Health Sciences

Paul Klee, a Swiss-German painter, fled Germany in 1933 when he and other modern artists were vilified by the rising Nazi Party. Isolated in Switzerland, a mysterious disease began wreaking havoc on his body and profoundly changing his artwork. Narrator/director, Ken August Meyer, explores Klee’s expressive last works after being diagnosed with the same life-threatening disease, systemic scleroderma.

HOW TO HAVE AN AMERICAN BABY

How to Have an American Baby is a kaleidoscopic voyage into the booming shadow economy that caters to Chinese tourists who travel to the U.S. on “birthing vacations”—in order to obtain U.S. citizenship for their babies. Inside bedrooms, delivery rooms, and family meetings, the story of ahidden global economy emerges—depicting the aspirations and anxieties, fortunes and tragedies that befall the ordinary people caught in the web of its influence.

THE ETERNAL MEMORY

2024 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature. Winner of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary Cinema, The Eternal Memory is directed by the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent). The documentary tells a profound and moving love story that balances vibrant individual and collective remembrance with the longevity of an unbreakable human bond.

INCOMPATIBLE WITH LIFE

From a personal experience of a pregnancy that had a diagnosis of fetal malformation incompatible with life, director Eliza Capai spoke with other women who had gone through a similar situation in Brazil - a place where abortion in these cases can lead to three years in prison - creating a powerful and touching choir of voices that reflects on universal themes: motherhood, prenatal grief and abortion.

MEMORY GAMES

Memory makes us human. Memory Games offers a thrilling insight into the lives of four athletes as they compete for the title of World Memory Champion. Their unique approaches to memorizing and recalling mind boggling amounts of information and their life stories form the basis for a visually stunning and thought-provoking documentary that also looks at how memory permeates every aspect of our lives.

PAY OR DIE

Today, nearly 2 million Americans are being held for ransom. Without insulin, they wont surive. Pay or Die follows families on the receiving end of these ransom notes, revealing the harrowing reality of life with chronic illness in the richest country in the world. This enraging and enlightening film lays bare the human cost of the United States’ insulin affordability crisis, and serves as a call to action against the medical-industrial complex that monetizes our bodies and lives.

MINAMATA MANDALA

Filmed over 15 years, this epic three-part documentary by Kazuo Hara (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On) chronicles the history of struggle for a community in southern Japan suffering from “Minamata disease”—a debilitating neurological disease caused by methylmercury poisoning from the consumption of fish contaminated by industrial wastewater—as they continue the decades-long battle for legal recognition and reparations from the government.

EAT YOUR CATFISH

Paralyzed by late-stage ALS and reliant on round-the-clock care, Kathryn clings to a mordant wit as she yearns to witness her daughter's wedding. Shot from her fixed point of view, Eat Your Catfish delivers a profoundly intimate, layered and wryly funny portrait of a family teetering on the brink, grappling with the daily demands of disability and in-home caretaking.

EVERYTHING WILL NOT BE FINE

Adrian was born in the year of the Chernobyl accident and his mother always believed that his partial blindness was caused by her visit to Ukraine while she was six months pregnant. Upon learning this, Adrian and his friend, a woman from Kiev also affected by the disaster, set out to meet people dealing with the effects of what happened in 1986. They discover the immense scale of Chernobyl’s impact on a new generation.

DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA

Five centuries ago, anatomist André Vésale opened up the human body to science for the first time in history. Today, De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens the human body to the cinema. In their thrilling new work of nonfiction exploration, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan) burrow deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body.

SEXUAL HEALING

A wondrous and important film about the necessity of intimate human contact for every human being. Evelien, spastic from birth, and only knowing disappointing sexual experiences, is taking the first steps on her quest for intimacy. After a lifetime of mostly clinical forms of touch, she sets out to claim sexual pleasure. On her journey, Evelien discovers new parts of her body and self, as she gradually opens to the needs and desires she has been suppressing, having been told sexual touch shouldn’t matter due to her disability.

