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Recommended Documentaries

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PHR National Student Program

Recommended Documentaries for Chapter Events

Director: Mary Olive Smith

The award winning feature-length documentary A Walk to Beautiful tells the stories of five Ethiopian women who suffer from devastating childbirth injuries and embark on a journey to reclaim their lost dignity. Rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities, these women are left to spend the rest of their lives in loneliness and shame. They make the choice to take the long and arduous journey to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in search of a cure and a new life.

Producer: Jordan Allott

Oscar’s Cuba is a feature length documentary that will help spread the message and story of Dr. Oscar Biscet, a prisoner of conscience currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in Cuba for his promotion of human rights. Oscar’s Cuba will highlight the courage, faith, and hope of Dr. Biscet and others working for democracy on the island. The goals of Oscar’s Cuba include raising public awareness of the plight of the Cuban people, helping individuals to stand and work in solidarity with those unjustly imprisoned and, ultimately, helping to secure the release of Dr. Oscar Biscet and all of Cuba’s prisoners of conscience.

Producer: Larry Adelaman

Unnatural Causes is the acclaimed documentary series broadcast by PBS and now used by thousands of organizations around the country [10] to tackle the root causes of our alarming socio-economic and racial inequities in health. The four-hour series crisscrosses the nation uncovering startling new findings that suggest there is much more to our health than bad habits, health care, or unlucky genes. The social circumstances in which we are born, live, and work can actually get under our skin and disrupt our physiology as much as germs and viruses.

Director: Connie Field

A timely examination of human values and the health issues that affect us all, ¡Salud! looks at the curious case of Cuba, a cash-strapped country with what the BBC calls ‘one of the world’s best health systems.’  From the shores of Africa to the Americas, !Salud! hits the road with some of the 28,000 Cuban health professionals serving in 68 countries, and explores the hearts and minds of international medical students in Cuba — now numbering 30,000, including nearly 100 from the USA.  Their stories plus testimony from experts around the world bring home the competing agendas that mark the battle for global health—and the complex realities confronting the movement to make healthcare everyone’s birth right.

Producer: Tristan Quinn

Becoming a mother in Africa can be among the most frightening and dangerous jobs in the world. This program investigates why more than half a million women die every year in pregnancy and childbirth.

DEAD MUMS DON’T CRY documents one woman’s remarkable struggle to stop mothers in her country from dying. She’s Grace Kodindo – an obstetrician in the poverty-stricken central African country of Chad. Women in Chad have a 1 in 11 chance of dying during pregnancy or in childbirth. The risk for women in the UK is 1 in 5100. Cutting maternal mortality by 75% by 2015 was one of the eight Millennium Development Goals set by 189 countries in 2000. Five years on, progress is far behind schedule – and this film reveals it’s slowest on the goals that affect women and children.

Director: Ali Habashi

The documentary One Water assesses the deficiency of potable, safe water on a global scale. The movie highlights how communities across the world are dramatically suffering from a lack of our most valuable resource, thanks to drought, pollution and other factors. It becomes apparent that although this issue demands an immediate, workable solution, the problem is not easily resolved. The filmmakers also discuss the vitality of water on parallel spiritual and physical levels.

Directors: Clark and Jesse Lyda

The Least of These explores one of the most controversial aspects of American immigration policy: family detention. As part of the Bush administration policy to end what they termed the “catch and release’” of undocumented immigrants, the U.S. government opened the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in May 2006 as a prototype family detention facility. The facility is a former medium-security prison in central Texas operated by CCA, the largest private prison operator in the country. The facility houses immigrant children and their parents from all over the world who are awaiting asylum hearings or deportation proceedings.

Directors: Alex Gibney

Taxi to the Dark Side examines America’s policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defense of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularization of the use of torture techniques in shows such as 24. (Corresponds with PHR’s Campaign Against Torture)

Director: Geoffery Smith

Driven by the need to help others where he can, Henry has been going out to Kyiv for over 15 years to help improve upon the medieval brain surgery he witnessed there during his first visit in 1992. Today the patients see him as the great saviour from the West, desperate parents want him to save their child, and his Ukrainian colleague Igor Kurilets sees him as a guru and a benefactor. But for all the direct satisfaction he gets from going, Henry also sees grossly misdiagnosed patients, children who he can’t save, and a lack of equipment and trained supporting staff.

