CHILDREN OF CHAMPIONS, an empowering feature-length documentary, examines the relationship between elite athletic performance and parenting success. The cinematic, deeply personal, and previously unheard story is told by a diverse group of local Olympians, their children, and a multi-award-...
The incredible history of The Palomino Club of North Hollywood (1949-1995) has never been told. What began as a watering hole with a hitching post out front serving the “Singing Cowboys of Hollywood” coming from movie sets became the most important venue for Country Music on the West Coast.
Dreaming in Somali is a timely exploration of Somali refugees’ integration in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The documentary follows the Somali-American experience through the eyes of four residents of the Twin Cities – a police officer, a women’s health advocate, a union leader, and an...
Do U Want It? is an exploration and celebration of the musical culture of New Orleans. The film chronicles the rise of beloved New Orleans' band Papa Grows Funk and uses their illustrious thirteen-year career, from formation up to the band's emotional final shows, as a vehicle to explore the...
American Love Story: A Community in Search of Freedom is a hybrid documentary-narrative that has been shot over the course of six years. By following Jessica, a survivor of domestic sex trafficking, American Love Story explores how modern slavery is perpetuated in the United States within our...
This short, 30-minute documentary paints a multi-dimensional portrait of a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania. Once home to the country’s largest integrated steel mill, Aliquippa, PA represents a microcosm of twentieth century America.
MOFAYA is an aspirational documentary about Mermans Mosengo, a musician and refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With love, hope and music as his guide, Mermans smuggled himself across Africa, in search of a better life.
Discover an invention from the 1870s that has outlasted technological innovations — the almost random arrangement of the typewriter keyboard – through the revealing personal journeys of three entrepreneurial inventors.
The Qwerty Story provides new insight into invention, innovation, the...
Max Steiner: The Dean of American Film Music deals with the origins of film music and how the role of the composer became essential to the cinematic art. Steiner’s pioneering scores became the model for the sound of the movies during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Nominated for 24 Academy Awards...
Centered around The New York Times’ Letters Department, people from across the country write letters to the editor (LTE), sustaining free speech in a time of political and technological upheaval.
As personal letter writing has become virtually extinct, why are LTEs still a vibrant and,...
America’s cowboy culture and opera's hallowed traditions converge in a story that celebrates a timeless legend and the collaborative power of art. RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE: THE MAKING OF A WESTERN OPERA follows Zane Grey’s classic Western dime-store novel as it is reborn onstage in fully...
Another Child, formerly known as "Honeychild"; Filmmaker Leanna Borsellino has a strained relationship with her mother, Cyndi, stemming from her emotional absence while Leanna was sexually abused as a child. In her 20’s, Leanna uncovers shocking secret information about her mother’s past that...
"The Hosts" shows the perspective of five different Brazilians who were affected by the 2014 FIFA World Cup in different ways - from a woman selling street food by the stadiums, to a man who was displaced by construction works. It's a social-political portrayal of Brazilians in this historical...
In 1945, two depression-era teenagers from Brooklyn, George and Mel, rode their bikes to Philadelphia for an adventure they’d remember for the rest of their lives—until Grandpa Mel lost his memory to Alzheimer’s. Now over seventy years later, his grandsons in their early twenties, Alex and Koby...
DANI’S TWINS, currently in post-production, will provide a rare, intimate look into the pregnancy and early parenting journey of Daniela Izzie--one of the few quadriplegics ever to give birth to twins.
While a source of great joy, Dani’s pregnancy is highly unusual and...
What is the price some pay for the world’s cheap pork? Rural communities in North Carolina fight for justice against a multibillion-dollar industry.
A cross-cultural montage of stories about women who became breadwinners after their husbands were suddenly no longer around. A school teacher in Oregon, USA... A genocide survivor in Phnom Penh, Cambodia...A field laborer in Chihuahua, Mexico... follow the extraordinary stories of ordinary women...
THE UNAFRAID is a feature length documentary that follows the personal lives of three DACA students in Georgia, a state that has banned them from attending their top state universities and disqualifies them from receiving in-state tuition at any other public college. Shot in an observational...
A spiritual missionary in the form of a 10-foot tree asks us to explore human nature and the survival of our species, but in the end he must contend with his own survival and past. Lionel Powell grew up in the Marcy Projects of Brooklyn surrounded by gangs, drugs and violence. As a boy he found...
