When Women Kill

When Women Kill is a poignant documentary exploring the shocking violence that seven women fell victim to at the hands of men. The program profiles the battered women who speak frankly about the cruel abuse, threats, and fears, and the overassertive men who led them down a one-way path to death and destruction. The film features in-prison footage, including a segment depicting a confession by a follower of the notorious Charles Manson, Leslie Van Houten, who was convicted of two killing sprees and committed to life in prison.

Born in Evin

Follows filmmaker and actress, Maryam Zaree, on her quest to find out the violent circumstances surrounding her birth inside one of the most notorious political prisons in the world.

Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street

The film follows a simple structure, and shows the drug-related degradation of five youths (Jake, Tracey, Jessica, Alice, Oreo) during the course of three years. The film depicts drug-related crimes and diseases: prostitution, male prostitution, AIDS, and lethal overdoses.

Free CeCe

This film confronts the culture of violence surrounding trans women of color. It is told through the voices of Laverne Cox and Cece McDonald.

Debut

The soulless atmosphere of a women's penitentiary destroys the prisoners' personality, kills all femininity in them. The film looks at the rationality of the long prison terms for women with children.

Women Behind Bars with Trevor McDonald

Trevor McDonald goes to Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana to speak with some of the women that live there.

Women's Prison

Women's Prison recounts the life of the prisoners and the problems their families encounter in their struggle to survive. Here again filmmaker Kamran Shirdel employs the cinema verité style. The interviews with the prisoners, social workers and teachers serve as commentaries for "constructed" documentary images.

Máma z basy

Like a Rose

A short documentary from 1975 about two women serving 25 years in a Missouri penitentiary. Made with an all-female crew.

Cages

The final months of pregnancy and the first ones after the birth of a baby are unique experiences in a woman's life. And when this daily life is lived inside a prison?

Ashley Smith : Out of Control

Ashley Smith was a troubled 19-year-old when she choked herself to death at Ontario's Grand Valley Institution for Women. Her death made national headlines and led to a scathing report by Canada’s federal prison ombudsman. Incarceration for Ashley began at a youth detention centre in New Brunswick. Her crime: she had tossed crabapples at a mailman. Her one-month sentence stretched to almost four years, served in five provinces. With the prison videotapes and exclusive access to Smith’s parents, along with a fellow inmate, this documentary exposes a system that fails the many Ashley Smiths still incarcerated in Canadian institutions.

Sister Hearts

Maryam Henderson-Uloho spent thirteen years in prison in Louisiana, seven in solitary confinement. After her release she struggled to find housing or employment. She began selling secondhand goods out of a suitcase on a street corner in New Orleans. In just three years, she grew her business to a brick-and-mortar thrift store—one that also provides housing and employment for other formerly-incarcerated women. She calls those women—and her store—Sister Hearts.

Die Kinder sind tot

A documentary exploring a crime that shocked Germany in the summer of 1999.

In Paradisum

In Paradisum relates two disturbing stories simultaneously. The female narrator tells her personal tale of imprisonment as the wife of the notorious Estonian serial killer, Andreas Hanni. Although her story is bizarre, it touches familiar themes that run throughout modern life: the desire to be loved and the fear of being alone. Pille Hanni's tale unfolds over cinema vérité images of life in several Estonian prisons. At times the images reflect in a literary way the events of the narration, yet they are representations and impressions, rather than traditional documentary style footage of the people involved. This opens the story to a more general interpretation, often with unsettling results. The parallel contents reveal, at two levels of story and social organisation, how the bizarre and inhuman can be tolerable and even addictive in the face of our fears.

Of Monsters and Skirts

Libertad, Enriqueta, Maricarmen and Albert evoke the years when their mothers and his aunt stayed in Les Corts jail, times of innocence, hopelessness and distress. Their childhood stories inmmerse us in a world whose main characters are memories, oblivion and the passing of time.

A Mother's Right: The Elizabeth Morgan Story

Based on the custody case involving Elizabeth Morgan and the subsequent Elizabeth Morgan Act.

Lady Vengeance

Released after being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 13 years, a woman begins executing her elaborate plan of retribution.

Sasori

A ruthless pack of thugs force mild-mannered, caught-in-the-middle-of-something-bigger Nami to murder her fiance's sister, decidedly ruining her pending marriage and landing the poor girl in the most brutal women's prison ever seen. Inside the hellblocks, she decides to stop being a victim at all costs, and ends up becoming stronger and even more vicious than the craziest inmates in the pen. She eventually escapes in a most unusual way, gets valuable fight training from a mysterious mountain man and returns to the streets in order to make the thugs who ruined her life pay.

The Reader

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.

Gloria

Gloria never imagined that an audition for the music producer Sergio Andrade was going to change her life so drastically. King Midas not only brought her to stardom, but also to a dramatic story of love, heartbreak and betrayal. Based on the life story of pop/rock singer Gloria Trevi.