Enfants placés : que fait la République ?(2021)

The Department(en)

THE DEPARTMENT is a feature documentary which takes us inside the never-before-seen child protection system at work in NSW. Filmed in an observational style, it follows caseworkers across the state as they navigate the complexities of keeping children safe in families experiencing domestic violence, addiction, poverty, mental health issues and intergenerational trauma.

Enfants placés : les sacrifiés de la République(fr)

DPJ(fr)

A direct, uncompromising look into the complex machinery of Quebec’s youth protection services (known as the DPJ). https://lustitia.com/en/productions/dpj/

Alicia(nl)

"It’s not easy to find a foster family for you," an orphanage supervisor explains to nine-year-old Alicia. "After all, you are a very special girl." Alicia is crying. "I’m not special. I’m just a girl." This disturbing scene sets the tone for this film about Alicia, who was taken away from her teenage mother by the Child Welfare Bureau when she was 12 months old. She’s been living in an orphanage since the age of five, and they have never managed to find a foster family for her. In Alicia, we watch as she becomes a teenager, still craving safety and love. Over the course of three years, filmmaker Maasja Ooms follows her daily life up close. Alicia's yearning and powerlessness are palpable in these observations, which painfully reveal the effects of having no prospects.

Barbara(en)

Barbara was caring for her grandchildren when her granddaughter Tiara was taken from school by welfare workers. Barbara fought for the next seven months to have her returned and finally won but the consequences of the removal on the family will never go away.

Tale in the Darkness(ru)

Angelina lives in a big city on the sea coast, where handsome men and beautiful women are strolling the streets with only one purpose: to have fun, flirt and love. But Angelina, being pretty, intelligent, and nice, finds herself lonely. She is a police officer and her job is helping abandoned kids, orphans, and troubled youngsters. One day one of her charges, a little boy, explains to Angelina how lonely, dull and useless she is. Those words have been bothering her ever since, and she decides to change herself.. Angelina starts her way through the darkness…

Kamen Rider ZO(ja)

Masaru Aso was the lab assistant of geneticist Doctor Mochizuki, used as one of his experiments related the creation of the Neo Organism, enabling him to transform into a grasshopper-like being called Kamen Rider ZO. He fled into the mountainside and went into a coma before he was awakened by a telepathic call two years later with an unconscious urge to protect Hiroshi Mochizuki, the son of Doctor Mochizuki.

Donner/Recevoir(fr)

The life stories of four families who were confronted with organ donation or transplantation issues. With humility and great generosity, the characters reveal to us the suffering, feelings, happiness that have surrounded these exceptional moments.

Birth of a Timeless Legacy(en)

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy some nice thoughts in The Birth of a Timeless Legacy doc, which tells about the way Star Trek came to be.

Struggles in Steel: A History of African-American Steelworkers(en)

This documentary focuses on the Civil Rights Movement in the heavily segregated steel industry and its equally segregated union, The United Steelworkers of America (USWA), at the time when this industry—devastated by mismanagement and global competition—began to crumble. It is a powerful picture of black working-class life in the latter part of the 20th century, told in a combination of interviews and documentary footage. Through live testimonials and revelatory archival materials, Struggles shows the contributions of African Americans to the steel industry and to the labor movement more generally. (via cinema.indiana.edu)

Painted Nails(en)

It won't take long to fall in love with the subject of Painted Nails, Van Hoang, a Vietnamese nail salon owner who serves an ethnically diverse group of working class women with acrylic nails and intricate airbrush designs. Through the course of the film, Van unintentionally becomes a contemporary Norma Rae or Erin Brockovich. Painted Nails brings us unprecedented insight into the personal nature of the political movement to regulate one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. Major loopholes in the federal law dating back to 1938 allow the 50-billion-dollar cosmetics industry to put unlimited amounts of chemicals into personal care products with no required testing, monitoring of health effects, or labeling requirements. (via Kanopy)

In Sight(cs)

In the second half of the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham designed the model of a panopticon, a type of building that made supervision most effective. Panopticons were firstly used for prisons, places where supervision and punishment are the main functions. Secret services but also different surveillance technologies are the new panopticons. They can monitor, save and store data about people to identify them, to distinguish the location and time of people’s behaviour and actions. Architecture theorist, software expert, people who are or were monitored, or the former secret service agents explain their panoptical experience. Reading again Michel Foucault´s Discipline and Punish, through experience with different kinds of supervision, in the film we are looking for the perfect application of the panoptical principle.

Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?(en)

Feature documentary on the life and career of Tony winner Idina Menzel, culminating in her headlining a concert at Madison Square Garden in her hometown of New York City after a nationwide tour.

Searching for the Lost Pochta(ru)

Travelogue of two film historians Nikolay Izvolov and Sergey Kapterev who visit world film archives around the globe in search of a lost sound version of one famous Soviet cartoon. It's "The Post" made by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky in 1929 and based on a poem by Samuil Marshak. At first "The Post" has been released in a silent form and later Tsekhanovsky remade it with experimental music and narration by Daniil Kharms. At that moment it was the first Soviet sound cartoon and it was a success all over the world. Russian film studies consider "The Post" to be of great importance and artistic value but unfortunately it's still lost. Only the silent version and the 1964 remake are still known and available.

Moody(id)

A mother and her adult son, who communicates with spirits through ecstatic dance, live completely alone on a tiny island in Indonesia.

As Mine Exactly(en)

A mother and son revisit the medical emergency that reshaped their lives, and the remarkable fragments that remain of that time, in this intimate blend of VR and performance film.

Laterna magika II(en)

A film of the Czech multimedia theatre production, Magician's Lantern

Me busco lejos(es)

Graziele was born on a small island located in the south of Rio de Janeiro. As her mother died when she was just one year old and her father was always an absent figure, she was raised by her older sister and her grandparents, next to an evangelical church where her grandfather has been a pastor for two decades. In that small-town, conservative environment, Graziele had to come to terms with her homosexuality, first to herself and then to others. She decided to migrate to Argentina, even though she left a love in Brazil, and started living in Buenos Aires, together with her older sister on her father's side, and her brother-in-law Diego, who will be the narrator of her new life with his camera.

A Texas Romance, 1909(en)

The film is an attempt to evoke, through paintings, the world of a small Texas town in an era long gone. The paintings are freely based on photographs, letters, and postcards, discovered hidden in a cigar box in the family barn by director Robert Benton, and dealing entirely with a courtship between his grandfather's brother, who was the local mailman, and a young woman who came to visit her relatives in Waxahachie, Texas, in the summer of 1909. They met, fell in love, got married, and shortly after the marriage, she died.

The Salam School's Girls XC Program: We Are Powerful(en)

In 2019, the team at MileSplit traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to profile The Salam School girls cross country team, a group of young female athletes training, competing and shattering stereotypes for Muslim girls across the United States. We go behind the scenes to learn more about how the program's religion and culture helps elevate its mission of empowering each other, and explore the traditions and recent successes of the team over the last several years.