Production
This acclaimed Emmy Award-winning anthology series features documentaries and a limited number of fiction films united by the creative freedom, artistic achievement and unflinching visions of their independent producers and featuring unforgettable stories about a unique individual, community or moment in history.
In a universe where cool kids are nerds, the orchestra is world class and being Asian American is the norm, seniors at Lowell High School compete for the top prize: admission to the college of their dreams.
Milwaukee mother Tahira transformed her life after overcoming a debilitating opioid addiction. In a candid beauty shop conversation with her daughter, she reveals her trauma, her pain, and her path to healing through opening Samad's House, a haven for women like herself.
More than 50% of transgender boys have attempted suicide. Through two life stories, directors Lexie and Logan unravel why their community is particularly vulnerable to living and dying quietly.
Filmed over three years, the film follows Ashley Chea, a Cambodian-American basketball phenom. Exploring the highs and lowsher immigrant family, surmounting racial and class differences, as well as personal trials that include a devastating knee injury. Despite the intensity of basketball recruiting, Ashley’s humor shines through and her natural talent inspires the support of those around her.
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
Filmmaker Tadashi explores his father Robert A. Nakamura's life as an influential Asian American artist and activist, while grappling with Robert's Parkinson's diagnosis, navigating themes of art, grief, and their father-son relationship.
Sonia Kennebeck takes on the controversial tactic of drone warfare, and demands accountability through the personal accounts—recollections, traumas, and responses—of three American military veterans whose lives have been shaken by the roles they played in this controversial method of attack.
Dallas, 2019 captures the pulse of a city and the people who work and live there, all trying to build a better future.
Explores a variety of underground hazing rituals that are abusive and sometimes deadly. The journey to understand hazing culture reveals a world of toxic masculinity, violence, humiliation, binge drinking, denial, and institutional coverups.
Mama Bears is an intimate exploration of two “mama bears”—conservative, Christian mothers who have become fierce advocates for LGBTQ+ people—and a young lesbian whose struggle for self-acceptance exemplifies why the mama bears are so important.
In India and the U.S., scientists are developing a new male contraceptive that could revolutionize family planning and transform women’s lives worldwide. The film follows the researchers as they strive to successfully launch a reversible male contraceptive—the first breakthrough since the modern condom was invented 200 years ago.
A courageous pastor uses his underground network to rescue and aid North Korean families as they risk their lives to embrace freedom.
The story of a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer in Newark, NJ who takes two young men under his wing to teach them how to live better lives.
Filmmaker Suzannah Herbert takes a sharp look at the American South’s unreconciled history through a Mississippi town that mixes antebellum tourism with a community deeply divided over its past. With an unflinching lens, the film captures the debates, memories, and tensions that are building toward a reckoning.
As an unprecedented wave of book banning is sparked in Texas, Florida, and beyond, librarians under siege join forces as unlikely defenders fighting for intellectual freedom on the front lines of democracy.
When director Jasmin Mara López sees a photo of her niece with her grandfather, she is flooded by painful memories of her own childhood sexual abuse at his hands—and the following 24 years of her silence. In this cinematically striking and poetic documentary, López bravely films her story as a willful act to accept difficult truths while finding beauty in the process of healing. As she defies the cultural silence that pervades her family and confronts her abusive grandfather, who is a Baptist minister, a world of generational abuse unfolds, and she quickly discovers she is not alone. Through archival family footage and intimate moments with her family, López has created a film about confronting painful truths and the beauty one can feel when they reach the other side of grief.
Borders have defined Sansón’s life. There’s the physical and psychological border between Mexico and the US. And now, looking at a life behind bars, there’s the one that separates him from his loved ones. Since it is forbidden to film inside the jail, Reyes recreates Sansón’s life – with the help of his family – through letters and by casting an untrained actor to play his friend. The resulting film is a reflection on migration, the notion of family, what it means to see one’s life on film, and the harshness and injustice of the US prison system.
A documentary about Robin Charboneau, a single mother, Oglala Sioux woman, living on the Spirit Lake Reservation, ND. Sutherland follows Robin over 3 years as she struggles to keep her two children, further her education, and heal herself and her daughter from the wounds of sexual abuse they suffered as children.
A filmmaker revisits her evangelical roots to find connection with her estranged father.
