American Documentary

An intimate and kaleidoscopic voyage behind the closed doors of the Chinese birth tourism industry in the U.S.

In 1999, filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson turned the camera on themselves and began filming their five-year-old son, Idris, and his best friend, Seun, as they started kindergarten at the prestigious Dalton School just as the private institution was committing to diversify its student body. Their cameras continued to follow both families for another 12 years as the paths of the two boys diverged—one continued private school while the other pursued a very different route through the public education system.

Rafe Esquith, 1992 American Teacher of the Year and National Medal of Arts recipient, teaches 5th-grade children whose parents don't speak English at a school in a dangerous, poor, drug-infested 100% Latino/Asian neighborhood in Los Angeles.

The planet’s busiest maternity hospital is located in one of its poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. There, poor women face devastating consequences as their country struggles with reproductive health policy and the politics of conservative Catholic ideologies.

Set in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, "93Queen" follows a group of tenacious Hasidic women who are smashing the patriarchy in their community by creating the first all-female volunteer ambulance corps in New York City. With unprecedented-and insider-access, "93Queen" offers up a unique portrayal of a group of religious women who are taking matters into their own hands to change their own community from within.

When one’s sole focus is to provide for their children, the stakes are extremely high. The need for multiple jobs to make ends meet has become a common reality for many families in this country, which leads to a very important question: who looks after the children while their parents work? Through the Night examines the economic and emotional toll affecting some American families, told through the lens of a 24-hour daycare center in Westchester, New York. At the center of it all is Nunu, the primary caregiver and a hero to many families in need of a safe space to bring their children.

The story of a defiant movement of women of color transforming American politics from the ground up. Filmed during the historic 2018 midterm elections, the series follows organizers and candidates as they fight on behalf of black, brown, immigrant and poor communities–long neglected by politicians and pundits alike.

Hla and Nyo Nyo live in a country torn by conflict. Hla is a Buddhist and the owner of a makeshift medical clinic in western Myanmar, where the Rohingya (a Muslim minority community) are persecuted and denied basic rights. Nyo Nyo is a Muslim and an apprentice midwife who acts as an assistant and translator at the clinic. Her family has lived in the area for generations, yet they are still considered intruders. Encouraged and challenged by Hla, who risks her own safety daily by helping Muslim patients, Nyo Nyo is determined to become a steady health care provider for her community.

Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Using the audio-visual approaches of essay film, first-person cinema vérité, staged actions, and decades of home movies, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current does not seek to investigate a crime, but creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

At America's elite MIT, a Ghanaian alum follows four African students as they strive to graduate and become agents of change for their home countries Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Over an intimate, nearly decade-long journey, all must decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.

Journalist Assia Boundaoui sets out to investigate long-brewing rumors that her quiet, predominantly Arab-American neighborhood was being monitored by the FBI.

For the past two years, Ryan and Amy Green have been working on That Dragon, Cancer, a videogame about their son Joel's fight against that disease. Following the family through the creation of the game and the day-to-day realities of Joel’s treatment, David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall create a moving testament to the joy and heartbreak of raising a terminally ill child.

A documentary about a survivor of Hurricane Katrina.

The film explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of a Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist and one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest leaders. Throughout the 1960s, Fannie Lou Hamer established a legacy of civil rights and human rights activism that remains relevant to this day – especially among Black youth.

Beautifully layered and expressionistic, After Sherman is a story about inheritance and the tension that defines our collective American history, especially Black history. The filmmaker follows his father, a minister, in the aftermath of a mass shooting at his church in Charleston, South Carolina to understand how communities of descendants of enslaved Africans use their unique faith as a form of survival as they continue to fight for America to live up to its many unfulfilled promises to Black Americans.

When a thriving, top-ranked African American elementary school is threatened to be replaced by a new high school favoring the community’s wealthier residents, parents, students and educators fight for the elementary school’s survival.

Filmmaker Nadine Natour turns her lens on her parents and her hometown, Appomattox, VA, to capture the story of her parents' emigration from Palestine to the United States. An uplifting, layered and often funny portrait of Palestinian Muslim immigrants Gehad and Sabah Natour, as the success of their popular grocery store defies xenophobia in the conservative rural town where the Civil War ended.