Producer: Joshua Z Weinstein

Wheelchair bound, without a larynx, and diagnosed with a life-threatening aortic aneurysm, Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet now lives only (and barely) so he can travel to India to perform free operations in marathon-like surgery sessions where up to 700 children receive treatment for their cleft lips and other deformities. Although Dicksheet survives off of social security while living in his Brooklyn apartment, his life is drastically different in India where the eight-time Nobel Prize nominee is treated like a living god. FLYING ON ONE ENGINE shows how this quirky, funny, and sometimes difficult character overcomes his own ailments by curing others.

Producer: Alex Gibney This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Money-Driven Medicine is the first and only documentary taking a systemic look at the forces underlying – and often undermining – American healthcare. Produced by Academy Award-winner Alex Gibney and inspired by Century Foundation Health Care Fellow Maggie Mahar’s acclaimed book by the same name, the film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the $2.6 trillion U.S. healthcare industry, how it went so terribly wrong and what it will take to fix it. The film interweaves the stories of patients and doctors ensnared in the system with insights by thought-leaders such as Dr. Donald Berwick, president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Dr. James Weinstein of Dartmouth and bio-ethicist Dr. Larry Churchill of Vanderbilt. Money-Driven Medicine goes beyond health insurance reform as it lays out the looming policy challenges for the next decade if we are to provide all Americans effective, high quality, patient-centered care while containing costs and reducing wasteful, even risky procedures.

Director: Lisa F. Jackson

Since 1998 a brutal war has been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Over 4 million people have died. And there are the uncountable casualties: the many tens of thousands of women and girls who have been systematically kidnapped, raped, mutilated and tortured by soldiers from both foreign militias and the Congolese army. The world knows nothing of these women. Their stories have never been told. They suffer and die in silence. In The Greatest Silence these brave women finally speak.

Director: Errol Morris

Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? Photographs taken by soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison changed the war in Iraq and changed Americas image of itself. Yet, a central mystery remains. Did the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs constitute evidence of systematic abuse by the American military, or were they documenting the aberrant behavior of a few bad apples? We set out to examine the context of these photographs. Why were they taken? What was happening outside the frame? We talked directly to the soldiers who took the photographs and who were in the photographs. Who are these people? What were they thinking? Over two years of investigation, we amassed a million and a half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted reports, and hundreds of photographs. The story of Abu Ghraib is still shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there. The Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an expose and a coverup. An expose, because the photographs offer us a glimpse of the horror of Abu Ghraib; and a coverup because they convinced journalists and readers they had seen everything, that there was no need to look further. In recent news reports, we have learned about the destruction of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation tapes. A coverup. It has been front page news. But the coverup at Abu Ghraib involved thousands of prisoners and hundreds of soldiers. We are still learning about the extent of it. Many journalists have asked about the smoking gun of Abu Ghraib. It is the wrong question. As Philip Gourevitch has commented, Abu Ghraib is the smoking gun. The underlying question that we still have not resolved, four years after the scandal: how could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib and the subsequent coverup could happen?

by Jenny Alexander

Undocumented immigrant workers at a New Bedford factory producing vests for the U.S. military were arrested in a raid by Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE). The majority were women, many with small children. Detained follows families affected by the raid, documenting the impact on the community as well.

By: Valerie Auzenne & Terry Coonan

Torture survivors from Africa, the Philippines, South America, the Middle East and the United States speak out both about their experiences and about their feelings about U.S. regarding torture.

Part 1: Overview of Political Torture Today, 31 minutes. Includes the legal definition of torture, how torture is practiced and why, the highest risk populations, aftereffects, assessment and treatment options, and the history of the torture rehabilitation movement. Part 2: The Torture Survivor’s Perspective, 28 minutes. Two torture survivors and a Bosnian medical interpreter describe their experiences with torture, the aftereffects, and their first experiences with the U.S. Healthcare system. Included are suggestions to healthcare providers for effective engagement.

