Rebecca Richman Cohen

When a powerful Florida lobbyist discovered that a nanny sexually abused his daughter, he wielded all of his considered political capital to pass some of the strictest sex offender laws in the country. Today, 800,000 people are listed in the sex offender registry, yet the cycles of abuse continue. Moving from the halls of power to the cardboard homes of a marginalized pariah people, this enlightening documentary defies expectations and challenge assumptions to argue for a new understanding of how we think about and legislate sexual abuse.

Continents apart from one another, two farming families aim to reinvent themselves on their land. One family-a strong-willed French matriarch and the son she raised among her vines-tends a centuries-old, biodynamic vineyard in the Southern Rhône. Across the ocean in Humboldt, California, another family-a brash father and his more reserved son-carefully manage a state-recognized, organic cannabis farm. The feature documentary WEED and WINE interweaves their stories, urging comparisons and teasing out contradictions between France's revered winemaking traditions and the artisan culture emerging alongside the legal cannabis industry.

Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with breaking into a pool hall. He could not afford a lawyer to defend him in court, and after a hasty trial, he was convicted. Had Gideon accepted his fate, he'd have been imprisoned for five years. But Gideon did challenge his conviction -all the way to the Supreme Court. The result was the landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright, which guarantees poor defendants the right to counsel in criminal cases.

This gripping documentary follows the trial of Issa Sesay, a leader in Sierra Leone's civil war who stands accused of crimes against humanity. Can the trial of one man uncover the truth of a traumatic past?

At a time when the country is rethinking its drug policies large and small, one state raises to the forefront of national attention. Once a pioneer in legalizing medical marijuana, the state of Montana is poised to become the first in the nation to repeal its medical marijuana law. Set against the sweeping vistas of the Rockies, the steamy lamplight of marijuana grow houses, and the bustling halls of the State Capitol, CODE OF THE WEST follows the 2011 Montana State Legislature as it debates the fate of medical marijuana. This is the story of the many lives and fraught emotions tied to one of the most heated policy questions facing the country today

Who actually bears the burden when we demand harsher punishment for a privileged white defendant?

Eighty-year-old Delores Saltzman was “relaxing and having a joint” when she heard a knock on her door. Pot, she explains, helped with her arthritis. Sleeping on a cement floor in jail after being arrested because her medical marijuana card had expired, not so much. Perhaps Delores’s case, cheerfully documented here, helped bring legal recreational weed to Michigan, approved by voters this past November.

California Judge Aaron Persky was recalled in 2018 after his decision in the infamous Brock Turner assault case, raising questions about accountability.