Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power

Hollywood’s cameras like their women silent, split into titillating body parts, and aroused by violence. Director Nina Menkes uses dozens of clips from all-time-favorite films to expose how the visual language of film disempowers women and shapes the mindset of the viewers and the entire film industry.

Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down

When an assassin shot her in the head at close range, nobody thought Gabby Giffords would recover, but she relearned to walk and talk, returned to public service, and continues to improve. Julie Cohen and Betsy West (RBG) joined her and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, on their remarkable journey.

Julia

Julia Child, the first-ever celebrity chef, rose to stardom at the age of 51, when Americans were still eating TV dinners. Her remarkable life story, charming personality, and passionate love affair with cooking are accompanied by amusing and inspiring clips from her iconic cooking shows.

Licht - Stockhausen’s Legacy

As pioneering musicians prepare to do the impossible and stage Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera cycle “Licht”—an ambitious, brilliant, and megalomaniacal musical production that nobody has ever performed fully—the vibrant universe of the genius composer is revealed, showing him to be every bit as eccentric, brilliant, and passionate as his opera.

Mutzenbacher

120 years after it was published, men of all ages audition—together and separately—by reading from an infamous erotic text that had been banned for years. What has changed since it was written? What fantasies, memories, and feelings of awkwardness does it evoke today?

My Name Is Pauli Murray

Pauli Murray was there before (almost) all the others. A poet, lawyer, activist, scholar, and Black queer person, Murray paved the way for the big civil rights and women’s rights revolutions in the US. Julie Cohen and Betsy West paint the portrait of a true luminary.

Turn Your Body to the Sun

Sandar, a Soviet soldier captured by the Nazis, returned to Mother Russia only to be condemned as a traitor and sent to Siberia. Through his diaries, his letters, and colorized archive footage, his daughter tries to piece together his silenced story, and with it—the stories of millions like him.

Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987)

Not so much a documentary murder investigation as a meticulously constructed meditation on race relations, economic forces, and the failings of the American legal system - all of which comprised the backdrop for the murder of a Chinese-American automotive engineer in Detroit in 1982 - Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s Who Killed Vincent Chin? remains a stirring, absorbing elegy for justice unserved.

Words That Remain

Six people recall the languages that cradled their childhoods: Judeo-Spanish or Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. Today, the languages themselves are dying but they left traces that still affect those who heard them as children.