Minneapolis, MN. For human rights advocates, and for primary care providers, therapists, and staff in refugee camps who work with survivors of sexual torture.

Directed by: Pamela Bates

Follows three stories of the global movement for justice and accountability: the campaign to extradite former president Alberto Fujimori back to Peru for trial, the efforts of the International Criminal Court to try armed faction leaders from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo for enslavement of child soldiers, and the quest to bring Guatemalan General Rios Montt to justice in Spain.

Director: Adam Rodgers

THE RESPONSE is a courtroom drama based on the actual transcripts of the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals. Conceived in the vein of “12 Angry Men”, the film revolves around the trial of a suspected enemy combatant and the military judges who must decide his fate.

Producer: Sherry Jones

The documentary TORTURING DEMOCRACY [22] tells the story of how the United States government circumvented tradition and law to adopt torture as official policy. The film, produced by award-winning filmmaker Sherry Jones, draws on interviews [23], archival footage, and recently declassified documents [19] to piece together the development and dissemination of torture tactics from Bagram in Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib — and the document trail leads right to the top of the chain of command.

Producers: Aisha Bain, Jen Marlowe and Adam Shapiro

The film presents the Darfurians the filmmakers met (refugees and displaced peoples, civilians and fighters resisting the Sudanese government, child soldiers, teachers, students, parents, children and community leaders) as a people with full lives, culture, and heritage–people with homes that they desperately want to return back to, people undergoing traumatic loss but who demonstrate inspiring strength and resilience, and people whose lives, homes, safety and rights deserve to be protected vigilantly as a fundamental human right.

Produced by: EEAF

The film exposes the use of forensic sciences, including anthropology, to uncover the truth of massacres, disappearances, and other gross violations of human rights as a means to help the families of victims recover the remains of their loved ones and provide evidence to courts. The film is a collaboration between Witness and Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense/Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), and it documents the stages of the EAAF’s work from pre-interviews and exhumations to trials and reburials, drawing on their landmark exhumation at El Mozote in eastern El Salvador, which EAAF has been documenting over the past 10 years, as well as on other examples from around the world. It also explores the history of EAAF and shows the reasons why science is an essential part of human rights investigations

http://www.witness.org/index.php?option=com_rightsalert&Itemid=178&task=view&alert_id=49 [14]

This film tells the harrowing stories of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed, two men who have survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government working with various other governments worldwide.  Outlawed places the post-9/11 phenomenon of renditions and the “war on terror” in a human rights context for use on a global level in advocacy, education, and mobilization.  Features relevant commentary from The U.N. High commissioner for Human Rights, U.S. President George Bush, Michael Scheurer, the chief architect of the rendition program and former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit at the CIA, and U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. 

https://www.fulfillmentwarehouse.biz/witness/default.asp?cat=330&PID=4759&pg=1

Over forty million people in Burma are living under the brutal military dictatorship of Than Shwe and the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). Many are engaged in a struggle against this oppression, and for freedom and democracy. The videos in this compilation provide a kaleidoscopic picture of the scale of human rights abuses under one of the most repressive regimes in the world.

https://www.fulfillmentwarehouse.biz/witness/default.asp?cat=326&PID=2739&pg=2

The systematic use of rape against women and girls in conflicts around the world is one of the most shocking and under-reported war crimes, and its use in the 10-year Sierra Leone Civil War was particularly brutal. Operation Fine Girl looks at the conflict through the stories of four survivors: Three women, who survived abduction, rape, and enslavement by rebel forces, and one young boy, abducted and forced to become a killer himself.

Producer: Kara-Lee Pool

Mountains of Hope is a Boston University School of Medicine student-produced documentary that highlights the massive departure of Lesotho’s health care professionals to the Republic of South Africa. It tells the harrowing story of the courageous doctors and nurses who stayed, what they go through on a day-to-day basis, and what is being done to lure more of them back to a place in a dire state of need.