At the beginning of the 90's, in San Francisco, Sylvie sets up Ti Couz, an utopian creperie, made of self-management, ecological concerns, social rights for the employees. After successful years, Sylvie and the Ti Couz ideals must face a violent gentrification and an opposite vision of society...
Drawing on his own childhood struggles adjusting to life in the US, Lebanese-American Mark Kabban uses soccer to help kids like Yousif Khummi, a recent refugee from Iraq, emerge from the shadow of war and develop a sense of identity and possibility in the United States. East County Yalla follows...
California Style: Edward H. Fickett will critically examine the life and work of master architect of Edward H. Fickett, one of America’s most prolific mid century architects. Fickett designed more than 60,000 houses as well as numerous commercial structures in California that helped give the...
The Lodge is about Fountaingrove Lodge in Santa Rosa, California -- the first of its kind continuing care retirement community (CCRC), licensed by the state, that’s specifically for LGBT seniors and their allies. It’s a story about the people who conceived and built the community and the people...
Edgar Mitchell's return to Earth in 1971 was a revelation, setting the course for a lifetime of ceaseless exploration.
"We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians." - Dr. Edgar Mitchell
The Space Less Traveled is a feature length documentary about Apollo 14...
Freep Film Festival is a documentary-focused event, with special attention paid to films connected to Detroit and Michigan — or with special resonance there. It believes great journalism and great documentary storytelling can inform, inspire and help push the region forward — shining light on...
LOGLINE: UNZIPPED: An Autopsy of American Inequality is a provocative and deeply humanizing film about the affordable housing crisis in America told through the prism of one community's struggle with the growing income divide.
SHORT SYNOPSIS: With a national reckoning on systemic...
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation of any size to MARCELLA, a feature-length documentary-in-progress about the extraordinary woman who changed how Americans cook and experience Italian food.
Marcella Hazan embraced simplicity and tradition, and built recipes around high...
FREE CHOL SOO LEE tells the story of a Korean American death row inmate convicted of a 1973 Chinatown gangland murder in San Francisco, and the activists who led a pan-Asian American movement to free him. Spanning the late 1970s to the early ’80s, this movement would for the first time bring...
L.A. is the epicenter of school privatization, and the newly appointed L.A. superintendent just unveiled his plan to dismantle the second largest public school district in the country, but then 98% of L.A. teachers vote to go on strike.
Union Vice President Cecily Myart-Cruz travels from...
ReImagine: A feature length documentary film following a young activist, as she searches for solutions to the western world's energy problems. Along the way she meets some of the world's leading scientists, activists, and innovators. She wants desperately to see the West released from its fossil...
Los Angeles, summer, 1945, a young boy, whose parents fled from Germany twelve years earlier, is adjusting to his mother’s fragile state of mind. She has just returned from months in a psychiatric hospital. Suddenly he is confronted by his father, who is shouting words he doesn’t understand: “...
EVERY BODY IN THE ROOM is a lyrical documentary portrait of celebrated theater director Anne Bogart's work with the SITI Company, one of theater's most influential and innovative companies, as they look to the next chapter of their company.
SITI was founded in 1992 by Anne Bogart and...
“Exquisite Wasteland” shatters the popular myth that deserts are lifeless, barren, and worthless. In fact, they are home to astonishing biodiversity, extraordinary animals, verdant oases, soul stirring landscapes, and an unfolding human drama that spans 10,000 years. The widely held...
An explosive viral video shows a white policeman throwing a Black teenager from her school desk. One woman uproots her life to help the girl, face the officer, and dismantle the system behind the "Assault at Spring Valley.”
"The Harvard 5" tells the true story of five men – architects and industrial designers, husbands, fathers, lovers. Now known famously as the "Harvard 5", who in a post WWII era of hope and reinvention descended upon the white picked-fenced New England town of New Canaan, Connecticut, caused...
In Ethiopia, there is a community of over nine thousand Jews. They speak Hebrew, keep kosher and have relatives in Israel, yet Israel continues to deny their appeals for aliyah — the Jewish birthright to become a citizen of Israel. They survive within a temporary, difficult reality in Ethiopia,...
