Film Type: Documentary
1915 Armenian Genocide
- Director: Mark Bedrosian
- Release Date: 2010
- Production Country: United States
In addition to reforming the Ottoman constitution, the political group known as the Young Turks embarked upon a planned destruction of the Christian Armenian population of Turkey in what is now widely agreed to be one of the first modern acts of genocide and the second-most studied Holocaust.
4 Little Girls
- Director: Spike Lee
- Release Date: 1997
- Production Country: United States
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb went off under the steps of an African-American church, killing four African-American girls. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law—in large part because of the national outcry after the bombing. But no matter the resulting changes in society, four families were still without their daughters and four lives had been ended, forever.
5 Broken Cameras
- Director: Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi
- Release Date: 2011
- Production Country: France, Israel, Palestine
Given a video camera when his son is born, Burnat records his son's life as he grows up alongside the concrete barrier the Israeli government is constructing through the middle of their land. One day Burnat is filming the first steps of his child and the next catching the violent retaliation of the Israeli guards to the Palestinian villagers' non-violent protest to being separated from their ancestral lands.
500 Years Later
- Director: Owen 'Alik Shahadah
- Release Date: 2005
- Production Country: United Kingdom, United States
The people of Africa, scattered all over the globe after 500 years of colonial and imperial encounters, struggle still for equality in education, in opportunity, in prosperity. This is their story.
A Decent Factory (Nokia: A Decent Factory)
- Director: Thomas Balmès
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: United Kingdom, Finland, France, Denmark, Australia
Employees of the Finnish company, Nokia, travel to the Chinese factory where their products are made to investigate human rights abuses, where they find some problems but apparently nothing really to write home (or make a movie) about.
Adwa: An African Victory
- Director: Haile Gerima
- Release Date: 1999
- Production Country: United States, Germany, Ethiopia
An Italian army, desperately low on morale and supplies, plans one last attack against an Ethiopian force despite being inferior in numbers, leadership, and armament. The decisive victory of Africans over Europeans became a near mythical event in African history and left Ethiopia as the only African country that was not overrun by colonial powers.
Africa Speaks!
- Director: Walter Futter
- Release Date: 1930
- Production Country: United States
Africa is a land of many wonders, filled with people and animals unlike any that Europe and the United States have seen. Filmmaker Paul Hoefler spent a year travelling through central Africa, recording the people and their world in order to show the western world what he found so fascinating about the "Dark Continent."
Afrique, je te plumerai (Africa, I Will Fleece You)
- Director: Jean-Marie Téno
- Release Date: 1993
- Production Country: Cameroon, France, Germany
Expressions of Cameroon's indigenous culture were not only repressed by colonial governments, but rooted out and systematically destroyed, at first by Europeans and then by the strongmen who came to power as the only tolerable alternative to the European interests that still control much of the country's economic interests.
Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
- Director: Lee Hirsch
- Release Date: 2002
- Production Country: South Africa, United States
In the struggle to overturn apartheid in South Africa, music was an essential tool; it built community, allowed communication, and provided a common language for people to share their story both within South Africa and with the rest of the world.
America Before Columbus
- Director: Cristina Trebbi
- Release Date: 2009
- Production Country: United States, Germany
The Americas, before the arrival of Columbus, was far from a pristine "New World," but had a vast and diverse history of peoples and empires, farms, and urban centers.
An Inconvenient Truth
- Director: Davis Guggenheim
- Release Date: 2006
- Production Country: United States
Former Vice President of the United States Al Gore embarks upon a campaign to make global warming an issue that can no longer be ignored by the industrialized world.
An Islamic History of Europe
- Director: Paul Sapin
- Release Date: 2004
- Production Country: United Kingdom
The landscape of medieval Europe was the dynamic space in which Muslim kingdoms and the Ottoman Empire provided the seeds of science and learning that led to the European Renaissance.
Ancient Inventions
- Director: Daniel Percival, Phil Grabsky
- Release Date: 1998
- Production Country: United Kingdom, United States
Ex-Monty Python member Terry Jones skewers modern conceits about past scientific and technological innovations, discussing how they are not products of the modern industrial age–in fact, some inventions are quite ancient and some modern science cannot yet be duplicated.
Anonymously Yours
- Director: Gayle Ferraro
- Release Date: 2002
- Production Country: United States
Four women in Myanmar from very different backgrounds share a common fate: they are trapped in the sex trade, a world in which even animals are considered more valuable than the victims who are often kidnapped and raped in order to force them to submit to further degradation as prostitutes.
Araya
- Director: Margot Benacerraf
- Release Date: 1959
- Production Country: Venezuela, France
The Spanish Conquistadors discovered the Araya Salt Mine in Venezuela and, in the five hundred years since, the people have continued to mine the salt as it 'always' has been done.
Athens: The Truth About Democracy (Athens: The Dawn of Democracy)
- Director: Timothy Copestake
- Release Date: 2007
- Production Country: United Kingdom
This new perspective on historical Athens discusses the fact that the democratic rights of a few were supported on the backs of many–those female, poor, or enslaved.
Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community
- Director: Greta Schiller, Robert Rosenberg
- Release Date: 1984
- Production Country: United States
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, cultural attitudes and associated laws about sexuality gradually shifted and, by the 1950s, rigidly defined gender roles and often draconian laws against "deviance" and same-sex social behavior had become the norm rather than the exception in the United States, with often devastating results for the LGBT community.
Best Boy
- Director: Ira Wohl
- Release Date: 1979
- Production Country: United States
An elderly couple must figure out what will happen to their mentally handicapped son when they die, while the fifty-two-year old son discovers that he is capable of caring for himself.
Best Man: 'Best Boy' and All of Us Twenty Years Later
- Director: Ira Wohl
- Release Date: 1997
- Production Country: United States
In the twenty years since his elderly parents sent him to live in a group home, Philly has established a life for himself and attained some independence. But there are two things the 72-year-old mentally-challenged Billy has yet to do: fly in an airplane and have his Bar Mitzvah.
Beyond the Call
- Director: Adrian Belic
- Release Date: 2006
- Production Country: United States
Three men take it upon themselves to go in and deliver aid to areas in the world that most NGOs won't or cannot access, delivering medical supplies, equipment, food, and sometimes cold hard cash to groups where even the smallest help from outside can mean the difference between life and death.