
01 Jan 1998

Waiting for Godot in San Quentin
Documentary about the staging of 'Waiting for Godot' in prison.
19-year-old Mikko works as a summer guard in a remote Finnish prison. Spending three months in a closed facility with convicts challenges his views on human dignity.
Himself
01 Jan 1998
Documentary about the staging of 'Waiting for Godot' in prison.
01 Jan 1996
For three months, the journalist Jesús Quintero visits more than thirty prisons and interviews more than a hundred prisoners in order to discover what life is like for those who live in them.
01 Jan 1974
The horrifying story of what went on inside General Pinochet's secret prisons.
16 Apr 2016
There are 100,000 US citizens in solitary confinement across the country, a staggering number prompting comment from both President Obama and the Pope. Situated in rural Virginia, 300 miles from any urban center, Red Onion State Prison is one of over 40 supermax prisons across the US built to hold prisoners in eight-by-ten-foot cells for 23 hours a day. Filmed over the course of one year, this eye-opening film braids stark prison imagery, stories from correction officers, and intimate reflections from the men who are locked up in isolation. The inmates share the paths that led them to prison and their daily struggles to maintain their sanity.
12 Feb 2008
Errol Morris examines the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison.
31 Jan 2016
In 1981, iconic Turkish film director escapes jail to France, his last work re-creating with other exiles the prison lives they left behind.
13 Sep 2016
Released from prison, former oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky expounds on his newfound freedom and complex relationship with Vladimir Putin.
17 Jan 2020
Survivors of violent crimes and prisoners incarcerated for murder connect to undergo astonishing transformations, liberating themselves from the debilitating constraints of trauma, and shattering preconceptions of "us and them."
06 Sep 1997
The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.
18 Apr 2018
A convicted felon builds a feminist movement from behind bars at an all-male prison in Soledad, California.
01 Jan 2013
A surreal look at the day-to-day life of American soldiers stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba through the eyes of a traveling circus troupe cleared to perform there.
01 Jan 2007
A compelling look at the choices that lead to incarceration and the reality of being locked up in Pelican Bay State Prison.
13 Jun 2018
This video, The Road to Mass Incarceration, by Greenhouse Media summarizes criminal justice policy decisions dating back to the 1960s. Although the effects often took decades to manifest, each of these policy shifts increased the rate of incarceration in the U.S. The video ends with many of the architects of these changes, Democrats and Republicans alike, admitting the failure of these policies and suggesting that it is time for real change.
16 Sep 2010
"El Rati Horror Show" is a documentary that portrays the dramatic story of Fernando Ariel Carrera, the case of an ordinary man wrongly sentenced to thirty years in prison - not by mistake but deliberately - through the manipulation of a judicial case in Argentina. The film takes as its central point the way in which Fernando Carrera's case was fabricated: the manipulation and alteration of evidence at the scene of the crime; the manipulation of all national media by Rubén Maugeri, key witness to the events and president of the Association of Friends of Commissary 34. On the other hand, it shows how Fernando Carrera leads his daily life in prison.
14 Jun 2016
MILWAUKEE 53206 chronicles the lives of those living in the ZIP code that incarcerates the highest percentage of black men in America, up to 62%. Through the intimate stories of three 53206 residents, we witness the high toll that mass incarceration takes on individuals and families that make up the community. The film examines Milwaukee’s ZIP code 53206 to illuminate the story of people from across the United States who live with the daily affects of mass incarceration.
06 Jun 2016
Behind the walls of the Compound, LA’s most violent juvenile offenders await their trials. To their advocates, they’re kids. To the system, they’re adults. To their victims, they’re monsters. Who are they to you?
07 Oct 1999
The war on drugs has been going on for more than three decades. Today, nearly 500,000 Americans are imprisoned on drug charges. In 1980 the number was 50,000. Last year $40 billion in taxpayer dollars were spent in fighting the war on drugs. As a result of the incarceration obsession, the United States operates the largest prison system on the planet. Today, 89 percent of police departments have paramilitary units, and 46 percent have been trained by active duty armed forces. The most common use of paramilitary units is serving drug-related search warrants, which usually involve no-knock entries into private homes.
09 Apr 2015
Welcome to Florence, Arizona: a cowboy town with a prison problem. Just 8,500 residents call the tiny community home—but over 17,000 inmates live there, housed in nine jails spread out over a sprawling industrial prison complex. The economic fate of the town’s inhabitants is inextricably linked with the prisons—and the townspeople are not necessarily happy about it. Director Andrea B. Scott follows four colorful characters whose lives are tied up with the prisons, including the town’s aspiring mayor, a retired correctional officer and speed shooter, a barber who longs for the town’s free-spirited cowboy days, and troubled teen Marcus, whose parents met through their prison careers. “Florence, Arizona” is a richly drawn, humorous look at a singular small town whose Wild West roots are still very much alive in its outlaw identity today. -TCFF database
09 Sep 2003
British documentarian Nick Broomfield creates a follow-up piece to his 1992 documentary of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a highway prostitute who was convicted of killing six men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. Interviewing an increasingly mentally unstable Wuornos, Broomfield captures the distorted mind of a murderer whom the state of Florida deems of sound mind -- and therefore fit to execute. Throughout the film, Broomfield includes footage of his testimony at Wuornos' trial.
06 Jun 1991
The Stanford prison experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life, and the effects of imposed social roles on behaviour. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University.