Produced by: Linda Harrar

“The Roots of Health” explores the social determinants of health — the upstream reasons why people become ill or stay healthy. From early childhood development in England, to environmental pollution, racism and green jobs in California, to microcredit opportunities and the fight for clean water of the Self Employed Women’s Association in Ahmedabad, India, this one-hour international documentary looks at how social policies can affect the health of whole populations — for worse or for better.

Directed By: Anders Ostergaard

Going beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker, Anders Østergaard, brings us close to the video journalists who deliver the footage. Though risking torture and life in jail, courageous young citizens of Burma live the essence of journalism as they insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country. Armed with small handycams the Burma VJs stop at nothing to make their reportages from the streets of Rangoon. Their material is smuggled out of the country and broadcast back into Burma via satellite and offered as free usage for international media. The whole world has witnessed single event clips made by the VJs, but for the very first time, their individual images have been carefully put together and at once, they tell a much bigger story. The film offers a unique insight into high-risk journalism and dissidence in a police state, while at the same time providing a thorough documentation of the historical and dramatic days of September 2007, when the Buddhist monks started marching.

Produced by: Mai Iskander

Documentaries about impoverished communities around the globe — in Latin America, Africa and Asia — feature heart wrenching images of children picking their way through garbage dumps to gather food to eat or material goods to sell. But nothing quite compares to the story of Cairo’s Zaballeen, a community of Egyptian Coptic Christians who have for generations survived by scouring their city for trash, carting it off to their ‘garbage neighborhood’ and recycling it. Mai Iskander follows Adham, Osama and Nabil, three bright and likable teenagers, as they continue to work in the profession of their parents, yet dream of finding a better way to make their living. While coping with meager living conditions and a daunting struggle to survive, they never lose their spirit and hope.

Produced by Mark Hopkins

In the war-zones of Liberia and Congo, four volunteers with Doctors Without Borders struggle to provide emergency medical care under extreme conditions. With different levels of experience, each volunteer must find their own way to face the challenges, the tough choices, and the limits of their idealism. “Living in Emergency” is a window into the seldom portrayed and less-than glamorous side of humanitarian aid work. It explores a world that is challenging, complex, and fraught with dilemmas – the struggles, both internal and external, that aid workers face when working in war zones and other difficult contexts

Produced by: Anne Aghion

Could you ever forgive the people who slaughtered your family? In 1994, hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus were incited to wipe out the country’s Tutsi minority. From the crowded capital to the smallest village, local ‘patrols’ massacred lifelong friends and family members, most often with machetes and improvised weapons. Announced in 2001, and ending this year, the government put in place the Gacaca Tribunals—open-air hearings with citizen-judges meant to try their neighbors and rebuild the nation. As part of this experiment in reconciliation, confessed genocide killers are sent home from prison, while traumatized survivors are asked to forgive them and resume living side-by-side. Filming for close to a decade in a tiny hamlet, award-winning filmmaker Anne Aghion [24] has charted the impact of Gacaca on survivors and perpetrators alike. Through their fear and anger, accusations and defenses, blurry truths, inconsolable sadness, and hope for life renewed, she captures the emotional journey to coexistence.

Produced by: Roger Weisberg

What happens if you fall sick and are one of 47 million people in America without health insurance? Critical Condition by Roger Weisberg (Waging a Living, POV 2006) puts a human face on the nation’s growing health care crisis by capturing the harrowing struggles of four critically ill Americans who discover that being uninsured can cost them their jobs, health, home, savings, even their lives. Filmed in vérité style, Critical Condition offers a moving and invaluable expose at a time when the nation is debating how to extend health insurance to all Americans.

The Heroes: This special program presents the stories of unsung champions who protect people worldwide from the ravages of threatening disease. Using highlights from the six-hour series, this special focuses on the individual heroes whose tireless perseverance saves millions of lives across the globe. From young polio warriors in India to armies of grandmothers in Nepal, the program takes viewers inside the stirring campaigns that have brought renewed faith to poor communities from Africa to South America.

