Action J

Sicko

A documentary about the corrupt health care system in The United States whose main goal is to make profit even if it means losing people’s lives. "The more people you deny health insurance, the more money we make" is the business model for health care providers in America.

Visions of Europe

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

Losing It

Tracking missing socks in the European Union.

Little Injustices: Laura Nader Looks at the Law

Anthropologist Laura Nader's first field trip to a Zapotec Indian village in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the late 1950s, led her to study problem-solving in the local courts. There, "little injustices" were the meat of everyday courtroom life.

Stress: Portrait of a Killer

Over the last three decades, science has been advancing our understanding of stress: how it impacts our bodies and how our social standing can make us more or less susceptible. From baboon troops on the plains of Africa, to neuroscience labs at Stanford University, scientists are revealing just how lethal stress can be. Research tells us that the impact of stress can be found deep within us, shrinking our brains, adding fat to our bellies, even unraveling our chromosomes. Understanding how stress works can help us figure out ways to combat it and how to live a life free of the tyranny of this contemporary plague. In Stress: Portrait of a Killer, scientific discoveries in the field and in the lab prove that stress is not just a state of mind, but something measurable and dangerous.

Minerva

Severely battered from the Beirut Port Explosion on August 4th, Minerva passed away eight days later. Her son Joseph, while still grieving for his loss, sunk into a long and absurd bureaucratic path through the inept system that disowned his mother as a victim of the blast. Minerva is gone. The explosion has snatched her soul, and the city walls have not yet recognized her as a martyr. There is no poster of her smiling face among those of the victims. Their faces are memories that will haunt us for the rest of our lives. Perhaps her son, devastated by her passing, seeks to etch her image into the city's memory. Perhaps he is seeking some confession to the crime. This is a place that casts out its children, whether dead or alive.

Blix Not Bombs

When the world was on fire, they called Hans Blix. This is how the Swedish diplomat is introduced in ‘Blix Not Bombs’. And if there is one fire he is particularly associated with, it is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prior to the invasion, Blix led the delegation of UN officials to find out whether weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq. And it is the invasion and its consequences that we get Blix’s formidably insightful analysis of in a thorough and honest conversation with director Greta Stocklassa. Few others understand the complexities of international politics on the world stage like Blix, and none can explain it with his intellectual elegance. But Stocklassa’s film is also a portrait of the man himself, now an elderly gentleman, writing his memoirs, walking with a cane and watching birds through the window of his apartment. His outlook and commitment is as urgent as ever, as Blix takes stock of the invasion of Iraq and the state of the world today.

A Good American

A Good American tells the story of the best code-breaker the USA ever had and how he and a small team within NSA created a surveillance tool that could pick up any electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets and render results in real-time while keeping the privacy as demanded by the US constitution.

Juvenile Court

"Juvenile Court" shows the complex variety of cases before the Memphis Juvenile Court: foster home placement, drug abuse, armed robbery, child abuse, and sexual offenses. The sequences illustrate such issues as community protection vs. the desire for rehabilitation, the range and the limits of the choices available to the court, the psychology of the offender, and the constitutional and procedural questions involved in administering a juvenile court.

Welfare

WELFARE shows the nature and complexity of the welfare system in sequences illustrating the staggering diversity of problems that constitute welfare: housing, unemployment, divorce, medical and psychiatric problems, abandoned and abused children, and the elderly. These issues are presented in a context where welfare workers as well as clients struggle to cope with and interpret the laws and regulations that govern their work and life.

The Spanish Flu: The Invisible Enemy

In April 1918, a disease of unknown origin swept across the five continents. In 18 months, millions of lives that had not been taken by the war were swept away by a virus that would cause the worst pandemic in history: the Spanish flu.

Berlin Ulysses

Successfully completed your studies - now what? Raffly already has a lucrative job offer from a large German company, but neither an apartment nor a work permit.

16 Acres

The dramatic inside story of the monumental collision of interests at Ground Zero in the decade after 9/11.

Nila's Dream in the Garden of Eden

Leyla and her six-year-old daughter Nila live in the holy city of Mashhad in Iran. Nila is the result of a temporary marriage, which allows a man to marry a woman even if he is already married. Children born from such a relationship are legally non-existent. As long as the father does not recognize the child, no birth certificate can be issued and Nila cannot attend school. The documentary depicts Leyla's tireless efforts to clarify Nila's legal status in order to offer her a perspective for her future. In a never-ending bureaucratic battle, Leyla fights not only against the legal system, but also against a judgmental society.

Sacrés Fonctionnaires !

Paperland: The Bureaucrat Observed

Bureaucracy shapes our lives and guides us from the cradle to the grave. This documentary lays bare the idiosyncrasies of bureaucracy, whether in Canada, Austria, Hungary, the Vatican or the Virgin Islands. It also attempts to make the functioning of the public service more comprehensible. The absurdities of bureaucratic behaviour are exposed with humour and irreverence.

Ruurdt

In 2023, there were an estimated 30.6 thousand homeless people. This number continues to rise at an alarming rate. One of them is the headstrong Ruurdt. He has difficulty getting help and cannot adapt well to our society. He is now also in danger of losing the houseboat that was assigned to him. 'Ruurdt' is an intimate portrait of a man on the fringes of our society.

Open to the Public

The Institute for Public Housing in Naples employs about 100 people. When the office is open to the public, employees receive residents who live in the 40,000 houses managed by the institute. Their task is to find solutions to citizens’ problems and trigger the bureaucratic procedures to solve them. But managing these chaotic lives within rigid legal structures is not an easy task and employees are often forced to resort to a singular art: “bureaucratic compromise”. (Tënk)

Your Call Is Important To Us

The only thing colder than a Canadian winter is Canadian bureaucracy (probably). Based on five real life stories, Romy Boutin St-Pierre and Joe Nadeau pay homage to the nation-wide stress headache of phone calls with the government in this surprising short.

Civil Servant P327JUM

Johan Grum is a civil servant. He loves to process different matters and to read reports. Most of all he likes the everyday routines when nothing out of the ordinary happens.