Tehachapi

French visual artist-director JR (co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary FACES PLACES with the legendary Agnès Varda) situates his latest social-art intervention in a Southern Californian supermax prison, where he has imagined an enormously ambitious collaboration with the facility’s inmates.

Out of State

Out of State is the unlikely story of native Hawaiians men discovering their native culture as prisoners in the desert of Arizona, 3,000 miles, and across the ocean, from their island home.

Behind Our Walls

In America, the prison system has become a place of retribution, not restoration. Inmates are often treated as sub-human, and often find themselves feeling hopeless. But a small midwest college decides to give inmates an opportunity to earn a bachelor's degree. Experience the journey of the resilient inmates as they fight incredible odds to change their lives – and change the system.

Turned Out: Sexual Assault Behind Bars

A look beyond the shock and inhumanity of prison rape to the intricate social hierarchy that keeps it alive. A filmmaker goes deep inside Alabama's infamous Limestone penitentiary to uncover the long-term causes and consequences of prison rape. With a startling lack of inhibition, five inmates reveal the workings of an elaborate inner society.

The Feminist on Cellblock Y

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

Attica

Follows the largest prison uprising in US history, conducting dozens of new interviews with inmates, journalists, and other witnesses.

Chasing Bonnie & Clyde

'Don't build prisons, they cost too much!' In this era of Great Recession, the conservative and tough-on-crime State of Texas takes an unprecedented path by becoming a social justice leader with programs that rehabilitate offenders. Looks like rape, abuse and death are no longer parts of the solution for modern-day Bonnie and Clyde...

45 días en Jarbar

The plastic artist Cesar Arechiga recreates his living room and studio in the maximum-security prison of Puente Grande, Jalisco, in which fifteen inmates learn about paper production, clay modeling, sculpting and painting. Through this artistic interaction, they share their personal experiences of how they became involved with the world of drug trafficking.

Rikers

This film from Bill Moyers is the first documentary to focus exclusively on people formerly detained in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island Jail. They tell their compelling stories direct to the camera, revealing the violent arc of the Rikers experience – from the trauma of entry to extortion and control by inmates, to oppressive corrections officers, violence and solitary confinement.

2018 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Documentary

The year’s most spectacular Documentary short films.

Deus e o Diabo em Cima da Muralha

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.

Serving Life

SERVING LIFE documents an extraordinary hospice program where hardened criminals care for dying fellow inmates. Narrated and executive produced by Academy Award®-winner Forest Whitaker, the film takes viewers inside Louisiana's maximum security prison at Angola, where the average sentence is more than 90 years.

Strangeways: Britain's Toughest Prison Riot

Twenty-five years after the biggest riot in British penal history, this film brings together the ringleaders of the trouble with the prison guards they battled with over three weeks of anarchy that brought Strangeways to its knees. For the first time, these events are told through unparalleled access to the people at the heart of the riot - ex-inmates, prison officers and the governor himself - createing a compelling story of the struggle for power between the authorities and the hardcore prisoners who ultimately took their protest onto the prison roof. The stand-off that followed is documented until the final moments, when the siege was ended in a dramatic takedown in front of rolling news cameras.

Tipularen sehaska kanta

Going to the doctor to make a diagnosis or to have a treatment is a common thing in the outside world. But for every prisoner it is a very difficult or impossible path. Lander Garro, the director, turns to those who have lived the experience of being ill in prison to better understand its consequences. It uses a language that goes beyond political discourse, exploring the helplessness of prisoners whose right to health is limited from an emotional point of view, through cinematographic tools. 'Tipularen sehaska kanta' ('Nana de la cebolla' - 'Lullaby of the onion') more than a political film is an artistic film, narrated in the first person and from the entrails. Based on the poem 'Nana de la cebolla' by the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández, who died in prison in 1942, the film makes a historical analogy: if it didn't make sense to die in prison in 1936, does it make sense today?

London Symphony

Impressionistic glimpses of London life from early morning to rush hour.

The Prison Within

Survivors of violent crimes and prisoners incarcerated for murder connect to undergo astonishing transformations, liberating themselves from the debilitating constraints of trauma, and shattering preconceptions of "us and them."

From Prison: Young Devil Worshipers

Devil worship? Could it be real? Follow up to Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground.

My Marlboro City

Brindisi, Italy: a focal point in cigarette smuggling. The director returns to her hometown to see what's left of the past and what lies in store for the future.

Enquête sur les camps perdus du IIIème Reich

Temps mort

An exchange of video messages between an artist and an inmate, a surprising and intimate portrait from behind prison walls.