The Central Park Five

Sister Hearts

Maryam Henderson-Uloho spent thirteen years in prison in Louisiana, seven in solitary confinement. After her release she struggled to find housing or employment. She began selling secondhand goods out of a suitcase on a street corner in New Orleans. In just three years, she grew her business to a brick-and-mortar thrift store—one that also provides housing and employment for other formerly-incarcerated women. She calls those women—and her store—Sister Hearts.

Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison

Cash's concert at Folsom State Prison in California in January 1968 touched a raw nerve in the American psyche and made him a national hero at a troubled time in American history. Using the stark images of rock photographer Jim Marshall, graphic techniques, archive footage and interviews with Merle Haggard, Cash's daughter Rosanne, band members Marshall Grant and WS 'Fluke' Holland, alongside former inmates of the prison, the film documents this explosive concert, the live album that followed and a transformative moment in the lives of Cash, the inmates of Folsom Prison and the American nation in the troubled year of 1968.

Pé de Pato: As (in)Justiças de um Cidadão Comum

Use Your Eyes

“Use Your Eyes” is a police training film produced by the Alhambra Police Department, California, in 1970. It is intended to demonstrate to police officers how to search a residence for evidence of marijuana use, and what rights they have to search the property once certain prima facia evidence is established.

Die Enkeltrick Betrüger

Grandchild fraudsters scare their victims on the phone with so-called "shock calls". The losses run into millions. Month after month. Many victims are left severely traumatized. But the scam has a weak point. And the izzy team has found it. During a year-long investigation, izzy figurehead Cedric Schild pretends to be an elderly person and supposed victim on the phone. This not only makes for a few laughs, but also drives the perpetrators crazy - at the same time, the editorial team penetrates deep into the structures of the criminal clans. Thanks to more than 1200 minutes of recorded conversations from real shock calls, the izzy film "Die Enkeltrick Betrüger" shows all the tricks used by fraudsters for the first time and thus makes an important contribution to prevention. In cooperation with the law enforcement authorities, the perpetrators are arrested in front of the cameras.

3 ½ Minutes, 10 Bullets

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving November 2012, four boys in a red SUV pull into a gas station after spending time at the mall buying sneakers and talking to girls. With music blaring, one boy exits the car and enters the store, a quick stop for a soda and a pack of gum. A man and a woman pull up next to the boys in the station, making a stop for a bottle of wine. The woman enters the store and an argument breaks out when the driver of the second car asks the boys to turn the music down. 3½ minutes and ten bullets later, one of the boys is dead. 3½ MINUTES dissects the aftermath of this fatal encounter.

Chicago 1968

American Experience looks at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where Vice President Hubert Humphrey won his party's nomination for president amid massive civil unrest and violence perpetrated by Chicago Police and anti-Vietnam War protesters.

The Beast

Each year, hundreds of Central American migrants try to cross the northern border of Mexico on the freight train known as the Beast. That trip is usually the most dangerous journey of their lives. On the road many lost their dreams, their body parts and even their lives. Crossing Mexico is their biggest challenge, here are victims of discrimination, violence and even murder. This film portrays the suffering of those people who travel in search of a better life.

God and Devil on Top of the Wall

Imagine a prison with some ten thousand prisoners, many of them dangerous and, to control them, only a few unarmed employees. Small in number, these employees work in shifts. They are almost prisoners themselves, in a routine of tension, but also of humor and emotion. This prison was all too real. While it was in existence, the Carandiru was the largest prison in Latin America, administered by a reduced number of employees. The documentary shows, from the point of view of these few employees, holding the keys, how the prison operated: the delicate balance in the relationship with the prisoners, affinity among employees, moments of tension and, even, of happiness. These are stories told by former employees, among them, Dr. Dráuzio Varella, author of the book Estação Carandiru. These are the secrets of a place that no longer exists.

Two Doors

The documentary Two Doors traces the Yongsan Tragedy of 2009, which took the lives of five evictees and one police SWAT unit member. Left with no choice but to climb up a steel watchtower in an appeal to the right to live, the evictees were able to come down to the ground a mere 25 hours after they had started to build the watchtower, as cold corpses. And the surviving evictees became lawbreakers. The announcement of the Public Prosecutors’ Office that the cause of the tragedy lay in the illegal and violent demonstration by the evictees, who had climbed up the watchtower with fire bombs, clashed with voices of criticism that an excessive crackdown by government power had turned a crackdown operation into a tragedy.

Fragment of a Memory

Capturing the early recording process of the compilation album “Prison Songs: Nyanyian yang Dibungkam”, this film is a collaborative work of Komunitas Taman 65 Bali, archiving history through dialogue with composers and people knowledgeable with the songs of Pekambingan penitentiary, Denpasar.

Champagne

The true story of a young teenage girl whose mother is incarcerated for murder. Living in a Catholic Children's home run by an order of nuns, she provides poignant commentary about her mother, her own situation and her outlook for the future.

Escaping Satan's Web

In the mid 80s during the Satanic Panic era Pastor Flether A. Brothers who was director of Freedom Village USA interviewed Satanic teen killer Sean Sellers for an exclusive video only offered through Brothers Ministry. Brothers interviews Sellers and discusses what "Satan doesn't want you to know". This video was one of the highlights of the Satanic Panic epidemic first started by Geraldo Rivera in the mid 1980s. The clamshell case bodly [sic] professes "This tape may save your childs [sic] life and even your own!" […] This tape is hard to find and the interview with Sellers has rarely ever been seen outside of the owners of this release. The clamshell and video we have is in perfect condition and has pretty much only been played once in 25 years. (serialkillersink.net)

Black and Blue

A documentary about police brutality that follows a DJ beat up by off duty DEA agents, a man arrested for filming a police officer, and many others as they fight for justice for their loved ones.

Chodorkowskis neue Freiheit

Released from prison, former oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky expounds on his newfound freedom and complex relationship with Vladimir Putin.

Free Chol Soo Lee

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.

Do You Remember Revolution?

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.

The Feminist on Cellblock Y

A convicted felon builds a feminist movement from behind bars at an all-male prison in Soledad, California.

A Cop Movie

This documentary walks the line between fact and fiction, delving into corruption in the Mexican police through the experiences of two officers.

Louis Theroux: Behind Bars

For two weeks, Theroux visits the San Quentin State Prison.