Laura Poitras
Following the life of artist Nan Goldin and the downfall of the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty who was greatly responsible for the opioid epidemic's unfathomable death toll.
A visual study of the investigation by Forensic Architecture into the Israeli cyberweapons manufacturer NSO Group and the use of its Pegasus malware to target journalists and human rights defenders worldwide.
Shocked when their friend embraces extremism, a group of Muslim Americans in Texas recount their time with him and theories about his fate.
With a baited handling of American symbolism, filmmaker RaMell Ross joins five men in the deep South, Alabama, who resurrect the homestead ritual of hog processing under the guidance of Johnny Blackmon.
Gripped by a fear of drought, 'SCENES FROM A DRY CITY' uses the lens of water to reveal cracks in Cape Town's complex social fabric.
When artist-turned-filmmaker Jill Magid learns that the archives of Mexico's most famous architect are being held in a private collection, she devises a radical plan to explore the contested legacy of the late Luis Barragán.
New York cab and black car drivers are facing economic and emotional hardship in a city dominated by ride-share apps. As these long standing industries are decimated by economic and political forces, drivers are forced to cope or fight back.
A cable system designed by controversial Chinese company Huawei Technologies enables communication between an expert and a machine. Time succumbs to space in a "New Cold War" played out in technological materials.
The historic story of whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Shot over two years and featuring exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes verité with Manning, the film picks up on the momentous day in May when she leaves prison and follows her through her journey of discovery.
Alka Pradhan, James Connell and Sterling Thomas are lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the five men facing the death penalty for plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. THE TRIAL provides a window to reflect on the impact of a rarely seen part of the war on terror: a lack of accountability for the legacy of torture and the build-up to the largest criminal trial in American history.
This montage film is made from previously unknown archival materials. It was nominated for an Oscar in 2019 in the Best Documentary Short Subject category (and was a part of the Short Film Program at the Sundance Film Festival), and shows us an almost forgotten meeting that took place in the Madison Square Garden, New York’s most famous arena - the meeting that was held by the German American Bund, a Nazi organization. It is 1939, and in the giant square Americans are making statements about white supremacy, not yet knowing into what horrors for Europe and the entire world will the Nazi regime turn into in just seven months when it invades Poland. A Night at the Garden turns out to be a chillingly relevant film for a divided America that recently saw yet another splash of race-based violence.
Meet two women fighting against race-based gerrymandering in North Carolina: Val Applewhite, a plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case, and Moon Duchin, a mathematician who empowers organizers to use data to advocate for fairly drawn electoral maps.
The story of Donald Trump's election told entirely through Russian propaganda. By turns horrifying and hilarious, the film is a satirical portrait of Russian meddling in the 2016 election that reveals an empire of fake news and the tactics of modern day information warfare.
A documentary feature film about the biggest global corruption scandal in history, and the hundreds of journalists who risked their lives to break the story.
In Japan, earthquake preparedness is a way of life — and a full- blown industry.
Constructed from footage of every regular-season concussion in the NFL this past year, this film transforms these collisions with terrifying balletic grace.
In France’s last presidential election, Marine Le Pen, a right-wing candidate, won over 30 per cent of the vote after an attempt to rebrand a party long associated with her controversial father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. See how three of her supporters faced similar obstacles in changing the narrative.
Over four years of unprecedented access, the story of a brave group of black and Latino whistleblower cops and one unrelenting private investigator who, amidst a landmark lawsuit, risk everything to expose illegal quota practices and their impact on young minorities.
Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, this film is constructed in a form that allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South - trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously a testament to dreaming.
When the MV Sewol ferry sank off the coast of South Korea in 2014, over three hundred people lost their lives, most of them schoolchildren. Years later, the victims’ families and survivors are still demanding justice from national authorities.
Moscow, Russia, December 2016. Edward Snowden, Larry Lessig and Birgitta Jónsdóttir meet for the first time in a secret place. Apparently, Russia is interfering in the US presidential elections while it mourns the death of its ambassador to Turkey. Snowden carefully chooses his interviews, so nobody really knows something about him. As the world prepares for Christmas, they gather to discuss the only issue that matters, their common struggle: how to save democracy.
Since the election of Donald Trump, there has been a continual flow of high level visitors to the penthouse apartment in Trump Tower. Their arrivals were turned into a media spectacle.
Examining the violent death of the filmmaker’s brother and the judicial system that allowed his killer to go free, this documentary interrogates murderous fear and racialized perception, and re-imagines the wreckage in catastrophe’s wake, challenging us to change.
