Projects

Directed by Trish Adlesic. 

A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting is a deeply personal portrait of the survivors, victims, and family members, who share their harrowing first-hand accounts of the shooting’s impact on the community.

Directed by Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater and Mike Attie.

At Philly’s abortion helpline, cruel legislation determines who has access to abortion.

Directed by Angela Tucker.

News footage, campaign advertisements and archival audio and video help detail the story of the 2017 mayoral runoff in New Orleans as it comes down to two very different candidates — Desiree Charbonnet and LaToya Cantrell.

Directed by Cynthia Lowen. 

BATTLEGROUND is an urgently timely window into the intersection of abortion and politics in America, following three women who lead formidable anti-abortion organizations to witness the influence they wield. As the nation faces the end of Roe, the film also depicts those on the front lines of the fierce fight to maintain access.

Directed by Erika Cohn. Produced by Angela Tucker, Nicole Docta and Christen Marquez.

An exposé of human rights abuses in women’s prisons, highlighting modern-day eugenics & reproductive injustice.

Emily Ramshaw and Amanda Zamora wanted to do something radical about the white men dominating newsrooms. “70% of policy and politics editors are men, almost all of them are white,” says Emily. “These are the people deciding which stories are told, who is telling them, and whether they will be on the front page or the back page, if they get there at all.”

So, Emily and Amanda along with Editor-at-Large Errin Haines and a scrappy group of fearless women and LGBTQ+ journalists band together to buck the status quo and launch The 19th*, a digital news start-up. Named after the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote, but with an asterisk to acknowledge the Black women and women of color who were omitted, the 19th’s work is guided everyday by the asterisk – asking who is being omitted from the story, and how can they be included.

Errin Haines covers politics and race, including breaking the first national story on the killing of Breonna Taylor. Emerging Latina reporter Chabeli Carrazana is based in Florida and reports on gender and the economy. LA-based Kate Sosin, a nonbinary reporter, covers LGBTQ+ stories, including the large numbers of anti-trans bills becoming law in states around the country. The film documents the honest discussions at The 19th* around race and gender equity, revealing that change doesn’t come easy, and showcasing how one newsroom confronts these challenges both as a workplace and in their journalism. But this film is about more than a newsroom. It’s about America in flux, and the voices that are often left out of the American story

Directed by Dru Holley

The iconic Buffalo Soldiers fought on two very different sets of front lines: military conflicts abroad and civil rights struggles at home. Though the 14th Amendment promised citizenship in exchange for enlistment, Black men were denied this right due to Jim Crow laws. The award-winning documentary, Buffalo Soldiers: Fighting on Two Fronts, explores the profound and often contradictory roles played by Black soldiers in the United States military.

Directed by Dominic Savage

Sam (Elliot Page) hasn’t been home since his transition. After four years in Toronto, he takes a long-dreaded trip back to his hometown for his father’s birthday. Once there, he confronts unresolved wounds and reconnects with an old friend.

Directed by Lynn Novick

College Behind Bars is the story of a dozen incarcerated men and women trying to earn college degrees in the rigorous Bard Prison Initiative. The four-part documentary series reveals the transformative power of education.

Directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.

In collaboration with filmmakers, an imagined space is run by formerly incarcerated women for comfort and healing.

Directed by Nailah Jefferson

When Danielle Metz’s triple life sentence was commuted, she got a rare chance to regain the life and family that she’d been dreaming about in prison. But back home in New Orleans, she steps into a different reality. Commuted traces Danielle’s journey to find purpose and love, and to confront the wounds of incarceration that linger after release from prison

Download Discussion Guide Below

Directed by Yoruba Richen

The Cost of Inheritance: An America ReFramed Special, is an hour-long documentary that explores the complex issue of reparations in the United States using a thoughtful approach to history, historical injustices, systemic inequities, and the critical dialogue on racial conciliation.

Directed by Sam Feder, produced by Amy Schoulder. 

DISCLOSURE is an unprecedented, eye-opening look at transgender depictions in film and television, revealing how Hollywood simultaneously reflects and manufactures our deepest anxieties about gender.

Directed by Jenifer McShane.

Ernie & Joe: Crisis Cops is an intimate portrait of two Texas police officers who are helping change the way police respond to mental health calls.

Directed by Heather Courtney

Running out of time and money, a journalist battles an oil bust, a global pandemic, and a growing mistrust of the media as she tries to keep her newspaper alive in rural Texas.

Directed by Sam Osborn & Alejandra Vasquez

In the competitive world of high school mariachi, the musicians from the South Texas borderlands reign supreme. Under the guidance of Coach Abel Acuña, the teenage captains of Edinburg North High School’s acclaimed team must turn a shoestring budget and diverse crew of inexperienced musicians into state champions.

Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite.

An investigative journalist uncovers the money, influence and alarming rationale behind covert efforts to control the most vital resource on the planet.

Directed by Idit Avrahami, Noam Sheizaf

Segregated, highly surveilled, heavily filmed and intensely guarded: H2 uncovers the ways in which a single neighborhood in Hebron fuels the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 54 years of military occupation, told through the story of a one-kilometer long street.

Directed by Violet Du Feng.

The story of nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, to the Chinese port city of Shanghai.

