An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.
Repping best view to date into the world of the Indian eunuch, “Between the Lines: India’s Third Gender” may not answer all the questions it poses, but helmer Thomas Wartmann provides an intimate glimpse at a community whose members are considered pariahs and conduits of supernatural force. Following shutterbug Anita Khemka in her quest to discover why these castrated men fascinate and repel, docu concentrates on three personalities and uses them as guides to their highly stratified world. Under its nautch skirts, film has strong enough legs to step out into international arthouses.
A documentary exploring sexism and patriarchy in Kosova.
La trans de la patria
In the coffee-growing village of Santuario, Colombia, lives an indigenous transgender community. That is where Juliana and Berómica were banished due to the prejudices of their own strongly Catholic community.
They're the real 'goodfellas': 'Joe Dogs' Iannuzzi, Tommy DelGiorno, 'Big Dom' Lofaro. For the first time on television, Mafia turncoats give personal accounts of life inside the Mob. In this shocking documentary, five high-ranking informants tell tales of murder, brutality, greed and vanity--and why they broke the Sicilian code of honor. The first generation of the American Mafia stood on the foundation of loyalty and a code of silence. The second and third generations traded their Sicilian traditions for government protection and instant personal gain. MOB STORIES presents five chilling narratives from five members of the underworld, most of whom are overwhelmed with fear and paranoia with the exception of “Fat Jackie”, a loyal lifelong mobster. Father and son team, Alan and Marc Levin, direct and produce an honest and personal portrayal of the demise of the Mafia.
Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Using the audio-visual approaches of essay film, first-person cinema vérité, staged actions, and decades of home movies, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current does not seek to investigate a crime, but creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.
This gripping, atmospheric documentary recounts the infamous trial, conviction and eventual acquittal of Seattle native Amanda Knox for the 2007 murder of a British exchange student in Italy.
A transgender Iranian-American embarks on a road trip to discover the everyday realities of being trans in conservative states across the United States. As he travels through some of the country’s most anti-trans states, he uncovers the struggles and triumphs that define being trans in America today.
A young Holocaust survivor who descends into crime; an Italian-Jewish engineer who wants to see a movie; a German Christian who forgives her husband’s murderer because of her Buddhist faith; and a Jewish woman who carries on an affair with a Nazi and exposes members of the resistance so that she and her children may survive: their fates intersect when two bullets are fired into a queue of people waiting to see “A Man Escaped” at Tel Aviv’s Cinema North in 1957.
Two bodies and one mind, this is the extraordinary story of one pair of conjoined twins in today's world.
The shocking murder of 21-year-old British backpacker, Grace Millane, in New Zealand grabbed headlines around the world in 2018, as did the ensuing investigation and trial. This chilling true-crime documentary revisits the night of her tragic murder with previously unseen footage and expert analysis, exploring the alarming, regressive attitudes laid bare in the subsequent trial, and highlighting important, broader issues of violence against women in today’s society.
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
A riveting expose about the personalities of murderers and their motives. This 72 minute film covers the McDonalds' restaurant massacre, President Reagan's assassination attempt, serial murderer Henry Lee Lucas and others.
Fred Martinez was a Navajo youth slain at the age of 16 by a man who bragged to his friends that he 'bug-smashed a fag'. But Fred was part of an honored Navajo tradition - the 'nadleeh', or 'two-spirit', who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits.
Black Box BRD steps back into German history, showing the Federal Republic of Germany of the 70s and 80s. The country is polarized due to the power struggle of the German state and the "Red Army Faction". Society is torn, the fronts are irreconcilable. The life stories of both Wolfgang Grams and Alfred Herrhausen are tragically linked to this era. Grams is the one who takes up arms for moral rigor; Herrhausen however seizes power and dies when powerful.
A documentary about the macho owner of an auto wrecking company in Florida who goes into hiding from the law as a woman setting off a bizarre journey of self discovery. Undergoing a risky sex change operation, Gloria becomes a dominatrix, a transgender activist and finds a gender-bending love all while trying to reconcile with her dysfunctional family.
A documentary that shows a body in social and family isolation, but the distance is not caused by the coronavirus, but by being a transvestite. Renata Carvalho is a character of herself, her voice tells us the historicity/transcestrality of her body and the structural transphobia.
In the early hours of New Year’s Day 1998, Olivia Hope and Ben Smart boarded a yacht with a man, and were never seen again. The case enthralled the nation, and 18 months later Picton man Scott Watson was convicted of their murders. Watson has always maintained his innocence. Legal expert Dr. Chris Gallavin re-examines the case from a fresh perspective. Going back to the night of New Year’s Eve, 1997.
Julia is a young transgender woman who left her home country of Lithuania. Now living in Germany, she walks the streets of Berlin, working as a prostitute to survive. This documentary revisits Julia over a ten-year period of her life.