Social & External
A moll, imprisoned after participating in a bank robbery, helps with a breakout plot.
One decade after THE FARM: ANGOLA, USA (Oscar nominated 1999; two-time Emmy winner 1999), we go back inside Louisiana's maximum security penitentiary, to catch up with our characters' lives. While the theme of THE FARM was "to err is human, to forgive divine", we now delve more deeply and find hope for "reconciliation and release". Angola is America's oldest and largest prison, with 5,000 inmates, most of whom have received life -, or death-, sentences for violent crimes, and will never leave Angola. THE FARM continues to provide extraordinary opportunities for learning through storytelling.
After greedy men have Edmound Dantes unjustly imprisoned for 20 years for innocently delivering a letter entrusted to him, he escapes to revenge himself on them.
A blue-collar worker on New York's depressed waterfront finds his life changed after he saves a woman attempting suicide.
After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.
An epic tale spanning forty years in the life of Celie, an African-American woman living in the South who survives incredible abuse and bigotry. After Celie's abusive father marries her off to the equally debasing 'Mister' Albert Johnson, things go from bad to worse, leaving Celie to find companionship anywhere she can. She perseveres, holding on to her dream of one day being reunited with her sister in Africa.
Incarcerated participants in a mental health experiment watch videos of sunset-soaked beaches, wildflowers and forests on loop, prompting them to reflect on isolation and wilderness. Equal parts meditation and provocation, Blue Room identifies the damage done by withholding access to the outdoors and how we are all prisoners when the essential human need for communion with nature is denied.
When illegal card dealer and recovering heroin addict Frankie Machine gets out of prison, he decides to straighten up. Armed with nothing but an old drum set, Frankie tries to get honest work as a drummer. But when his former employer and his old drug dealer re-enter his life, Frankie finds it hard to stay clean and eventually finds himself succumbing to his old habits.
In order to foil a terrorist plot, an FBI agent undergoes facial transplant surgery and assumes the identity of a criminal mastermind. The plan turns sour when the criminal wakes up prematurely and seeks revenge.
People in the future live in a totalitarian society. A technician named THX 1138 lives a mundane life between work and taking a controlled consumption of drugs that the government uses to make puppets out of people. As THX is without drugs for the first time he has feelings for a woman and they start a secret relationship.
A death row inmate turns for spiritual guidance to a local nun in the days leading up to his scheduled execution for the murders of a young couple.
The true story of Henry Hill, a half-Irish, half-Sicilian Brooklyn kid who is adopted by neighbourhood gangsters at an early age and climbs the ranks of a Mafia family under the guidance of Jimmy Conway.
20 volunteers agree to take part in a seemingly well-paid experiment advertised by the university. It is supposed to be about aggressive behavior in an artificial prison situation. A journalist senses a story behind the ad and smuggles himself in among the test subjects. They are randomly divided into prisoners and guards. What seems like a game at the beginning soon turns into bloody seriousness.
A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgängers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.
Michel takes up pickpocketing on a lark and is arrested soon after. His mother dies shortly after his release, and despite the objections of his only friend, Jacques, and his mother's neighbor Jeanne, Michel teams up with a couple of petty thieves in order to improve his craft. With a police inspector keeping an eye on him, Michel also tries to get a straight job, but the temptation to steal is hard to resist.
Sheriff Holt is determined to prove that prisoners can be rehabilitated and released into society in this prison drama. In charge of a new kind of program, the sheriff places inmates in a clean environment and makes them build a road. Despite the improved conditions, the criminals continue to pull off a few shady shenanigans as an innocent man who is sent there soon discovers.
An intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in the French Alps (Chartreuse Mountains). The idea for the film was proposed to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. The Carthusians finally contacted Gröning 16 years later to say they were now willing to permit Gröning to shoot the movie, if he was still interested.
Following the arrest of her mother, Ramona, young Vanessa Lutz decides to go in search of her estranged grandmother. On the way, she is given a ride by school counselor Bob Wolverton. During the journey, Lutz begins to realize that Bob is the notorious I-5 Killer and manages to escape by shooting him several times. Wounded but still very much alive, Bob pursues Lutz across the state in this modern retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.