Directed by Orlando von Einsiedel.

INTO DUST tells the extraordinary true story of Perween Rahman, a women who worked tirelessly to protect the rights of Pakistan’s poor, and paid the ultimate price. Set against the backdrop of a global water crisis, Perween’s story highlights the dangers of what can happen when our water starts to run out.

Directed by Judith Helfand.

“How do you live without your mother?” Filmmaker Judith Helfand asks this unbearable question twice: as a daughter caring for her terminally ill mother; as an “old new mom”, single parenting her much-longed-for adopted baby girl at 50+. With gallows humor and lots of heart, this multigenerational love story ultimately asks: what do we really need to leave our children?

Directed by David Osit

MAYOR follows Musa Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah, during his second term in office. His immediate goals: repave the sidewalks, attract more tourism, and plan the city’s Christmas celebrations. His ultimate mission: to end the occupation of Palestine.

Rich with detailed observation and humor, MAYOR offers a portrait of dignity amidst the madness and absurdity of endless occupation while posing a question: how do you run a city when you don’t have a country?

Directed by Sara Archambault and Margo Guernsey

Amidst an onslaught of attacks from a sitting President and the deadly threat of a global pandemic, local election administrators work around the clock to secure the vote for their community. Rhode Island’s election teams take center stage in this unprecedented voting adventure.

Directed by Vivian Kleiman.

No Straight Lines tells the story of five scrappy and pioneering cartoonists who depicted everything from the AIDS crisis, coming out, and same-sex marriage, to themes of race, gender, and disability.

Directed by Derek Goldman and Jeff Hutchens

In a virtuoso solo performance, Academy Award nominee David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski in this genre-defying true story of a reluctant World War II hero and Holocaust witness. After surviving the devastation of the Blitzkrieg, Karski swears allegiance to the Polish Underground and risks his life to carry the first eyewitness reports of war-torn Poland to the Western world, and ultimately, the Oval Office. Escaping a Gestapo prison, bearing witness to the despair of the Warsaw ghetto and confronted by the inhumanity of a death camp, Karski endures unspeakable mental anguish and physical torture to stand tall in the halls of power and speak the truth.

Directed by Nancy Schwartzman.

Roll Red Roll is a true-crime thriller that goes behind the headlines to uncover the deep-seated and social media-fueled “boys will be boys” culture at the root of high school sexual assault in America.

Directed by Reed Harkness

What do two film-obsessed brothers do to solve a family mystery? Using every video format imaginable, they make a movie as they travel thousands of miles looking for their missing mom. Stitching together 25 years of home videos and filling the gaps in the archive with play, SAM NOW is a mosaic of love, longing and loss, as well as an attempt to overcome intergenerational trauma.

Co-directed by Jerry Risius and Beth Levison

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Art Cullen and his family fight to unite and inform their Iowan farming community through their biweekly newspaper, The Storm Lake Times—come hell or pandemic.

Directed by Hazel Gurland-Pooler. 

The film uplifts the story of Ruby Duncan and a band of mothers who launched a revolutionary Black feminist anti-poverty movement in the 1960s & 1970s.

When a young arms dealer discovers his work is harming families in less affluent societies, he has an ethical crisis and begins a decades-long journey to redeem himself and make the world a better place. SAVING WALDEN’S WORLD is a revealing new film following Jim Merkel as he raises Walden, a budding scientist, in an off-the-grid homestead and wonders: could the very people his past-life’s work targeted, hold the keys to a sustainable planet?

A film by David Washburn

Muslim chaplains work for change in one of America’s most powerful institutions—the military. For them, the fight for equality and religious freedom begins on the inside.

Directed by Shalini Kantayya

Explore the power and complexity of technology through the lens of TikTok and the Gen Z influencers who know it best.

Directed by Paula Eiselt

Under G-d is a documentary short about the national Jewish response to the Dobbs Decision woven through the lived experiences of impacted women and the various lawsuits currently being launched by Jewish and interfaith leaders to challenge the overturning of Roe v. Wade, state by state.

Executive produced by Charlotte Mangin and Sandy Rattley.

An innovative series of 26 animated documentary shorts featuring unsung and extraordinary women from the turn of the 20th century who changed America.

Directed and Produced by Michael Premo.

Water Warriors is the story of a community’s successful resistance against the oil and gas industry. When an energy company begins searching for natural gas in New Brunswick, Canada, indigenous and white families unite to drive out the company in a campaign to protect their water and way of life.

Directed by Christi Cooper.

The story of America’s youth taking on the world’s most powerful government. Since 2015, twenty-one plaintiffs, ages 11 to 22, have been suing the U.S. government over their constitutional rights to a safe climate system.

Directed by Rachel Boynton
Produced by Rachel Boynton and Erika Dilday

Urgent and nuanced, Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are) travels across the United States, exploring how Americans tell the story of their Civil War. Filmed from the last year of Obama’s presidency through the present, it interweaves insightful scenes and touching interviews filmed North and South, painting a uniquely crafted, multi-faceted portrait of the American psyche and the deep roots of its turbulent times. With delicacy and strength, subtlety and determination, Civil War portrays a nation in denial, haunted by an embittered past and the stories it refuses to tell.