Movies: Democracy

May, 1980. Man-seob is a taxi driver in Seoul who lives from hand to mouth, raising his young daughter alone. One day, he hears that there is a foreigner who will pay big money for a drive down to Gwangju city. Not knowing that he’s a German journali...

Song Woo-seok is a lawyer with no clients. When his friend's son is falsely accused of a crime and tortured, he takes up the case and the course of his life changes for good....

In 1987 Korea, under an oppressive military regime, a college student gets killed during a police interrogation involving torture. Government of officials are quick to cover up the death and order the body to be cremated. A prosecutor who is supposed...

In 1988, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, is forced to call a plebiscite on his presidency. The country will vote ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to Pinochet extending his rule for another eight years. Opposition leaders for t...

On 9 April 1940, German soldiers arrive in the city of Oslo. The King of Norway faces a choice that will change his country forever. The King's Choice is a story about the three most dramatic days in Norway's history, the royal family's escape and K...

A cautionary tale for these times of democracy in crisis—the personal and political fuse to explore one of the most dramatic periods in Brazilian history. With unprecedented access to Presidents Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva, we witness their rise...

Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological exam...

Through interviews filmed over four years, Noam Chomsky unpacks the principles that have brought us to the crossroads of historically unprecedented inequality – tracing a half-century of policies designed to favor the most wealthy at the expense of t...

Once upon a time, the Venezuelan village of Congo Mirador was prosperous, alive with fisherman and poets. Now it is decaying and disintegrating—a small but prophetic reflection of Venezuela itself....

Primary is a documentary film about the primary elections between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Primary is the first documentary to use light equipment in order to follow their subjects in a more intimate filmmaking style. This unconve...

What would American democracy look like in the hands of teenage girls? In this documentary, young female leaders from wildly different backgrounds in Missouri navigate an immersive experiment to build a government from the ground up....

In post-WWII Japan, an American captain is brought in to help build a school, but the locals want a teahouse instead....

When the Chinese Communist Party backtracks on its promise of autonomy to Hong Kong, teenager Joshua Wong decides to save his city. Rallying thousands of kids to skip school and occupy the streets, Joshua becomes an unlikely leader in Hong Kong and o...

A director feels he is about to lose himself to the market forces and thinks that the only way he can protest is by making a political film. He contacts Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who will become his mouthpiece and articulate what is wrong. But along th...

The film splits itself between two timelines. In 2006, Ada is basing her thesis on a massacre that occurred twenty years prior in a village called Acacia. Her mother Cecilia was part of a fact-finding mission into a massacre, and Ada’s inquiries brin...

Thoughts of a diversity of public and private citizens on the virtues of democracy, its faults, its decadence, its fall and the rise of populism....

A documentary that chronicles the life of South African leader Nelson Mandela. Mandela is probably best known for his 27 years of imprisonment, and for bringing an end to apartheid. But this film also sheds light on the little-known early period of M...

A road trip across five countries to explore the social and political movements as well as the mainstream media's misperception of South America while interviewing seven of its elected presidents....

Demirkırat stumbled on March 12, 1971. Actually, you know, they shoot limping horses. But this time it didn't. Turkish democracy continued to run despite its wounds. Because March 12 was not a "seizure" but a "warning". The generals were saying, "If...

In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed ceramics workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave. All they want is to re-start the silent machines. But this simple act - the take - has the power to turn the global...