Cruel and Unusual (2006)
Five transgender women share their prison experiences. Interviews with attorneys, doctors, and other experts are also included.
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Panic Bodies (1998)
"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)
DIVERSXS (2017)
It wasn’t long until Ethan knew that he wasn’t Irene, meanwhile, Sarah wondered why it wasn’t the colour of her skin that made her feel so different from the others but, in fact, the stigma of living with HIV. Those are some of the stories from "DIVERSXS".
Sandra Bernhard: Confessions of a Pretty Lady (1994)
Bernhard, an actress-comedienne whose brassy humor attracts a cult-like following, here offers a semiconfessional view of her life's landscape. Childhood memories of her father, a doctor, and her mother, an artist, are warmly rendered in scenes of the Jewish family amiably accommodating itself to the Christmas season, and of the obligatory communal vacations joined by colorful relatives. The abrupt transition to a flamboyant denizen of "downtowns," Los Angeles or New York, to an existence as a character in the lives of marginal people, is evoked in sharply satirical terms, in a melange of humorous fact and fiction, monologues akin to those that make Bernhard an icon of pop culture.
Visions of Abolition: From Critical Resistance to a New Way of Life (2011)
Weaving together the voices of women entangled in the criminal justice system, along with leading scholars on prison abolition, this film provides a critical analysis of the disfunctionality and violence of the prison system.
Hating Peter Tatchell (2021)
The powerful and inspiring true story of the controversial human rights campaigner whose provocative acts of civil diso bedience rocked the British establishment, revolutionised attitudes to homosexuality and exposed world tyrants. As social attitudes change and history vindicates Peter's stance on gay rights, his David versus Goliath battles gradually win him status as a national treasure. The film follows Peter as he embarks on his riskiest crusade yet by seeking to disrupt the FIFA World Cup in Moscow to draw attention to the persecution of LGBT+ people in Russia and Chechnya.
The Condemned (2013)
With unprecedented access, this documentary looks into the hidden world of one of Russia's most impenetrable and remote institutions - a maximum security prison exclusively for murderers. Deep inside the land of the gulags, this is the end of the line for some of Russia's most dangerous criminals - 260 men who have collectively killed nearly 800 people. The film delves deep into the mind and soul of some of these prisoners. In brutally frank and uncensored interviews the inmates speak of their crimes, life and death, redemption and remorselessness, insanity and hope. The film tracks them though their unrelenting days over several months, lifting the veil on one of Russia's most secretive subcultures to reveal what happens when a man is locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours every day, for life. A startling insight into inscrutable minds and the forbidding world they have been condemned to. (Storyville)
The Man Who Drank the Universe (2005)
It is late 2004, and 34-year-old Englishman Alistair Appleton is about to fly from London to the Brazilian coast, where he will drink ayahuasca for the first time. With wit, insight, and sensitivity, Alistair shares this experience with us, and chats with some fellow participants before and after the ayahuasca ceremonies. For the past few years, Alistair had been working as a television presenter. In 2000, he started making trips to the Centre for World Peace and Health in Scotland to learn how to meditate. When clinical psychologist Silvia Polivoy opened an ayahuasca healing center in Bahia in 2004, Alistair faced his fears and seized the opportunity to attend.
AIDS Diva: The Legend of Connie Norman (2021)
Seizing her power as she confronts her mortality, trailblazing trans activist Connie Norman evolves as an irrepressible, challenging and soulful voice for the AIDS and queer communities of early 90's Los Angeles.
Wig (2019)
Spotlighting the art of drag, and centered on the New York staple Wigstock, this documentary showcases the personalities and performances that inform the ways we understand queerness, art and identity today.
Hotel Gondolín (2005)
The hotel Gondolín is home to some 30 transvestites who practice prostitution as the only option to survive in a society that excludes them.
The Big One (1997)
The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.
Vivre nos vies (2023)
Through the spoken stories and testimonies of 4 LGBTQ+ people over 40 years old about their lives, their joys, their hopes, their struggles, and their advice, this documentary aims to contribute to an archive, to the construction of a queer history. But also to the bridging of the communication gap between generations, showing young queer people that it is possible to have a long and happy life. What are the differences and similarities between their lived experience and the one of younger LGBTQ+ people? What can we learn from them and what should we aim to overcome? What links unify this 'community' and what debates split through it? But more than anything: what does it mean to grow old whilst being gay, lesbian, bi, trans, non-binary...? What does that look like? What does the future, which is sometimes so complicated to imagine, have on hold for us?
Two Spirits (2009)
Fred Martinez was a Navajo youth slain at the age of 16 by a man who bragged to his friends that he 'bug-smashed a fag'. But Fred was part of an honored Navajo tradition - the 'nadleeh', or 'two-spirit', who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits.
Saving Marriage (2006)
A landmark court decision in Massachusetts allows gay people in that state to marry - forcing activists, legislators, and ordinary people to reconsider how they view same-sex relationships.
Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story (2014)
A former U.S. Navy Seal seeks life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness living life as a transgender woman.
SHRED (2024)
A group of queer Latinx skaters struggle with crippling mental health and societal expectations in Southern California. In their local skate community, they find cathartic release, chosen family and mastery of empowerment.
What Is a Woman? (2022)
Matt Walsh's controversial doc challenges radical gender ideology through provocative interviews and humor.
Interview with a Woman (2023)
A documentary is an interview that asks questions. With an emphasis on femininity female-male as I interviewed her I wanted to express the "Femininity" in my male body. The movie is like a superposition of the thoughts and feelings of two people who have "femininity" in their hearts as I interviewed her. I would also like to have a voice to express my opinion. In the hopes that someone will come to interview about a life that has been overlooked because the body is not a "woman".
The World's Worst Place to Be Gay? (2011)
Scott Mills travels to Uganda where the death penalty could soon be introduced for being gay. The gay Radio 1 DJ finds out what it's like to live in a society which persecutes people like him and meets those who are leading the hate campaign.
The Codes of Gender (2010)
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.