Disease Warriors: Before there was an understanding of infectious disease, few weapons were available to fight it. Disease Warriors chronicles the groundbreaking work of early researchers, such as the famed scientist Louis Pasteur, who unmasked germs as the source of illness. Pasteur went on to develop a rabies vaccine — a great scientific triumph. Today, vaccines have made huge strides against epidemics, conquering smallpox and bringing the global eradication of polio within reach. But the world still faces major challenges in getting basic vaccines to those who still need them, and in creating new ones to combat modern nemeses, like AIDS.

Rise of the Superbugs: It’s difficult to imagine a world without medicines — and yet, before the twentieth century there weren’t any. The discovery of the very first antibiotic, penicillin, and the subsequent development of more “wonder drugs” transformed the face of modern medicine. Rise of the Superbugs chronicles these historic successes, as well as the growing threat posed by new strains of germs, such as tuberculosis and staph, that are resistant to our best antibiotics. Are our strongest medicines becoming obsolete, and can we develop new drugs in time to replace them?

Delivering the Goods: At the dawn of the 21st century, we can prevent, treat or cure most of the deadliest diseases known to humankind — and yet millions die needlessly every year because the benefits of modern medicine and public health fail to reach them. What are the obstacles to providing care to populations in need? From the villages of the Gambia to the cities and towns of Thailand, from the sun-scorched refugee camps of Chad to the teeming streets of Bangladesh — this episode chronicles innovative health programs and charismatic leaders who, against all odds, are Delivering the Goods to millions of individuals — and inspiring a new vision for the future of global health.

Deadly Messengers: Since the plague killed millions of Europeans in the Middle Ages, vector-borne diseases — those that rely on insects and animals to spread infectious agents — have posed a serious threat to public health. Today, the most dangerous vector on earth is the mosquito. From malaria to yellow fever to West Nile virus, mosquito-borne diseases continue to threaten the health of millions around the world. Deadly Messengers recounts the stories of heroic scientists and health workers who battled against the mosquito, and examines current efforts to control dangerous and spreading vector-borne diseases

Back to the Basics: Ever since sailors noticed that scurvy could be prevented with citrus fruits, it has been clear that illness could be caused by a lack of certain nutrients. While nutrient-enriched products have reduced diseases caused by vitamin deficiency in the developed countries, the problem continues to plague the developing world. And many in poorer countries suffer from the twin problems of poor nutrition and unsafe water, which create a disease burden that is almost unbearable. Back to the Basics explores the connection between health and the essential requirements that so many people take for granted. It also examines how an overabundance of nutrition — in the form of over-consumption — is causing an epidemic of obesity that is spreading across the globe.

How Safe are We: During the past 100 years, life expectancy more than doubled in developed countries. In the last few decades, however, thirty new infectious diseases have emerged and one of them — AIDS — is becoming perhaps the most devastating epidemic in history. New diseases travel the globe with unprecedented rapidity, and older killers that once seemed controllable are roaring back with a vengeance. How Safe Are We? examines the most critical threats we face today — including avian flu — and the pressing need to strengthen global public health systems.

“It isn’t just about loss of life, but about the capacity to move beyond and rebuild life.”

-Michael Pertnoy

The Last Survivor is an uplifting film that helps to shape our understanding of genocide and gain new perspective.  The film chronicles four stories of survivors, from the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, and The Congo conflicts.  All four people have suffered similar atrocities at the hands of different regimes, in separate genocides, spanning over half a century.

The impact of genocide reaches much farther than those murdered, and does not end with the killing.  Surviving victims of genocide have to live with immense psychological, physical, and emotional burdens.  In this film, we see victims struggle to find themselves and start over as they cope with the burden of survival.

It is often challenging for people in a difficult situation to find an alterative focus and build meaning into their lives.  Children in Northern Uganda have been faced with the threat of rape, murder, and abduction every day for the past twenty years while the Lords Resistance Army (L.R.A.) has been at war with the government.  This film exhibits a group of students living in an Internally Displaced Persons Camp who chose to focus and direct their energy toward music and dancing in order to cope with the turmoil around them.  The children who are part of this group were victims of the LRA and have been forced to overcome immense obstacles at a very young age.  This Film shows the power of dance, music, and determination in the face of extreme odds, and the power that these children earned by refusing to let the atrocities around them consume their lives.

Quelle