76 DAYS

On January 23rd, 2020, China locked down Wuhan, a city of 11 million, to combat the emerging COVID-19 outbreak. Set deep inside the frontlines of the crisis in four hospitals, 76 Days tells indelible human stories at the center of this pandemic. These raw and intimate stories bear witness to the death and rebirth of a city under a 76-day lockdown, and to the human resilience that persists in times of profound tragedy.

GREY MATTER

A deeply human documentary dealing with personal aspects of the medical process, director Jan Louter follows two neurosurgeons during the treatments of various patients with brain disorders, a very intensive process for both surgeon and patient during which – besides life and death – personality, the essence of the patient, is at stake.

HEALERS

By examining bodies and exploring the corners of the human psyche, Healers draws the contours of tomorrow's medicine, and weaves a portrait of a rapidly changing healthcare system. At the intersection of generations and practices, the film questions the vocation and profound meaning of caring for others, and focuses on the human dimension of medicine in a system undergoing great change.

MR. TOILET: The World's #2 Man

To a stranger, he’s a guy obsessed with toilets, but to those who know him he's “Mr. Toilet,” a crusader in global sanitation. A former entrepreneur, Jack Sim uses humor to campaign for something no one dares talk about: shit. It's a crisis that impacts over 2 billion people. In India alone, 200,000 children die each year from lack of safe sanitation. Jack fought for and established UN World Toilet Day, but with recent corporate pushback and thinning resources, he is discovering there is a price to pay for being the world's #2 hero.

AMÉRICA

Three brothers confront the chasm between adolescent yearning and adult responsibilities when brought together to care for their charismatic ninety-three year old grandmother in this critically-acclaimed documentary, “a sublime, magical masterpiece.” (Joshua Oppenheimer, director, The Act of Killing)

WOMEN OF THE VENEZUELAN CHAOS

Embodying strength and stoicism, five Venezuelan women from diverse backgrounds and generations each draw a portrait of their country as it suffers under the worst crisis in its history amid extreme food and medicine shortages, a broken justice system, and widespread fear, in this powerful and timely documentary.

FOOD EVOLUTION

Amidst a polarized debate marked by passion, suspicion and confusion, this fascinating documentary – narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson and directed by Oscar-nominee Scott Hamilton Kennedy – explores the controversy surrounding GMOs and food. Travelling from the cornfields of Iowa to banana farms in Uganda, Food Evolution brings a fresh perspective to one of the most critical issues facing global society today.

HEAVEN IS A TRAFFIC JAM ON THE 405

2018 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Short Subject, Heaven is an extraordinary documentary, a portrait of artist Mindy Alper, whose astonishing body of work – drawings and sculptures of powerful psychological clarity – reveals a lifetime of struggle with debilitating mental illness.

END OF LIFE

“In our culture, almost everyone fears death,” says Ram Dass, the noted spiritual guru and author, and one of the subjects in this extraordinary documentary. Directed by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik, who underwent training as doulas in order to accompany people nearing death, End of Life is a deeply moving, revelatory work that captures the last years of five individuals in the process of dying.

AFTER FIRE

With intimate access to the lives of women veterans, After Fire is an observational documentary that throws a spotlight on the human toll of military service - including military sexual trauma, combat injuries and bureaucratic dysfunction - examining the challenges faced by the fastest-growing group of American veterans: women

THE STAIRS

Shot over the course of five years, Hugh Gibson's award-winning documentary examines the lives of habitual drug users at an urban health center staffed by both former and current users; expanding into a wide-ranging portrait of the conditions that can nurture addiction and the social and legal structures that surround it.

STARTING POINT

A pilot program in which female prisoners work at a nursing home for the elderly and disabled while serving out their sentences.

LAST DAY OF FREEDOM

2016 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short Subject, an extraordinary, animated documentary exploring some of the most pressing social issues of our day - racial bias, veteran’s care, mental health and criminal justice.