Two prostitutes in a small corrupt South American town, falls in love with a freedom fighter, posing as a guard at the local prison. Run by the corrupt Governor and a sadistic wardress.
A young Frenchwoman Claire, resting with her friend on an island in the Mediterranean Sea, becoms the victim of harassment by the local police commissioner Castes. Accused for disturbing public order, and then in the drug trade, she gets to the women's prison. Vacation turns into a nightmare ...
Biarritz, 1933. Charm and talent help small-time swindler Serge Alexandre, alias Stavisky, to bribe his way into the centre of French political power. But when his great scam involving millions gets exposed, he brings the government to the verge of collapse and the country to the brink of civil war.
The story of Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottingham, who uncovers one of the most significant social scandals in recent times – the forced migration of children from the United Kingdom to Australia and other Commonwealth countries. Almost singlehandedly, Margaret reunited thousands of families, brought authorities to account and worldwide attention to an extraordinary miscarriage of justice.
A second trial begins in November 1975 against French left-wing revolutionary Pierre Goldman, accused of several armed robberies and the death of two chemists.
Fr. Hugh O'Flaherty is a Vatican official in 1943-45 who has been hiding downed pilots, escaped prisoners of war, and Italian resistance families. His activities become so large that the Nazis decide to assassinate him the next time he leaves the Vatican.
When a feared judge of the French court, Xavier Racine, encounters a French-Danish juror, Ditte Lorensen-Coteret, at a murder trial, their shared past is slowly uncovered.
When Juan Catalan is arrested for a murder he insists he didn't commit, he builds his case for innocence around unexpected raw footage.
Alec Graham is sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend Jennie, with whom he spent a weekend at the English country home of the parents of his friend Brian Stanford. Alec’s father, David Graham, a not-so-successful writer and alcoholic who has neglected his son in the past, flies in from Canada to visit his son on death row. David then goes on a quest to try and clear his son’s name while battling “the bottle.”
Fed up with her small-town marriage, a woman goes after the big time and gets mixed up with the mob.
The true story of fraudulent Washington, D.C. journalist Stephen Glass, who rose to meteoric heights as a young writer in his 20s, becoming a staff writer at The New Republic for three years. Looking for a short cut to fame, Glass concocted sources, quotes and even entire stories, but his deception did not go unnoticed forever, and eventually, his world came crumbling down.
After writing for Cahiers du cinéma, a young Jean-Luc Godard decides making films is the best film criticism. He convinces producer Georges de Beauregard to fund a low-budget feature, and creates a treatment with fellow New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut about a gangster couple. The result? Breathless, one of the first features of the Nouvelle Vague era of French cinema.
A joinery instructor at a rehab center refuses to take a new teen as his apprentice, but then begins to follow the boy through the hallways and streets.
Young women toiling in a factory are exposed to hazardous material which takes a disastrous toll on their health.
Semi-true story of the Hollywood murder that occurred at a star-studded gathering aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1924.
A corrupt D.A. with governatorial ambitions is annoyed by an investigative reporter's criticism of his criminal activities and decides to frame the reporter for manslaughter in order to silence him.
In a moment of madness a middle-aged, married and respectable pharmacist kills a young woman who is sun-bathing by a lake. Unable to take in what he has done, he flees from the scene of the crime and behaves as if nothing has happened. Eventually her boyfriend is charged with the crime and, in a strange twist of fate, the killer finds himself serving on the jury.
In 1950s England, slow-witted Derek Bentley falls in with a group of petty criminals led by Chris Craig, a teenager with a fondness for American gangster films. Chris and Derek's friendship leads to their involvement in the true case which would forever shake England's belief in capital punishment.
The Black Rebels Motorcycle Club ride into the small California town of Wrightsville, eager to raise hell. Brooding gang leader Johnny Strabler takes a liking to Kathie, the daughter of the local lawman, as another club rolls into town.
At the tense 1938 Munich Conference, former friends who now work for opposing governments become reluctant spies racing to expose a Nazi secret.
A documentary on a former Miss Wyoming who is charged with abducting and imprisoning a young Mormon Missionary.
While serving as a juror in a high profile murder trial, family man Justin Kemp finds himself struggling with a serious moral dilemma…one he could use to sway the jury verdict and potentially convict—or free—the accused killer.
