Our Documentaries

A disfigured sister stands over the front yard grave of her sibling, both bitten by a
cobra while sleeping. A Kenyan teenager found dead on the side of the road from a
black mamba bite. An Indian father fights for his life in the ER after a bite on his
walk home from work. The stories don’t seem to end.

From Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia, more than 500,000 snakebite victims
die or suffer from lifelong disfigurement and amputations each year. Death from
snakebites claim roughly the same number of lives every month, as the total number
of lives lost to Ebola since it’s outbreak in 2014. Studies claim the rural poor fear
snakebite, more than malaria, tuberculosis or HIV.

This voiceless population of the rural poor already struggling to earn a dollar a day,
find themselves racing to unequipped hospitals devoid of antivenom, or supplies
that are unsafe and unaffordable. It is a global health crisis the world knows little
about.

‘Minutes to Die’ travels to five continents to capture the cries for help, the financial
ruin families face to save loved ones and the heroic scientists rushing to create
break-through solutions. Will world health powers and governments in endemic
countries finally act after years of ignoring what they’ve know all along? Who in the
world will become the champions of a voiceless population?

Five teenagers stigmatized by being in Special Ed. struggle to articulate how their brains work and discover that they are smarter than they thought. In a one-size-fits-all educational system, kids with learning disabilities suffer from lack of self-esteem. They become alienated and drop out. But the protagonists of ORIGINAL MINDS buck the trend. They work intensively with the filmmaker to tell their own stories. Their narratives reveal the unique approach to learning that each must discern and claim as his or her own if they are to succeed in the world.

Jim Thorpe, The World’s Greatest Athlete is a biography of the Native American athlete who became a sports icon in the first half of the 20th century. Beginning with Thorpe’s boyhood in Indian Territory it chronicles his rise to athletic stardom at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, winning two gold medals at the 1912 Summer Olympics, his fall from grace in the eyes of the amateur athletic establishment, and his rebound in professional baseball and football. Thorpe retired from pro sports at age 41 just before the stock market crash of ’29. He worked as a construction laborer before getting work in Hollywood as a bit part player. He became a representative for Indian extras in Hollywood, fighting for equal pay for Native Americans in the movies. In the 1940s he crisscrossed the nation as a public speaker advocating for Indian self-determination.

This is a film about a man who used his amazing physical prowess as a way to affirm his American Indian identity in the face of unrelenting efforts to eradicate Native American culture. Jim Thorpe, The World’s Greatest Athlete. It is the first documentary film to tell the story of Thorpe’s life outside of his well-known athletic victories.The film uses in-depth interviews with Thorpe’s surviving children, some simple recreations and images culled from over seventy-five archive sources, both stills and motion picture.

Christopher Swain braved whitewater, sewage, snapping turtles, hydroelectric dams, homeland security patrols, factory outfalls, and PCB contamination to become the first person to swim the entire length of the Hudson River from the Adirondack Mountains to New York City.

Swain's experience links together stories of the river, which begins in wilderness and ends in one of the nation's densest population centers. We meet heroes who are fighting to protect the Hudson against a range of threats from industry, inept regulatory agencies, and public indifference. We also see how ordinary citizens can and do make a difference through choices they make effecting the environment, and by joining together around a common cause.

In the heart of the Congo, at the end of a war, a handful of aid workers help refugees who have lost everything. They mobilize villagers to dig wells for clean water, train health workers, and nurse children with acute malnutrition back to health. They are confronted with threats of violence from roving militias, systemic corruption, and a legacy of colonial dependency. And there are times when it is very clear that these workers exist apart from those they aim to help, benefiting from services and luxuries of the modern world that are beyond the reach of the rural Congolese.
In spite of this the Congolese and European aid workers struggle to encourage the will of the people, and build the skills necessary, for a self-sufficient future. Heart of the Congo is a film about courage, hope, and perseverance.

Boys are in trouble. The spate of school shootings in 1998 and 1999 amplified a warning being sounded by social scientists. After 20 years of concern over the status of girls raised by the women's movement, some experts say it is boys we need to turn our attention to. There are disturbing statistics to back this up. Four boys are diagnosed as emotionally disturbed for every one girl. Six boys are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder for every one girl. Boys kill themselves five times more often than girls. Boys are four times more likely to drop out of high school than girls are. Girls now outnumber boys entering college.

How do boys become men? How do they learn courage, the difference between right and wrong, and the meaning of love? What hurts them, makes them violent, and sometimes kills them? Boys Will Be Men, a documentary film about growing up male in America, seeks answers to these questions.

A DREAM IN HANOI tells the story of two theater companies, one American and one Vietnamese, as they come together to stage the first performance in Vietnam of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This spirited tale follows the actors, directors, producers and technicians from both countries as they struggle to surmount the huge obstacles of language, culture, ideology, and a history of war on their journey to opening night at Hanoi’s famous Opera House. The film features Vietnam's renowned theater, the Central Dramatic Company of Vietnam, and actors and staff from the Artists Repertory Theater in Portland, Oregon. Music is performed by artists of Vietnam’s National Theater of Music and Dance and the Cheo Theater of Hanoi. In English and Vietnamese with English subtitles.

Sweden originated the role of the ombudsman, a representative of the King to help citizens contend with powerful institutions. Today, in the United States, an ombudsman are the most approachable public figures who use persuasion, publicity and their own moral authority to help individuals who feel aggrieved with large forces in society. Travel to Sweden, Detroit and Sacramento to meet the men and women who stand on the side of the people and not the power.

They're grateful for health, happiness and the ability to stay active in their 80's and 90's. Living in the same villages of rural Sweden, these seniors show how to age gracefully in a country that proves to be a model for how to take care of the elderly.

The late 1940's saw many Chinese families migrating from mainland China to Taiwan. Some called Taiwan and economic basket case. Today, Taiwan is being transformed, now the sixth largest importer to the United States and now Taiwan is on the rise.

The world’s second largest economic power looks to the west to improve education. With standards already high and Japanese students scoring highest on international tests, what can the United States learn from a country whose high school graduates function at U.S. college graduate levels.