Since taking office last June, President Rodrigo Duterte has been waging a deadly anti-drug campaign. In the past year, police and vigilantes have reportedly killed over 7,000 people suspected of participating in the drug trade.
Donald Trump has become a beloved cult figure for many Russians. The short film uses found footage, fake news and state-controlled political programming to reveal the variety of ways Trump's newfound Russian supporters express their devotion.
In 2016, transgender teen Gavin Grimm sued his local school board after its members refused to let him use the bathroom of his choice. He was ready to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court—and then the election happened.
Inspired by Pizzagate, the director re-examines a conspiracy from his youth and uncorks a sometimes funny, sometimes serious meditation on skepticism.
One week before Donald Trump was elected, 700 workers—many of whom were Trump supporters—walked out of the Momentive chemical plant in Waterford, NY, sparking a 105-day strike. In the wake of his win, the striking workers reflect on the election and Trump's advocacy for union-busting legislation.
See how alt-right icon Steve Bannon’s years as a documentary filmmaker catapulted him to Breitbart News and the Trump White House.
For the past 20 years, ex-Army Ranger and “killology” expert Dave Grossman has been traveling across the US to train police officers on his philosophy of killing. Footage from one of Grossman’s seminars is juxtaposed with stark, brutal images of police brutality—including the shooting of Philando Castile by a Minnesota police officer.
In an office in India, a cadre of Internet moderators ensures that social media sites are not taken over by bots, scammers, and pornographers. The Moderators shows the humans behind content moderation, taking viewers into the training process that workers go through in order to become social media’s monitors.
A series of racist acts prompts three Mizzou students to pick up cameras and take us inside the student movement that brought down their college president. From the hunger strike, to victory, to the fear of violent reprisals, we live with the students who started a campus revolt.
A top-secret handbook takes viewers on an undercover journey to TITANPOINTE, the site of a hidden partnership. Narrated by Rami Malek and Michelle Williams, and based on classified NSA documents, PROJECT X reveals the inner workings of a windowless skyscraper in downtown Manhattan.
Vancouver-based filmmaker and TV news veteran Fred Peabody explores the life and legacy of the maverick American journalist I.F. Stone, whose long one-man crusade against government deception lives on in the work of such contemporary filmmakers and journalists as Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, David Corn, and Matt Taibbi.
Harrowing police scanner audios are set against placid landscapes in this urgent treatise on an American epidemic.
In June 2013, Laura Poitras and reporter Glenn Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with Edward Snowden. She brought her camera with her.
The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows. The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
The filmmaker Laura Poitras follows the tragic return home to Yemen of a Guantánamo Bay prison detainee, Adnan Latif.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans' personal data.
The prologue to a trilogy of films about 9/11 America. Composed of images filmed at Ground Zero in September 2001, two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. The soundtrack is composed of the National Anthem recorded in October 2001 at the Yankees' World Series Game 4 in New York. It is a split screen revision from a double-projection installation.
This is the second channel of Laura Poitras’s double video installation. It is comprised of United States military footage of interrogations, conducted shortly after 9/11, with two U.S. prisoners in Afghanistan, one of whom, Salim Hamdan, is the subject of Poitras’s feature documentary THE OATH.
From cinema-verite; pioneers Albert Maysles and Joan Churchill to maverick movie makers like Errol Morris, Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield, the world's best documentarians reflect upon the unique power of their genre. Capturing Reality explores the complex creative process that goes into making non-fiction films. Deftly charting the documentarian's journey, it poses the question: can film capture reality?
The director follows a Sunni Arab doctor as he prepares to run for the early 2005 elections in Iraq.
“Renga is a linked-verse form of Japanese poetry that, though still practiced today, reached its peak between the 13th and 16th centuries. It is characterized by being a group composition, typically in the presence of judges and an audience, with poets rapidly contributing stanzas such that each new stanza addresses only the previous stanza; there is no overarching plot development, and the overall structure is a chain, not a conventional, linear narrative… In 1989, I had the great privilege to be involved in a film renga that was produced in the graduate film seminar led by Nathaniel Dorsky at the San Francisco Art Institute.” —Eric Theise
An anthology film conceived as a love letter to cinema, with each director crafting their portion of the film during the pandemic.
Riotsville, USA is an archival documentary about the U.S. military’s response to the political and racial injustices of the late 1960s: take a military base, build a mock inner-city set, cast soldiers to play rioters, burn the place down, and film it all.
What happened when unarmed Black teen Michael Brown was fatally shot by White police officer Darren Wilson?
