Fly by Light

For the first time, four DC youth play in mountain streams, sing under the stars, and confront the entrenched abuse of their past. As they return to the city, each faces an unforgiving series of roadblocks that challenge their efforts to build a better life. From street corners to mountaintops, Fly By Light is an intimate exploration of the emotional journey to rewrite a young person's future.

A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues)

A Luta Continua explains the military struggle of the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) against the Portuguese. Produced and narrated by American activists Robert Van Lierop, it details the relationship of the liberation to the wider regional and continental demands for self-determination against minority rule. It notes the complicit roles of foreign governments and companies in supporting Portugal against the African nationalists. Footage from the front lines of the struggle helps contextualize FRELIMO's African socialist ideology, specifically the role of the military in building the new nation, a commitment to education, demands for sexual equality, the introduction of medical aid into the countryside, and the role of culture in creating a single national identity.

A Calling to Care

A Calling to Care is the inspiring story of 55 year-old Grace Stanley, a Canadian nurse who left her home and prestigious career behind to answer a calling halfway around the world in Karachi, Pakistan. Teaching nursing to local women in a strict Muslim culture that forbids them to even to touch men is a formidable task. However, Grace challenges her own values and belief systems to find common ground with her students, helping them to excel and feel respect for themselves in a culture that doesn't respect them. Whether it is getting her hands painted with henna, swimming fully-clothed in the ocean, or marching bravely with them on International Women's Day, Grace bonds with her students in a very special way, and ultimately discovers how the West can learn a lot more from the Third World than she ever thought.

Children Are Too Young to Die

The film graphically calls attention to the brutal dangers of playing on top of elevators in public housing high-rise 30-story buildings in New York City. The slang is called "elevator surfing", "elevator action" or "elevator chicken" and it is a deadly game in which groups of children ride up and down the elevator shafts on top of a moving elevator car and jump from one moving car to the top of another. At times, a child waits in the pit of the elevator shaft. When a car pauses on the lowest floor, he grabs the electrical cable and rides upward. "Children Are Too Young To Die" begins with a bloody reenactment of an elevator accident in which a 10-year-old boy gets his arm cut off by the counterweight in an elevator shaft. The story unfolds and reveals real issues and deaths resulting from such dangerous activities.

Lo zebù e la stella

A zebu disappears while children are drawing it. They find it again in the woods. The notes of a harp accompany their multi-coloured joy. This short was made with children from a nursery school in Mantua. Playing with colours, the children seem to conquer the world.

Preschool to Prison

Preschool to Prison is a compelling examination of how the United States public school system is built and operated like prisons. Zero-tolerance policies are used to justify suspension and arrests that set up a pathway to send children of color and children with special needs from school to prison. Children are being suspended, restrained, dragged, physically manhandled, and subsequently arrested for minor offenses such as throwing candy on a school bus. These personal accounts from people affected by the school-to-prison pipeline give riveting tales about the generational impact on society.

Writing the Land

In this short documentary, a Musqueam elder rediscovers his Native language and traditions in the city of Vancouver, in the vicinity of which the Musqueam people have lived for thousands of years. Writing the Land captures the ever-changing nature of a modern city - the glass and steel towers cut against the sky, grass, trees and a sudden flash of birds in flight and the enduring power of language to shape perception and create memory.

Melting Snow

Two tons of snow—flown from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico in 1952 in order to “gift” Puerto Ricans a “white Christmas”—become a metaphor for the colonialist paternalism of America’s relationship to Puerto Rico.

Dance for All

The Making of a Japanese

Intimately following 1st and 6th graders at a public elementary school in Tokyo, we observe kids learning the traits necessary to become part of Japanese society.

A Pathway Forward

A year in the life of the unique Central High School Law and Government Magnet Program.

Son of the Streets

13-year-old Khodor is a child whose family tries to issue him an ID document that proves his existence and gives him the right to education, health-care and movement outside of the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut, Lebanon. Through the process, many of the family's old secrets are revealed.

Potlatch...a strict law bids us dance

Presents the history of the conflict between the Canadian government and the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Pacific over the ritual of the Potlatch. Archival photographs and films, wax roll sound recordings, police reports, the original potlatch files, and correspondence of agents form the basis of the reconstruction of period events, while the film centres on a Potlatch given today by the Cranmer family of Alert Bay.

Una identidad en absurdo Vol. 1

Guillermo Gómez Álvarez explores the identity politics of Puerto Rico via archival footage from various sources that clash with nine original songs from local independent musicians and a thematic analysis from a psychoanalyst and a historian. From the juxtaposition the absurd becomes coherent and the coherent becomes absurd as Puerto Rican identity is defined and rejected almost simultaneously.

Montezuma

Montezuma is a 2009 BBC Television documentary film in which Dan Snow examines the reign of the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II.

To Be and to Have

The documentary's title translates as "to be and to have", the two auxiliary verbs in the French language. It is about a primary school in the commune of Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, Puy-de-Dôme, France, the population of which is just over 200. The school has one small class of mixed ages (from four to twelve years), with a dedicated teacher, Georges Lopez, who shows patience and respect for the children as we follow their story through a single school year.

365 Without 377

Imposed under the British colonial rule in 1860, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalise any sexual acts between consenting adults of the same sex, stigmatising them as 'against the order of nature'. On July 2, 2009 the Delhi High Court passed a landmark judgment scrapping this clause, thus fulfilling the most basic demand of the Indian LGBTQ community, which had been fighting this law for the past 10 years. Three characters, Beena, Pallav and Abheena travel through the city of Bombay heading to the celebrations for the first anniversary of the historic verdict. '365 without 377' is the story of their journey towards freedom.

The Imperial Lullaby

The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.

Acadia Acadia?!?

In the late 1960s, with the triumph of bilingualism and biculturalism, New Brunswick's Université de Moncton became the setting for the awakening of Acadian nationalism after centuries of defeatism and resignation. Although 40% of the province's population spoke French, they had been unable to make their voices heard. The movement started with students-sit-ins, demonstrations against Parliament, run-ins with the police - and soon spread to a majority of Acadians. The film captures the behind-the-scenes action and the students' determination to bring about change. An invaluable document of the rebirth of a people.

Images of the Orient - "Vandalic Tourism"

Working from archives of private film footage from a trip to India by the upper class of the late 1920s, a period of strong anti-colonial outbreak, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi deconstruct the images and analyze the attitude and behavior of Westerners in the East.