Black Thoughts

A man that is a stranger, is an incredibly easy man to hate. However, walking in a stranger’s shoes, even for a short while, can transform a perceived adversary into an ally. Power is found in coming to know our neighbor’s hearts. For in the darkness of ignorance, enemies are made and wars are waged, but in the light of understanding, family extends beyond blood lines and legacies of hatred crumble.

Tinkebell - Who Killed the Blue Bird?

Artist Katinka Simonse, alias Tinkebell, is a controversial, very mediagenic phenomenon. In her universe there is no distinction between life, art and activism; Tinkebell is her own work of art. Everything she encounters on her life path can become part of her story. Filmmaker Judith de Leeuw was given access to all images about Tinkebell, including her entire private archive. She thus constructed an archive film about how as a human being, living on the ruins of the past, you can be a character in your own story. What is the price you can afford if you continue to believe at any cost?

Berlin Babylon

A documentary focusing on the rebuilding projects in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Our Street Was Paved with Gold

Filmmaker Albert Kish revisits Montreal's St Lawrence Boulevard in the '70s. The street, also known as "The Main," is a little Europe with many languages, foods and small courtesies that make a stranger feel at home.

Seattle Freeway Revolt

In the 1950s, Seattle had plans to build one of the densest networks of freeways in the world. It would have displaced thousands, especially the poor and people of color. Over the next two decades, a broad coalition of communities came together and halted these plans. Testimonies from that era are juxtaposed with interviews of activists who participated in the revolt, giving a picture of what Seattle could have been had the people not stood up to the highway lobby and their representatives.

Ramps to Nowhere

A film about the cross coalition of communities that stopped a planned network of freeways from being built in Seattle in the late 60s and early 70s. It weaves together archival material with the filmmaker's personal narrative about living next to freeways, and features interviews with participants from the freeway revolt.

One Book at a Time

Sarah Kamya is a school counselor in New York City. She began the project Little Diverse Libraries on June 3rd and has already raised over $13,000, supported black owned bookstores, and has distributed 775 books to Little Free Libraries across all 50 states. Sarah is helping educate communities while most importantly amplifying and empowering black voices.

Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square

In 1959 New York City announced a "slum clearance plan" by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working class and immigrant families, and dozens of businesses, from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit - not displace - residents, Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification - cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty three years later, they established the state's first community land trust - a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the "real estate capital of the world."

When Paris was German

Discovering Paris under the German occupation through the story of an SS soldier and more generally of Wehrmacht soldiers allows us to follow the daily life on the German side. These soldiers enjoyed privileged status, during their stay, they were led to believe that they belong to a social elite, a status unreachable back in Germany during peacetime. And who better than a German who has led such lifestyle to serve as a common thread and tell this story?

The Rainhill Story: Stephenson's Rocket

First transmitted in 1979, this programme looks at the Rainhill Locomotive Trials in Rainhill, Lancashire (now Merseyside) in 1829, a competition to find the best passenger steam locomotive in Britain.On the 150th anniversary of the trials, replicas of its famous winner - Stephenson's 'Rocket' - and two of its competitors are rebuilt by modern day designers, and the trials are reconstructed in Hyde Park.

Becoming Ourselves: How Immigrant Women Transformed Their World

A social justice organization based in Oakland-Asian Immigrant Women Advocates-focused on building the collective leadership of limited-English speaking immigrants, and empowered women and youth to become powerful agents of social change.

Cruel Architecture, a Tool of Gentrification

Beneath the Concrete, The Forest

“Beneath the Concrete, The Forest” is a short experimental documentary that takes us inside an ongoing struggle inside the city of Atlanta, GA between two sides to determine the future of Weelaunee, the biggest contiguous urban forest in the country.

Mossville: When Great Trees Fall

As a centuries-old black community, contaminated and uprooted by petrochemical plants, comes to terms with the loss of its ancestral home, one man standing in the way of a plant's expansion refuses to give up.

645 Wellington

Residents struggle to pay their rapidly rising rents on Wellington Street in Montreal.

Days of Cannibalism

A Western-like documentary set in a remote rural region in Lesotho: a frontier space where the ways of modern society are of little, if any, value. The arrival of economic migrants from China has irrevocably upset the balance of power, as old laws and ancient gods are doddering away. Subtle moments and small gestures reveal the trauma of expatriation, the burden of personal sacrifice, solitude and alienation, as well as the painful experience of otherness. As old structures begin to disintegrate and violence is about to erupt, one rule asserts itself above all others: eat or be eaten.