Docs to Watch

Filmmaker Dana Perry documents the life of her son, Evan, a 15-year-old who committed suicide.

Nearly a year before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency, two filmmakers began to roll cameras on the young senator. Over the next 19 months, across the USA, the daily events of the presidential campaign are chronicled.

Emmy(R)-winning filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi ('Journeys With George') explores scandalized former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey's new life as a spiritual advisor to female prison inmates and a soon-to-be ordained Episcopalian priest.

A documentary exploring what it happens when you pledge to a frat house.

A Rock and a Hard Place is a portrait of Red Lake, a small Northwestern Ontario community built atop one of the world's richest underground gold mines. The film examines a modern-day gold rush as residents reflect on the boom and bust grind of life in a gold mining town. Following the extraction of gold from 7000ft underground to the surface, voices from the deep reveal a community long-dependent on a single resource; including the threat of relocation due to open-pit mine development.

A look at the Miami-Dade County Corrections and Rehabilitation Boot Camp Program, which allows young inmates undergo a strict 4 month course in order to learn from their past mistakes and make a better future for themselves.

The police killing of Mark Duggan in London, 2011, ignited the worst civil unrest in recent British history and made headlines around the globe.

By issuing marriage licenses to same gender couples, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom uproots the status quo and attempts to change the way the nation looks at life, love, and marriage.

The abortion battle continues to rage in unexpected ways on one corner in an American city.

In the early 1990s, teenager Nicole Althaus began an unlikely friendship with a teacher at her high school. Soon after, she accused her father of sexual abuse and rape. Local law enforcement arrested the father, and pursued a case against another couple as well. A psychiatrist diagnosed Nicole as having post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by sexual abuse. As Nicole's stories and accusations became even more wild (murder, a woman flying around on a broomstick, etc.), one police detective became skeptical. Eventually the charges were dropped. Nicole sued the psychiatrist in civil court, and won.

Former trucker Mark Lunsford transforms into one of America's most effective child-protection crusaders after losing his 9-year-old daughter to a sexual predator.

Documentary covering the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black nationalist and journalist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer and sentenced to death in a trial marked by controversial prosecutorial and defense tactics and charges of racism.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most recognized death row inmate in the world today. In 1982, he was was tried and convicted for the murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Since then, the Abu-Jamal trial proceedings have come under scrutiny and today his case is one of the most contested legal cases in modern American history. A former Black Panther and now renowned author, his books and writings in venues as diverse as the Yale Law Review, Forbes, Nation and street-papers for the homeless, have led many to hail him the voice of the voiceless. Justice on Trial navigates the tempest of the Abu-Jamal trial by reviewing the known facts of the case. It demonstrates that the major violations in the Abu-Jamal case -- judicial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, racial discrimination in jury selection, police corruption and tampering with evidence to obtain a conviction-- are not special to this case. Instead, they are commonly practiced within the criminal justice system and account for the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans and Latinos in the United States. The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is a microcosm of greater problems in the criminal justice system in the United States today. The attention that its many violations have received make the Abu-Jamal case one of the most important civil rights cases of our time.

A woman kills her husband, but only after years of suffering from his abuse.

The interrogation recordings of the underaged Canadian Guantanamo Bay prisoner, Omar Khadr, by Canadian intelligence personnel are presented with observations by his attorneys and former cell mates.

The heroic battle to free an innocent man. A family waiting 20 years for his return. A small town's dirty little secret.

In 1991, Cameron Todd Willingham's three daughters died in a Corsicana, Texas house fire. Tried and convicted for their arson murders, Willingham was executed in February 2004 despite overwhelming expert criticism of the prosecution's arson evidence. Today, Willingham's name has become a call for reform in the field of forensics and a rallying cry for the anti-death penalty movement; yet he remains an indisputable "monster" in the eyes of Texas Governor Rick Perry, who ignored the science that could have saved Willingham's life. Equal parts murder mystery, forensic investigation and political drama, INCENDIARY documents the haunted legacy of a prosecution built on "folklore."

A short history of civil rights movements in the US.

An homage to the inspirational African-American civil rights leader, the movie collects testimonies, eyewitness accounts and dramatic reenactments to tell the life, legacy, loves, and losses of Malcolm X.

In 1964 in rural southwest Mississippi, a young black college student, Charles Moore, and his friend Henry Dee, were kidnapped by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, taken into a nearby forest, beaten, tortured, and then taken to the Mississippi River's backwaters, where they were thrown in still alive. For 40 years, nobody seemed to care, except Charles' older brother, military non-comm Thomas Moore. Until, that is, national news organizations began to investigate this "cold case" Civil Rights murder in the late 1990s. David Ridgen, documentary filmmaker for Canadian Broadcasting, took up this cause, along with Thomas Moore. This film is the record of their investigation and their journey back to the sites of the murders. A journey into a true heart of darkness, this one in the United States. One surviving accused killer, James Ford Seale, was convicted belatedly in 2007 and went to prison.

In the Hour of Chaos is a 2016 American documentary film directed by Bayer Mack about the life and trials of the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. ("Daddy King"), father of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

To a soundtrack the mixes gospel with hip-hop, this film tells the story of the heroic but often overlooked protests by black and white civil rights supporters in 1964 in Saint Augustine, Florida, and the inequalities that persist to this day in the local African American community.

The film features 85-year-old Mr. Armstrong, an African American barber in Birmingham, Alabama, as he experiences the manifestation of an unimaginable dream: the election of the first African American president. This colorful and courageous activist of the Civil Rights era casts his vote, celebrates Obama's victory and proudly unfurls the American flag as he is inducted into the Foot Soldiers Hall of Fame. Mr. Armstrong links the magnitude of the present paradigm shift with challenges he faced in the past: from his sons' integration into an all white school to the Bloody Sunday march for voting rights. The documentary raises questions about democracy and patriotism in the face of adversity, and the vigilance and action required to ensure continued forward movement to end racial injustice.

Crime, drugs, HIV/AIDS, poor education, inferiority complex, low expectation, poverty, corruption, poor health, and underdevelopment plagues people of African descent globally - Why? 500 years later from the onset of Slavery and subsequent Colonialism, Africans are still struggling for basic freedom-Why? Filmed in five continents, and over twenty countries, 500 Years Later engages the authentic retrospective voice, told from the African vantage-point of those whom history has sought to silence by examining the collective atrocities that uprooted Africans from their culture and homeland. 500 Years Later is a timeless compelling journey, infused with the spirit and music of liberation that chronicles the struggle of a people who have fought and continue to fight for the most essential human right - freedom.

A documentary of the notorious racial terrorist1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of the African American 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement, which killed four young girls.