The silence behind the genocide of the Rohingyas in Burma.
Social & External
The people behind it
Sittwe is about two teenagers separated by conflict and segregation in Burma's Rakhine state, Phyu Phyu Than, a Rohingya girl and Aung San Myint, a Buddhist boy. Both youth saw their homes burned down during communal violence in 2012. Phyu Phyu Than is confined in an apartheid-style camp and has no chance to go to school or travel to her home just a few miles away. Aung San Myint's family struggles to survive and support his high school studies to fulfill his dream to go to medical school. Interviews filmed over two years with the teenagers reveal their ideas about each other's communities and the hope of reconciliation.
Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun.
"The Actors of Cannes" is a documentary film project that showcases a painful part of Kosovo’s history – the spring 1990 school poising of 8400 students by the Serbian government. The mass poisoning of Albanian Kosovars targeted students, teachers, citizens, even young children in preschools.
Turkey's history has been shaped by two major political figures: Mustafa Kemal (1881-1934), known as Atatürk, the Father of the Turks, founder of the modern state, and the current president Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, who apparently wants Turkey to regain the political and military pre-eminence it had as an empire under the Ottoman dynasty.
In Aukland Harbour, New Zealand, on July 10th 1985, French navy combat frogmen placed two mines against the hull of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior, sinking the ship and killing photographer Fernando Pereira.
Tehran, Iran, August 19, 1953. A group of Iranian conspirators who, with the approval of the deposed tyrant Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, have conspired with agents of the British MI6 and the US CIA, manage to put an end to the democratic government led by Mohammad Mosaddegh, a dramatic event that will begin the tragic era of coups d'état that, orchestrated by the CIA, will take place, over the following decades, in dozens of countries around the world.
An attempt to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes violently, in the Basque Country, in northern Spain.
Filmed along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border and within Rohingya refugee camps, Shafiur Rahman’s documentary on the 2017 Tula Toli massacre exposes chilling interviews and evidence of Myanmar military’s premeditated atrocities. The film documents mass killings, sexual violence, and the systematic destruction of the village of Tula Toli, highlighting a humanitarian crisis that forced over half a million people—many of them children—to flee in an exodus of historic scale.
On October 17, 1961, in response to the curfew imposed on Muslim Algerians by Paris police prefect Maurice Papon, the FLN Federation of France organized a peaceful demonstration in the streets of the capital. The demonstration turned into a bloody crackdown: unprecedented violence, thousands of arrests, hundreds missing, and dozens dead. Today, much is known about the violence of that night: at least 200 Algerians were killed, beheaded, beaten, or thrown into the Seine; 11,500 others were arrested and often tortured. Hundreds were deported back to Algeria. Long silenced, the repression has been acknowledged thanks to the work of remembrance and eyewitness accounts.
This documentary bears witness to the events that took place more than thirty years before the filming of this movie, on October 17, 1961, in Paris, during the Algerian War. It is a work not only about historical truth but also about memory. Constructed primarily from interviews conducted with those involved in the events, along with archival footage, photographs, and radio broadcasts from the time, our investigation proves that nearly 200 Algerians were killed (drowned, tortured) that night and in the days that followed by the French police. "A Missing Day" seeks to ask two key questions: how could such events have unfolded in the capital of a Western democracy barely thirty years ago? And why have they been silenced ever since?
On October 17 and 18, 1961, during a non-violent demonstration against the imposed curfew, dozens of Algerians were murdered in Paris by police officers acting on orders from their superiors. For forty years, this crime has been concealed; yet these events, the deadliest on French soil since the Second World War, resemble, in some respects, the darkest hours of the collaboration. Why has this history been hidden? Under what conditions, and in the name of what reasons, did officials of a democratic state conceal the scale and gravity of such events?
Three demonstrators from October 17, 1961, and a journalist recount the peaceful success of the demonstration and its brutal repression in the streets of Paris. Five months before the end of the Algerian War, the Gaullist government violently suppressed (40 to 300 deaths in a single evening, according to various sources) a peaceful demonstration by the entire Algerian civilian population of the Paris region, protesting the curfew imposed solely on this population (all participants held French citizenship). The government long denied this state crime; the official version: 3 deaths! In 1962, these events were granted amnesty by a simple decree (later enacted into law) issued by the same Gaullist government.
On October 17, 1961, 30,000 Algerians demonstrated peacefully in Paris to protest the discriminatory curfew imposed upon them and to demand Algerian independence. Under the authority of the then Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon, the demonstration was brutally repressed, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Algerians. Historians cite eleven thousand arrests, dozens of murders, demonstrators thrown into the Seine, hundreds of expulsions, and just as many complaints that went unanswered; all for a night that would become a blind spot in the national narrative. No investigation, no trial, and certainly no commemoration. The day after the demonstration, Jacques Panijel began filming *October in Paris* to alert the public to the massacre that had just taken place in the streets of Paris. The film was banned by the French authorities. It obtained a distribution license in 1973. It was first shown in theaters in October 2011.
