Featured Films

Alice Street

In a rapidly gentrifying city, the construction of a luxury condominium threatens a local mural, forcing the artists and neighborhood to rally to protect its history, voice, and land.

Born in the USA 
Provides an in-depth look at low-risk childbirth in America by presenting three different types of caregivers and settings: an obstetrician working at a teaching hospital, a licensed midwife attending home births, and a certified nurse-midwife bridging both worlds in an urban, out-of-hospital birth center. By examining the culture of birth practices in America, 'Born in the U.S.A'. raises questions about technology, safety, and quality of care, and it challenges parents to be proactive about getting the kind of care they want and need.

Clinica De Migrantes

CLINICA DE MIGRANTES counters the often dehumanizing and highly politicized rhetoric surrounding America's immigrant population, providing a compassionate profile of patients at Puentes, many of whom have left their families behind to come to America and perform physically exhausting labor for meager wages. Poverty-stricken and without medical insurance, the patients at Puentes often have nowhere else to turn for medical care. In addition to the patients, the film follows the tireless clinic staffers who treat around ten thousand patients each year with limited space and even less funding.

Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
This documentary chronicles the various stages of a mother's Alzheimer's disease and the evolution of a daughter's response to the illness. The desire to cure the incurable—to set right her mother's confusion and forgetfulness and to temper her mother's obsessiveness—gives way to an acceptance which is finally liberating for both daughter and mother.

Dolores

Who is Dolores Huerta? One of the most important, yet least known activists of our time, Dolores Huerta was an equal partner in founding the first farm workers union with César Chávez. Tirelessly leading the fight for racial and labor justice, Huerta evolved into one of the most defiant feminists of the 20th century — and she continues the fight to this day, in her late 80s. With unprecedented access to this intensely private mother of 11, Peter Bratt’s film Dolores chronicles Huerta’s life from her childhood in Stockton, California to her early years with the United Farm Workers, from her work with the headline-making grape boycott launched in 1965 to her role in the feminist movement of the ’70s, to her continued work as a fearless activist.

Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women 4

In this new, highly anticipated update of her pioneering Killing Us Softly series, the first in more than a decade, Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics in distorted and destructive ideals of femininity. The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes -- images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality. By bringing Kilbourne's groundbreaking analysis up to date, Killing Us Softly 4 stands to challenge a new generation of students to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence.

People Like Us: Social Class in America

It's the 800-pound gorilla in American life that most Americans don't think about: how do income, family background, education, attitudes, aspirations, and even appearance mark someone as a member of a particular social class?

Class can be harder to spot than racial or ethnic differences, yet in many ways it's the most important predictor of what kind of financial and educational opportunities someone will have in life. But class is a hard subject to talk about in a society like ours, where the idea that all people are created equal and that a poor child can become President is enshrined in national legend.

A Place to Breathe 
A Place to Breathe explores the universality of trauma and resilience through the eyes of immigrant and refugee healthcare practitioners and patients. This feature-length documentary intertwines the personal journeys of those who are transcending their own obstacles by healing others.

Power to Heal 
Power to Heal is an hour-long public television documentary that tells a poignant chapter in the historic struggle to secure equal and adequate access to healthcare for all Americans.

Precious Knowledge

Precious Knowledge reports from the frontlines of one of the most contentious battles in public education in recent memory, the fight over Mexican American studies programs in Arizona public schools. The film interweaves the stories of several students enrolled in the Mexican American Studies Program at Tucson High School with interviews with teachers, parents, school officials, and the lawmakers who wish to outlaw the classes.

Race: The Power of an Illusion 
This three-hour documentary challenges the idea of race as biology and traces our current notions to the 19th century. It also demonstrates how race nevertheless has a continuing impact through institutions and social policies.

The Raising of America: Early Childhood and the Future of Our Nation 
The first documentary series to explore how a strong start for all our kids can lead to a healthier, more prosperous, and more equitable America.

Resilience
RESILIENCE is a one-hour documentary that delves into the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the birth of a new movement to treat and prevent Toxic Stress. Now understood to be one of the leading causes of everything from heart disease and cancer to substance abuse and depression, extremely stressful experiences in childhood can alter brain development and have lifelong effects on health and behavior. However, as experts and practitioners profiled in RESILIENCE are proving, what’s predictable is preventable. These physicians, educators, social workers and communities are daring to talk about the effects of divorce, abuse and neglect. And they’re using cutting edge science to help the next generation break the cycles of adversity and disease. 

TRANSforming Healthcare 
This short training video designed to give healthcare providers the opportunity to understand the needs of the transgender community. The film shows a diversity of transgender people speaking about their experiences accessing medical care with a focus on concrete advice and best practices toward improving the skills of health care providers.

Transgender Tuesdays 
They came for the hormones and stayed for the health care. Set in 1993 in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, these are the pioneering patients of the first free clinic in the country for trans folks. More than a film about a clinic, the filmmakers had access to the unvarnished stories of 12 courageous individuals who share their life experiences in the "Bad Old Days" decade by decade—from the closeted 1950s, through the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s—all illustrated by amazing (and fun) archival imagery. The second half of the film shows what a difference the groundbreaking Transgender Tuesdays clinic made in the lives of the country's most medically underserved, misunderstood, and despised minority.

Unnatural Causes 
A medical detective story out to solve the mystery of what's stalking and killing us before our time, especially those of us who are less affluent and darker-skinned. These are slow deaths, the result of a lifetime of grinding wear and tear, thwarted ambition, segregation, and neglect. But this is also a story of hope and possibility, of communities organizing to gain control over their destinies and their health.

Worlds Apart 

These unique trigger films follow patients and families faced with critical medical decisions, as they navigate their way through the health care system. Filmed in patients' homes, neighborhoods and places of worship, as well as hospital wards and community clinics, Worlds Apart provides a balanced yet penetrating look at both the patients' cultures and the culture of medicine. This series is an invaluable tool for raising awareness about the role sociocultural barriers play in patient-provider communication and in the provision of healthcare services for culturally and ethnically diverse patients.