The Feminist on Cellblock Y
2018
10
For three months, the journalist Jesús Quintero visits more than thirty prisons and interviews more than a hundred prisoners in order to discover what life is like for those who live in them.
A convicted felon builds a feminist movement from behind bars at an all-male prison in Soledad, California.
The Feminist on Cellblock Y
2018
10
Released from prison, former oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky expounds on his newfound freedom and complex relationship with Vladimir Putin.
Chodorkowskis neue Freiheit
2016
0
Errol Morris examines the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Standard Operating Procedure
2008
6
In 1981, iconic Turkish film director escapes jail to France, his last work re-creating with other exiles the prison lives they left behind.
Ballad of Exiles: Yılmaz Güney
2016
0
Metamorphosis is a documentary-style film giving the true account Bill Troester and the transformation he experienced by Jesus out of a life of violence, crime and drug addiction.
Metamorphosis
7
A compelling look at the choices that lead to incarceration and the reality of being locked up in Pelican Bay State Prison.
Extreme Consequences: The Reality of Prison Life
2007
0
The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.
The Big One
1997
6
A surreal look at the day-to-day life of American soldiers stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba through the eyes of a traveling circus troupe cleared to perform there.
Guantanamo Circus
2013
0
There are 100,000 US citizens in solitary confinement across the country, a staggering number prompting comment from both President Obama and the Pope. Situated in rural Virginia, 300 miles from any urban center, Red Onion State Prison is one of over 40 supermax prisons across the US built to hold prisoners in eight-by-ten-foot cells for 23 hours a day. Filmed over the course of one year, this eye-opening film braids stark prison imagery, stories from correction officers, and intimate reflections from the men who are locked up in isolation. The inmates share the paths that led them to prison and their daily struggles to maintain their sanity.
Solitary
2016
6
Derek and Nancy Haysom were brutally murdered in their house in Lynchburg, Virginia, on March 30, 1985. Suspicion fell on their daughter Elizabeth and her boyfriend Jens Söring. They flee to Europe, but are caught and extradited to the U.S. Elizabeth is sentenced to 90 years in jail for incitement to murder, Jens Söring to two life sentences. Karin Steinberger, Marcus Vetter and their team spent over three years researching this case, which achieved world-wide notoriety. They uncovered new evidence, including the fact none of the blood samples found at the scene of the crime belonged to Jens Söring.
Das Versprechen
2016
6
With unprecedented access, this documentary looks into the hidden world of one of Russia's most impenetrable and remote institutions - a maximum security prison exclusively for murderers. Deep inside the land of the gulags, this is the end of the line for some of Russia's most dangerous criminals - 260 men who have collectively killed nearly 800 people. The film delves deep into the mind and soul of some of these prisoners. In brutally frank and uncensored interviews the inmates speak of their crimes, life and death, redemption and remorselessness, insanity and hope. The film tracks them though their unrelenting days over several months, lifting the veil on one of Russia's most secretive subcultures to reveal what happens when a man is locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours every day, for life. A startling insight into inscrutable minds and the forbidding world they have been condemned to. (Storyville)
The Condemned
2013
6
Welcome to Florence, Arizona: a cowboy town with a prison problem. Just 8,500 residents call the tiny community home—but over 17,000 inmates live there, housed in nine jails spread out over a sprawling industrial prison complex. The economic fate of the town’s inhabitants is inextricably linked with the prisons—and the townspeople are not necessarily happy about it. Director Andrea B. Scott follows four colorful characters whose lives are tied up with the prisons, including the town’s aspiring mayor, a retired correctional officer and speed shooter, a barber who longs for the town’s free-spirited cowboy days, and troubled teen Marcus, whose parents met through their prison careers. “Florence, Arizona” is a richly drawn, humorous look at a singular small town whose Wild West roots are still very much alive in its outlaw identity today. -TCFF database
Florence, Arizona
2015
0
Waiting for Godot in San Quentin
1998
0
The film explores the destruction of a unique train station in Zurich and the construction of the new prison and police centre in its place. From the perspective of the filmmaker’s window, and with testimony from prisoners awaiting deportation, the film probes how we deal with the extinction of history and its replacement with total security.
Nemesis
2020
7
A documentary on reformed ex-con Rick Maylender and his attempts to help troubled youths by taking them out of their environment and showing them how to find and repair abandoned classic vehicles.
Last Chance Garage
2012
0
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.
Tehachapi
2024
7
An intimate portrait of mothers and daughters and the effects of trauma, Jacinta follows a young woman in and out of prison as she attempts to break free from an inherited cycle of addiction, incarceration, and crime.
Jacinta
2021
8
British documentarian Nick Broomfield creates a follow-up piece to his 1992 documentary of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a highway prostitute who was convicted of killing six men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. Interviewing an increasingly mentally unstable Wuornos, Broomfield captures the distorted mind of a murderer whom the state of Florida deems of sound mind -- and therefore fit to execute. Throughout the film, Broomfield includes footage of his testimony at Wuornos' trial.
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
2003
6
Sensationalized in the media as a high profile catfishing case involving an NBA superstar and an aspiring model, Shelly Chartier was portrayed as a master manipulator who used social media as her weapon. Through the sensitive and intelligent lens of Indigenous directors Lisa Jackson and Shane Belcourt, the sensationalism is swept aside to reveal something much more compelling and complex - the story of a young woman caught in historical circumstances beyond her control and how she struggles to rebuild her life after incarceration.
Indictment: The Crimes of Shelly Chartier
2017
0
Rosa is a Mexican woman who, at the age of 17, migrated illegally to Austin, Texas. Some years later, she was jailed under suspicion of murder and then taken to trial. This film demonstrates how the judicial process, the verdict, the separation from her family, and the helplessness of being imprisoned in a foreign country make Rosa’s story an example of the hard life of Mexican migrants in the United States.
Mi vida dentro
2007
7