Mother, Daughter, Sister (Amae, Thamee, Ama) exposes the Burmese military’s practice of using rape as a weapon of war and gives voice to Kachin and Rohingya women activists calling for justice for these crimes. Mother, Daughter, Sister revolves around the stories of four women: Shamima, a volunteer counselor working with survivors of military rape in the Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, Dil Kayas, a teenage survivor, and San Lung and Lu Ra, sister and mother of two Kachin school teachers brutally raped and killed in 2015, allegedly by the Burmese military. Powerful testimonies from survivors, witnesses, and activists explore the far-reaching impact of sexual violence and trauma upon these communities, and together, the women call for justice and an end to the army's impunity.
Into the Current: Burma’s Political Prisoners is about Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner who works to free his colleagues in Burma against the backdrop of the country’s non-violent political movement.
The painful story of Ireland and the Irish people, who struggled for centuries to free themselves from the tyrannical clutches of the British Empire; an epic tale of poverty, hunger, despair, violence and unyielding courage.
The exciting story of the splitting of the atom, a scientific breakthrough of incalculable importance that ushered in the nuclear age, has a dark side: the many events in which people were exposed to radiation, both intentionally and by accident.
How does it feel to be forgotten by the world? A powerful collective cry denouncing the crimes of the military dictatorship installed in Myanmar after the coup perpetrated on February 1, 2021: cinema and imagination against horror and in defense of freedom.
A short film produced between September and October of 1969, during the course of the Brazilian military dictatorship. It's authorship remained anonymous for a long time and the precariousness of the production was due because of its clandestinity. The film is a collage of images of popular repression, ruling power violence and its people resistance around the world.
“In Algeria, we are restoring order, what we mean by French order,” declared Michel Debré, Prime Minister, under the presidency of Charles De Gaulle, in April 1956. It was, of course, order colonial in defiance of the republican order, in Algeria as in Paris where, on October 17, 1961, Algerians flocking from suburban slums were massacred by the police of prefect Maurice Papon, while they were peacefully marching for the independence of their country. On October 17, 2001, a commemorative plaque was placed in Paris on the Saint-Michel bridge: "In memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of October 17, 1961." A surge of racial hatred, less than 20 years after the roundup of the Jews in July 1942. An Algerian, victim of this roundup, told us, holding back his tears, "I still have nightmares."
In an intimate and joyful story of love in the face of loss, celebrated poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley find strength—and unexpected hilarity—in what might be their final year together.
Unravel the case of Utah therapist Jodi Hildebrandt, whose child abuse arrest with parenting YouTuber Ruby Franke exposed a twisted tale of manipulation.
Alex Gibney explores the charged issue of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, following a trail from the first known protest against clerical sexual abuse in the United States and all way to the Vatican.
Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.
In 1997, Louis Theroux made a documentary about the world of male porn performers in Los Angeles. 15 years later, he returns to find a business struggling with the deluge of free porn on the internet. Louis revisits some of the original programme's contributors as well as meeting the latest crop of porn performers dreaming of porn stardom.
Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
Using hidden cameras and never-before-seen footage, Earthlings chronicles the day-to-day practices of the largest industries in the world, all of which rely entirely on animals for profit.
An examination of the life of acclaimed 'horse whisperer' Buck Brannaman, who recovered from years of child abuse to become a well-known expert in the interactions between horses and people.
A real-life undercover thriller about two ordinary men who embark on an outrageously dangerous ten-year mission to penetrate the world's most secretive and brutal dictatorship: North Korea.
Police pull over a woman who claims she just gave birth. But the baby — and the blood — aren't hers. Twisted lies unravel in this true-crime documentary.
After the high-profile killing of Damilola Taylor, Cornelius' family move out of London. But when they discover their new town is run by racists, Cornelius takes a drastic step to survive.
Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."
Legendary journalist Gay Talese unmasks a motel owner who spied on his guests for decades. But his bombshell story soon becomes a scandal of its own.
Lupita Nyong'o narrates a documentary about Peanuts and its creator, Charles M. Schulz. Famous fans—including Drew Barrymore, Kevin Smith, and Al Roker—share its influence on them, and a new animated story finds Charlie Brown on a quest.
Aileen Wuornos remains a rarity: a female serial killer. From childhood abuse to death-row revelations, this documentary revisits her life and crimes.
A glimpse into the raw and simple power of nature through encounters with farm animals: the eponymous Gunda, a mother pig; two cows, and a one-legged chicken.
This revealing documentary honors the legendary Sidney Poitier—iconic actor, filmmaker, and civil rights activist. Featuring interviews with Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, Halle Berry, and more.
Rising musician Jeff Buckley had only released one album when he died suddenly in 1997. Now, never-before-seen footage, exclusive voice messages, and accounts from those closest to him offer a portrait of the captivating singer.
The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.
RETURN tells the story of a retired Green Beret who embarks on a healing journey from Montana to Vietnam. There he retraces his steps, shares his wartime experiences with his son, treats his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and seeks out the mountain tribespeople he once lived with and fought alongside as a Special Forces officer.
