The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.
About Jonas Falk and his stepfather Anders Frid who are both tired of living in poor conditions. They jointly committed a robbery against a post office. The robbery is successful in the sense that they came across a large sum of money, but the fact that Jonas shoots the postilion to death during the robbery turns out to have fatal consequences.
Por Favor, Socorro
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
TV documentary about Manfred Smolka, an officer of the GDR border troops who was executed in Leipzig on July 12, 1960. He had been ambushed after his escape to West Germany and a show trial was held after his arrest.
The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.
Documentary about the magnitude and severity of domestic violence. This film features four women imprisoned for killing their batterers and their terrifying personal testimonies. It won an Oscar at the 66th Academy Awards in 1994 for Documentary Short Subject.
In Italy, in the mid-seventies, Adriana, Barbara, Nadia and Susanna were 20 years old when they decided to join the armed struggle and leave behind their social life and their families in order to make the revolution the center and the aim of their existence. Today they have returned after many years in prison, and they try, each one of them, to recount their own experiences. They speak about the political reasons which initially sustained them, the conflicts, the doubts, and the moments of being torn apart which market out their lives as women caught up in the vortex of war. A course of events which ended in the condemnation of the armed struggle and the pain of the lives that were destroyed – their victims’ lives and their own.
On June 3, 1973, a man was murdered in a busy intersection of San Francisco’s Chinatown as part of an ongoing gang war. Chol Soo Lee, a 20-year-old Korean immigrant who had previous run-ins with the law, was arrested and convicted based on flimsy evidence and the eyewitness accounts of white tourists who couldn’t distinguish between Asian features. Sentenced to life in prison, Chol Soo Lee would spend years fighting to survive behind bars before journalist K.W. Lee took an interest in his case. The intrepid reporter’s investigation would galvanize a first-of-its-kind pan-Asian American grassroots movement to fight for Chol Soo Lee’s freedom, ultimately inspiring a new generation of social justice activists.
Errol Morris examines the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison.
An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.
The film is about a woman’s prison and shows how creativity transforms people and gives them strength.
A film narrated by a prison interview with long-jailed black radical Ojore Lutalo. Ojore touches on many issues, from what prisons are, to why he is in prison to the nature of the black radical struggle. Ojore was released in 2009, only to be rearrested a few months later as the alleged "Amtrak Terrorist" in Colorado. All charges were dropped after no one was able to provide any evidence of wrongdoing.
We discover a modest, almost derisory garden, located in the heart of the women's prison in Rennes, Brittany, France.
Pete and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966 and produced this rare document of of work songs by inmates of the Ellis Unit. Worksongs helped African American prisoners survive the grueling work demanded of them. With mechanization and integration, worksongs like these died out shortly after this film was made.
Errol Morris's unique documentary dramatically re-enacts the crime scene and investigation of a police officer's murder in Dallas.
Vraies gueules d'assassins
This documentary, which features Sergei Parajanov’s heartbreaking letters from prison, explores creativity among inmates and the art born in conditions designed to destroy all traces of selfhood.
Province of Ciudad Real, Spain, December 29, 1990. During the annual march to the Herrera de la Mancha prison, held in support of the members of the terrorist gang ETA imprisoned there, the Basque rock band Negu Gorriak holds a concert, which is recorded, edited on video and turned into a tool of vindication. Decades later, a film crew tries to elaborate a personal essay around this event and its meaning.
While Germany sits as one of the major democratic models, an ex-prisoner of the Stasi delivers from his former cell a frightening testimony that questions the sustainability of our contemporary democracies.