
01 Jan 2012

Sexwork & Me
21st century legal prostitution through the frank stories of Amsterdam red-light district sex workers at a time when tighter regulation threatens their livelihood.
In Bern, Madame Mercedes has been working for 35 years in her car as a prostitute. An intimate and subtle portrait about ageing as a prostitute, a documentary about a vanishing chapter of habits in Switzerland.
01 Jan 2012
21st century legal prostitution through the frank stories of Amsterdam red-light district sex workers at a time when tighter regulation threatens their livelihood.
31 Jan 2019
How can structures, which take up defined, rigid portions of space, make us feel transcendence? How can chapels turn into places of introspection? How can walls grant boundless freedom? Driven by intense childhood impressions, director Christoph Schaub visits extraordinary churches, both ancient and futuristic, and discovers works of art that take him up to the skies and all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. With the help of architects Peter Zumthor, Peter Märkli, and Álvaro Siza Vieira, artists James Turrell and Cristina Iglesias, and drummer Sergé “Jojo” Mayer, he tries to make sense of the world and decipher our spiritual experiences using the seemingly abstract concepts of light, time, rhythm, sound, and shape. The superb cinematography turns this contemplative search into a multi-sensory experience.
29 Aug 2007
Ceschi and Stamm's documentary tells the incredible story of Monika Krause, a former East German citizen, who became Fidel Castro's Sexual Education Minister. After 20 years in Cuba, Krause set the Cuban sexual revolution in motion: in favor of a woman's right to sexual fulfillment and legal abortion, and against exclusion of homosexuals, she acquired the title "Queen of Condoms". A film about potent female agitators, staunch macho men and Caribbean love lives.
01 Nov 2016
Brilliantly mixing animated sequences and archival footage, Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre paints a touching portrait of virtuoso pianist Oscar Peterson.
04 Sep 2005
An intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in the French Alps (Chartreuse Mountains). The idea for the film was proposed to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. The Carthusians finally contacted Gröning 16 years later to say they were now willing to permit Gröning to shoot the movie, if he was still interested.
20 Mar 2008
Max Frisch was the last big Swiss intellectual widely respected as a “voice” in its own right – a character hardly found today. The film retells Frisch’s story as a witness of the unfolding 20th century, wondering if such “voices” are needed at all, or if we could do without them.
09 Nov 2019
Mike Tyson escaped a life of poverty and petty crime to make a name for himself, becoming the youngest Heavyweight Champion of the World and a household name—but his rise was followed by a very public fall. In this remarkably candid portrait, the boxer addresses his controversial past, including the rape charge that sent him to prison and his struggles with substance abuse, while also detailing his ultimate recovery and comeback.
06 Aug 2013
A behind-the-scenes inside a news story that swept the US: a Zumba instructor, Alexis Wright, who lead a double life as a prostitute. With never-before-seen interviews from men on “the List,” local media and even her husband, Sex, Lies and Zumba will delve deeper into the operation, those involved, and just how this scandal took place in the small town of Kennebunk, Maine.
01 Jan 2001
Buy Bye Beauty is a 2001 documentary film by Swedish director and performance artist Pål Hollender. The film is about the way Latvian sex industry and its being fueled by businessmen and sex tourists from Sweden visiting Riga. The film was shot in Riga in July 2000. The narration of the film is in English, with interviews conducted in Russian and Latvian.
27 Jul 1977
A documentary about the girls of the Mustang Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada.
17 Jun 1992
James Wong and his female assistant visited various kinds of pleasure-houses, including invisible dens, high-tech private dens, smuggling blackpoints and famouse tryst places, both large and small ones, throughout Hong Kong. They also looked back to the Scientific Beauty in Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park, striptease in the Kowloon Walled City and the old stories in fish-ball stalls. There are also interviews of call-girls and grooms.
06 Aug 2011
Switzerland still carries out special flights, where passengers, dressed in diapers and helmets, are chained to their seats for 40 hours at worst. They are accompanied by police officers and immigration officials. The passengers are flown to their native countries, where they haven't set foot in in up to twenty years, and where their lives might be in danger. Children, wives and work are left behind in Switzerland. Near Geneva, in Frambois prison, live 25 illegal immigrants waiting for deportation. They are offered an opportunity to say goodbye to their families and return to their native countries on a regular flight, escorted by plain-clothes police officers. If they refuse this offer, the special flight is arranged fast and unexpectedly. The stories behind the locked cells are truly heartbreaking.
22 May 1997
A documentary film about Tibetan traditional medicine.
28 Nov 2022
Juan Méndez Bernal leaves his house on the 9th of april of 1936 to fight in the imminent Spanish Civil War. 83 years later, his body is still one of the Grass Dwellers. The only thing that he leaves from those years on the front is a collection of 28 letters in his own writing.
25 Sep 2020
7-year-old Sasha has always known that she is a girl. Sasha’s family has recently accepted her gender identity, embracing their daughter for who she truly is while working to confront outdated norms and find affirmation in a small community of rural France.
30 Oct 2024
The filmmaker’s grandmother moved into this house in 1971. When Rolande Ségalini died, everything remained as it was during her lifetime. But what to do with all the accumulated things? As her granddaughter Céline begins to film this material legacy, she realises that her grandmother has remained an enigma to her to this day. Room by room, she inventories, classes, counts, sorts the possessions retrieved from wardrobes, drawers, cabinets and boxes and arranges the objects into new still lives. It is an attempt to understand the deceased woman better and find out more about her. Step by step, the heiress discovers various connections to France’s colonial history.
18 Jan 2005
Documentary account of a man’s life in the face of imminent death – Francisco Varela's story told affectionately and gently, touchingly and astutely. Varela spent his life building bridges: between Western science and Eastern wisdom, neurobiology and philosophy, abstract theory and practical life. This film seeks to deconstructs the prevailing division between science and art.
22 Jan 2015
Above and Below is a rough and rhythmic roller coaster ride seating five survivors in their daily hustle through an apocalyptic world. A journey of challenges and beauty in uncomfortable places: Rick & Cindy, Godfather Lalo in the flood channels deep down under the shiny strip of Sin City. Dave in the dry and lonesome Californian desert and April in simulation for a Mars mission in the Utah desert. Through the hustle, the pain and the laughs, we are whisked away to an unfamiliar world, yet quickly discover the souls we encounter are perhaps not that different from our own.
15 May 2025
For the first time in six years, Barbara Morgenstern, pioneer of German-style electronic intimate pop, works on a new album. Her laptop sits on a shoebox, in the privacy of her home she finds first lines and harmonies: “I like to be alone,” one song begins. One by one, musicians join her. Intuitive ideas take shape. A window has opened. Arrangements, rehearsals, recordings follow. Step by step, the music enters public space, images are produced, videos, narratives. Questions arise: New beginning or back to the roots? New Biedermeier or tough political comment? The bigger the band, the riskier the booking. The more crisis-ridden the environment, the more comforting the music-making.
27 Dec 1995
A documentary crew from the BBC arrives in L.A. intent on interviewing Heidi Fleiss, a year after her arrest for running a brothel but before her trial. Several months elapse before the interview, so the crew searches for anyone who'll talk about the young woman. Two people have a lot to say to the camera: a retired madam named Alex for whom Fleiss once worked and Fleiss's one-time boyfriend, Ivan Nagy, who introduced her to Alex. Alex and Nagy don't like each other, so the crew shuttles between them with "she said" and "he said." When they finally interview Fleiss, they spend their time reciting what Alex and Nagy have had to say and asking her reaction.