent a wall of water and debris, 40 feet high and half a mile wide, 14 miles downstream to the bustling industrial city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. More than 2000 people lost their lives in the disaster. This documentary tells the story, and tells us that the disaster was easily avoidable.

Beatus Ille

Lara, a German au pair, recently arrived in Marseille, where a new life is beginning for her. Being an introverted young girl, she nevertheless throws herself into the unknown, into the twists and turns of a city whose codes she still does not know.

The sinking of the Lusitania and the impact it had in determining the fate of World War I is widely known. But few know the stories of the passengers and crew aboard the doomed luxury liner, or the German commander who ordered the deadly attack on May 7, 1915. Follow the final voyage of the massive ship, from her celebrated exit from New York's Pier 54 to her 18-minute plummet off the coast of Ireland. Through firsthand accounts, meet the men, women, and children who rode the "Greyhound of the Seas" into a war zone, and into history.

Three years in the making in conjunction with the BBC. Using never seen before home movies, photos and eye witness accounts - this is the inside story of the world's biggest motorsport disaster.

A documentary about unemployed workers in Walbrzych, Poland.

Follows the deadly Australian bushfires of 2019-2020, known as ‘Black Summer’. Burning is an exploration of what happened as told from the perspective of victims of the fires, activists and scientists.

The director, twenty-three-year-old Iwabuchi Hiroki, is a permanent part-timer who on weekdays does menial work at a factory for 1,250 yen an hour, and on weekends takes on casual temporary work in Tokyo, a city he is fascinated with. He joins a demonstration demanding rights for permanent part-timers, and is featured on TV as "a poor, unhappy temporary worker." Despite having made his own choice to live as a permanent part-timer, he says that "the days feel like drowning in shallow water." But during the diary-like documentation of his life, something changes...