The story of Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973, which forever shook the very foundations of communist ideology.
An artistic hybrid documentary, ZERO IMPUNITY is the centerpiece of an ambitious global transmedia project. ZERO IMPUNITY sheds a powerful spotlight on the seemingly total Impunity for the use of sexual violence in armed conflicts worldwide. ZERO IMPUNITY is an important and necessary eye opening Scream, raising awareness and outrage.
The story puts İlhan Çomak at the center, even though he is not physically present in the film. It focuses on the 21 years that İlhan spent in prison and his family’s experience of those years without him. The narrative is constructed through the letters İlhan wrote and aims to describe his life, his emotions and longings. The film constructs İlhan’s history through a chronology in the prison but refrains from restricting it only to a “prisoner’s quest for justice”, and rather tells a story of the situations he finds himself in over the years and his emotions and their equivalents in life.
Short documentary about artist Keith Haring, detailing his involvement in the New York City graffiti subculture, his opening of the Pop Shop, and the social commentary present in his paintings and drawings.
Documentary look at doomed male prostitutes in Prague, ages 15 to 18, who troll at the public swimming pool, the train station, a video arcade, and a disco. After the boys talk about how they got in the game, the camera follows them to the home of Pavel Rousek. Under the name Hans Miller, he makes gay porno videos, primarily for German distribution. Intercut with a movie shoot chez Rousek is an interview that follows him to his day job at a morgue, where he performs an autopsy as he talks about his work. The sex is without protection; the boys are without family. They talk about their bodies and souls, money, their sexual orientation, AIDS, their dreams, and death.
After the Stonewall riots and at the height of the gay liberation movement in America, an entire generation were busy celebrating their newfound emancipation, unaware of an impending epidemic. A disease that seemed determined to wipe out an entire generation of gay men, was largely ignored by politicians and the mainstream media. Gaetan Dugas was a French-Canadian flight attendant, who offered to help early scientific research into the origins of AIDS. An unfortunate series of events followed and he would be vilified as Patient Zero, the man who gave us AIDS.
This film tells the story of the unknown pre-history of the AIDS virus, long before people started to die in the US and Europe. Following a team of scientists we uncover a forgotten medical archive in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that tells of an epidemic a full two decades before anyone knew about the novel killer. From high-tech labs in the US to African medics who have their boots on the ground, we trace HIV back to its origin in the jungles of Cameroon. In the decades around the turn of the 20th century, colonialism fundamentally changed the lives of millions of people in central Africa; it created an environment that allowed HIV to leave its original host, the chimpanzee, and start to spread in humans.
A short documentary about the October 14 1979 March For Lesbian And Gay Rights in Washington D.C.
As a result of the Holocaust and later, AIDS, the male homosexual community has sustained bitter losses and, according to Praunheim, lesbian women have now placed themselves at the head of the so-called queer movement. The female protagonists in the film represent two different generations; they also incorporate the past and present status of homosexuals in society.
The Cherokee language is deeply tied to Cherokee identity; yet generations of assimilation efforts by the U.S. government and anti-Indigenous stigmas have forced the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes to declare a State of Emergency for the language in 2019. While there are 430,000 Cherokee citizens in the three federally recognized tribes, fewer than an estimated 2,000 fluent speakers remain—the majority of whom are elderly. The covid pandemic has unfortunately hastened the course. Language activists, artists, and the youth must now lead the charge of urgent radical revitalization efforts to help save the language from the brink of extinction.
In a deportation centre in the middle of idyllic Denmark, Artin and Jahan seek ways to bring hope to their lives and to the people around them.
We Are Not Princesses is a documentary film about the incredible strength and spirit of four Syrian women living as refugees in Beirut as they come together to tell their stories of love, loss, pain and hope through the ancient Greek play, Antigone.
On 28 October 2015, a migrant boat left the coast of Western Turkey heading to the closest European coast – the Greek island of Lesvos. The shipwreck resulted in the death of at least 43 people, making it the deadliest incident of that period, also known as “the long summer of migration.” One of the survivors, the artist Amel Alzakout, recorded the journey and the shipwreck on a waterproof camera attached to her wrist. This footage – which also forms the basis of her subsequent film Purple Sea – provides a unique situated perspective on this tragic event at the threshold of Europe.
Seizing her power as she confronts her mortality, trailblazing trans activist Connie Norman evolves as an irrepressible, challenging and soulful voice for the AIDS and queer communities of early 90's Los Angeles.
Mina Ahadi is an Iranian human rights activist living in Cologne. She talks about the fate of other freedom fighters in Iraq and what life is like under the Iranian regime.
There are countless stories of Cubans reaching their dream destination of Florida as boat refugees. A lesser known route to the United States starts with a flight in a ramshackle plane to Guyana. Then the refugees travel to Colombia where they cross the jungle to arrive in Central America, from where they hope to reach the promised land of America—a hard and dangerous journey. Cuban filmmaker Marcel Beltrán visits them in a refugee camp in Panama, where one of the residents gives him an idea. Many people here have filmed their journey, she says, and these videos tell their real story. These jerky, shocking videos are interspersed with Beltrán’s footage of the camp, tangibly illustrating the difference between the hectic pace of the journey and the insecure life at the reception center.
A short film mostly comprised of two sources: research footage from 1988 about the beginnings of the HIV epidemic from the perspective of medical professionals, and an interview with Cleve Jones in 2003 as he looks back upon his activism, and the state of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 2000s.
"I’m Just a Layman in Pursuit of Justice" chronicles the injustices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, also known as ‘the last plantation,’ and the lived experiences of Black farmers who chose to fight against discrimination.
Political engagement spawned the wildest of wonderlands for Hong Kong’s creativity – but as a new law annihilates freedom of expression overnight, underground artists and creatives find themselves targets, and their works disappeared. Together we race to preserve the creative uprising amid China’s crackdown.
After a quarter-century of political denial and social stigma, of stunning scientific breakthroughs, bitter policy battles and inadequate prevention campaigns, HIV/AIDS continues to spread rapidly throughout much of the world. Through interviews with AIDS researchers, world leaders, activists, and patients, FRONTLINE investigates the science, politics, and human cost of this fateful disease and asks: What are the lessons of the past, and what can be done to stop AIDS?