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.
Narrated by Uncle Jack Charles and seen through the eyes of Indigenous prisoners at Victoria’s Fulham Correctional Centre, this documentary explores how art and culture can empower Australia's First Nations people to transcend their unjust cycles of imprisonment.
The Art of Incarceration
2021
0
Rage!
1980
7
71 years in the making, this feature documentary experience reveals the extraordinary life journey of Hollywood's most unlikely hero, Danny Trejo.
Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo
2019
7
Set entirely inside Folsom Prison, The Work follows three men during four days of intensive group therapy with convicts, revealing an intimate and powerful portrait of authentic human transformation that transcends what we think of as rehabilitation.
The Work
2017
7
Five transgender women share their prison experiences. Interviews with attorneys, doctors, and other experts are also included.
Cruel and Unusual
2006
5
Thomas, the son of a prison warden, falls for Martin, one of the prison inmates. After Martin is released, they try to build a relationship and a life together but, no one will leave them alone.
Die Konsequenz
1977
6
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
A male prison escapee heads for his hidden loot, electronically attached to a female prisoner.
Wedlock
1991
5
A New Understanding explores the treatment of end-of-life anxiety in terminally ill cancer patients using psilocybin, a psychoactive compound found in some mushrooms, to facilitate deeply spiritual experiences. The documentary explores the confluence of science and spirituality in the first psychedelic research studies since the 1970s with terminally ill patients. As a society we devote a great deal of attention to treating cancer, but very little to treating the human being who is dying of cancer.
A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin
2015
7
An inside look at the notorious Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where one of the U.S.’s only in-prison college programs, Hudson Link, offers long-time inmates an education – and a new lease on life.
The University of Sing Sing
2011
5
A young female prison guard finds out that her first assignment is to San Quentin, one of the toughest prisons in the country.
Women of San Quentin
1983
1
Four-time Emmy winner John Kastner was granted unprecedented access to the Brockville facility for 18 months, allowing 46 patients and 75 staff to share their experiences with stunning frankness. The result is two remarkable documentaries: the first, NCR: Not Criminally Responsible, premiered at Hot Docs in the spring of 2013 and follows the story of a violent patient released into the community. The second film, Out of Mind, Out of Sight, returns to the Brockville Mental Health Centre to profile four patients, two men and two women, as they struggle to gain control over their lives so they can return to a society that often fears and demonizes them.
Out of Mind, Out of Sight
2014
6
A look at the prison breakout of Richard Matt and David Sweat from Clinton Correctional facility, as well as a look back at some of the most daring and ingenious prison breaks in American history.
America's Greatest Prison Breaks
2015
6
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
6
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
As beautiful and sleek as it is deadly, 52 Blocks merits special conservation efforts as the United States' only existing native martial culture, as it is indeed, the jazz of the martial arts world. Across the African diaspora, there are manifestations of African-derived warrior-dances, capoeira in brazil, mani in Cuba, ladja in Martinique, pinge in Haiti- yet the US offshoot has remained esoteric, because it was suppressed throughout slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow and then obscured in the criminal justice system. The history, interviews and training of the martial arts style that created Breakdance and boxing greats like Mike Tyson.
52 Blocks: Show and Prove
2007
0
True story of a couple charged with manslaughter when their rejection of modern medicine in favor of religion to treat their diabetic child resulted in his death.
Promised a Miracle
1988
3
Five Jewish Hungarians, now US citizens, tell their stories: before March 1944, when Nazis began to exterminate Hungarian Jews, months in concentration camps, and visiting childhood homes more than 50 years later. An historian, a Sonderkommando, a doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners, and US soldiers who were part of the liberation in April 1945.
The Last Days
1998
7
This lengthy docudrama records the harrowing conditions at the Confederacy's most notorious prisoner-of-war camp. The drama unfolds through the eyes of a company of Union soldiers captured at the Battle of Cold Harbor, VA, in June 1864, and shipped to the camp in southern Georgia. A private, Josiah Day, and his sergeant try to hold their company together in the face of squalid living conditions, inhumane punishments, and a gang of predatory fellow prisoners called the Raiders.
Andersonville
1996
6
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.
Preschool to Prison
2023
0