Culture of Hate: Who Are We?
2002 · 57m · Documentary
In April 1999, three Lakeside brothers murdered a Mexican migrant worker by beating him to death. Producer Lee Harvey spent several months talking with Lakesiders--teachers, social workers, longtime residents and teens who are avowed racists--to unearth the reasons why kids would commit this gruesome crime and why it happened in the peaceful, semi- rural town of Lakeside in eastern San Diego county.
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The Price of Protest
2019 · ★ 7.6
United States, September 1st, 2016. American football player Colin Kaepernick kneels during the national anthem, protesting police brutality against black people. Part of the population regards the gesture as an unacceptable affront to the flag. Later, he loses his place on his team. Today, however, he is considered by many as a true hero.
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Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence
2019 · ★ 9
Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence is a 50-minute documentary about the life and work of Georgia writer and activist Lillian Smith (1887 – 1966). This documentary explores her legacy and the life journey that led to her awakening, from her childhood experiences in a small southern town, to her years of living abroad in China, to directing a girls' summer camp in North Carolina. By the time she published a bestselling novel in 1944, her moral compass was finely tuned to the changes needed in the southern U.S., and she spent the next two decades confronting the ugly institution of segregation, saying that it harmed whites as much as blacks. In the decade before her death she wrote about the need for freedom and respect for everyone everywhere.
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An American Story: Race Amity and The Other Tradition
2018
In contrast to the lens that focuses exclusively on the racist traditions that are rooted in America’s social history, the moral counterweight of close, loving, friendship and collaboration, which have always been present in our history, represents “the other tradition.” This “other tradition” is a source of inspiration and presents models of behavior that are instructional and include unknown and uncelebrated legacies to be absorbed and emulated across generations of present day Americans. The documentary discusses the “better in us” a needed collective perspective in the current climate of national disunity across racial, religious, and political lines. This has significant implications for addressing public issues from immigration to health care and the myriad of governmental, educational, business, and religious challenges that we must successfully meet to weave the fabric of unity which is indispensable to survival as a nation.
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In retrospect
2025 · ★ 4
Immigrant workers build a shopping mall for the upcoming 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. In 2016, nine people with migrant backgrounds are killed in a racist attack at the same mall.
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How to Build a House out of Wreckage and Rags
2022
Found footage: California in the 1950's and 60's. A young Indian couple enjoys their personal American dream come true in their home somewhere in the suburbs of San Francisco. In great detail they pose with their newly achieved wealth in front of their Super-8 camera. Just like postcards, they would send these film rolls to their joint families back in India. Around the same time, an American missionary couple visits the city of Calcutta to shoot a Christian propaganda film. The drastic reality with poverty and famine in the streets of the Indian metropolis fits perfectly into their wicked plan: To promote the faith in Jesus by showing the misery that pagan believers are doomed to suffer from.
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UNSPOKEN
2022
An intimate insider’s journey to uncover buried truths and explore how the community in Monroe, Georgia has been impacted by the 1946 quadruple lynching and decades of racial injustice, shattering a code of silence that has distanced neighbor from neighbor for generations.
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Town Destroyer
2022
Controversy erupts over a New-Deal-era mural of the namesake of San Francisco’s George Washington High School. The thirteen-panel artwork "The Life of Washington" by Victor Arnautoff offers a view of the Founding Father both celebratory and critical, referencing his involvements in slavery and Native American genocide.
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The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
2017 · ★ 7.1
Describing herself as a 'street queen,' Johnson was a legendary fixture in New York City’s gay ghetto and a tireless voice for LGBT pride since the days of Stonewall, who along with fellow trans icon Sylvia Rivera, founded Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), a trans activist group based in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village. Her death in 1992 was declared a suicide by the NYPD, but friends never accepted that version of events. Structured as a whodunit, with activist Victoria Cruz cast as detective and audience surrogate, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson celebrates the lasting political legacy of Johnson, while seeking to finally solve the mystery of her unexplained death.
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1983, The Marchers for Equality
2023 · ★ 9.5
In the 1980s, young people of North African descent born in France and a priest from the Lyon suburbs organized the "March of the Beurs." Launched on October 15, 1983, by seventeen people from the La Cayolle neighborhood in Marseille following a racist crime, the march concluded two months later—on December 3—on the streets of Paris, with 100,000 participants. This movement demanded equal rights. Was their cry heard?
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Hafu
2013 · ★ 6.8
A journey into the intricacies of mixed-race Japanese and their multicultural experiences in modern day Japan. For some hafus, Japan is the only home they know, for some living in Japan is an entirely new experience, and the others are caught somewhere between two different worlds.
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Obaida
2019
OBAIDA, a short film by Matthew Cassel, explores a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli military arrest. Each year, some 700 Palestinian children undergo military detention in a system where ill-treatment is widespread and institutionalized. For these young detainees, few rights are guaranteed, even on paper. After release, the experience of detention continues to shape and mark former child prisoners’ path forward.
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