Imad's Childhood

Can a child recover from spending half his life in ISIS captivity?

After two and a half years in captivity, Imad, his little brother Idan and their mother Ghazala are released into a displaced persons' camp in Kurdistan. Healing from the trauma is hard for all of them, but it seems Imad is having a particularly tough time. Not yet five, he has already spent over half his life enduring terror, abuse and "training" meant to make him heartless. Speaking only Arabic, he cannot communicate with his family, and the only means of expression at his disposal is violence. He hits and spits, and his only game is pretending to be an ISIS fighter who shoots, blows things up and kills. This poignant film follows him as he takes hesitant steps on the hard road to recovery, guided and held by his mother, his grandmother and an incredibly supportive therapist.

Turning a Blind Eye

What drives a seemingly ordinary man to murder his wife?

In October 2019, an unthinkable tragedy hit the peaceful village of Jura in Switzerland: Christophe Keller slit his wife Mélanie's throat before cutting his own. The crime shocked the whole country. What had happened between this couple, living a seemingly ordinary life with their three children? This film talks to the victim's sister, children, and friends to try and get to the bottom of how family life could descend to rape and murder. Each year, nearly 90,000 women are killed by their partner or ex-partner throughout the world; could more have been done to save Mélanie?

Mesopotamia 3D

The future of our origins

Sumer. Babylon. The epic Gilgamesh and the legendary Tower of Babel. Today, these names still resonate. They embody Mesopotamia – the land between the two rivers of Tigris and Euphrates. Regarded as a cradle of civilization, within this historical region humanity organized itself into a society of tens of thousands. They invented writing, developed agriculture, and monumental architectural structures. The history of the region is now more valuable than ever, with the resurgence of a terrorist group – Islamic State – determined to erase all traces of this remarkable ancient civilization. What lessons can be learned from Mesopotamia, and what can be done to preserve its remaining traces ? Jawad Bashara, an Iraqi writer exiled in France under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, returns to his country in a quest to rescue the Mesopotamian treasures targeted by Islamic State, embarking on a hazardous journey in search of our origins.

The Assassination and Mrs Paine

One woman’s unshakable connection to the JFK assassination continues to haunt her fifty years later.

According to her detractors, Ruth Paine is a government agent who helped frame Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin of the president. But to her defenders, she is simply an innocent bystander caught up in history. The Assassination and Mrs. Paine juxtaposes Ruth’s first-hand account alongside the assassination researchers who suspect her and the defenders of the official story with whom she sides.

By Rook or Left Hook: The Story of Chessboxing

Rocky meets The Queen's Gambit as brain and brawn are put to the test

Follow a self-defeating promoter from London and a self-promoting artist from Berlin as they fight for control of professional chessboxing, a sport which taxes mind and body through alternating rounds of chess and boxing. While Londoner and chessboxing aficionado Tim Woolgar toiled away and carried the financial burden to get the sport into the spotlight, Iepe Rubingh, the sport's inventor, used his status to garner all of the media attention at his events. As relations turned sour, Tim cut ties with Iepe and the two squared-off in a behind-the-scenes battle to decide who would become the 'Don King of chessboxing.'

Only I Can Hear

The story of CODA - Children of Deaf Adults

In the American Midwest, three hearing teenagers come of age in the vibrant, raucous Deaf community. In search of a home between two disparate worlds, the young women explore their unique identity as CODA — Children of Deaf Adults, as they strive to fit into both the deaf and hearing communities to which they belong.

Jacinta

A deeply intimate portrait of mothers and daughters, and the effects of trauma

Jacinta follows a young woman in and out of prison as she attempts to break free from an inherited cycle of addiction, incarceration and crime. Filmed for over three years, Jacinta begins at the Maine Correctional Center where Jacinta, 26, and her mother Rosemary, 46, are incarcerated together, both recovering from drug addiction. As a child, Jacinta became entangled in her mother's world of drugs and crime and has followed her in and out of the system since she was a teenager. This time, as Jacinta is released from prison, she hopes to maintain her sobriety and reconnect with her own daughter, Caylynn, 10, who lives with her paternal grandparents. Despite her desire to rebuild her life for her daughter, Jacinta continually struggles against the forces that first led to her addiction. With unparalleled access and a gripping vérité approach, director Jessica Earnshaw paints a deeply intimate portrait of mothers and daughters and the effects of trauma over generations.

On These Grounds

The school incident that exposed the division at America’s core

An explosive video goes viral, showing a white school resource officer in South Carolina pull a Black teenager from her school desk and throw her across the floor. An outraged nation divides over who is at fault and what role race played in the incident. Healer-Activist Vivian Anderson uproots her life in NYC and moves to South Carolina to help the girl and dismantle the system behind the "Assault at Spring Valley". To contextualize this incident, geographer Janae Davis treks the surrounding swamps to unearth the overgrown and neglected homes of formerly enslaved people of African descent, drawing a throughline connecting trauma from the past to present.

Bangla Surf Girls

Never have the stakes and the waves been so high

Bangla Surf Girls is an immersive documentary that takes us into the heart of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. We witness the transformation of young girls who join a local surf club and dare to dream of freedom and escape from a life of drudgery and abuse. The documentary captures the raw emotions, the family dynamics, and the complex pressures of poverty. Balancing the freedom of the waves with the restrictive realities of their circumstances, we experience the thrill and struggle of coming of age in a developing country.