Holloway

Mo'nique: I Coulda Been Your Cellmate

April 2007 •English

Mo'nique visited a women's prison and performed her stand-up comedy for the inmates. I Coulda Been Your Cellmate is as much a documentary as it is a performance film.

Born in Evin

October 2019 •German

Follows filmmaker and actress, Maryam Zaree, on her quest to find out the violent circumstances surrounding her birth inside one of the most notorious political prisons in the world.

Women Behind Bars with Trevor McDonald

September 2013 •English

Trevor McDonald goes to Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana to speak with some of the women that live there.

Die Kinder sind tot

March 2004 •English

A documentary exploring a crime that shocked Germany in the summer of 1999.

When Women Kill

September 1983 •English

When Women Kill is a poignant documentary exploring the shocking violence that seven women fell victim to at the hands of men. The program profiles the battered women who speak frankly about the cruel abuse, threats, and fears, and the overassertive men who led them down a one-way path to death and destruction. The film features in-prison footage, including a segment depicting a confession by a follower of the notorious Charles Manson, Leslie Van Houten, who was convicted of two killing sprees and committed to life in prison.

Women's Prison

April 1965 •Persian

The film recounts the life of the prisoners and the problems their families encounter in their struggle to survive. Here again filmmaker Kamran Shirdel employs the cinema verité style. The interviews with the prisoners, social workers and teachers serve as commentaries for "constructed" documentary images.

Sister Hearts

March 2018 •English

Maryam Henderson-Uloho spent thirteen years in prison in Louisiana, seven in solitary confinement. After her release she struggled to find housing or employment. She began selling secondhand goods out of a suitcase on a street corner in New Orleans. In just three years, she grew her business to a brick-and-mortar thrift store—one that also provides housing and employment for other formerly-incarcerated women. She calls those women—and her store—Sister Hearts.

Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street

March 2000 •English

The film follows a simple structure, and shows the drug-related degradation of five youths (Jake, Tracey, Jessica, Alice, Oreo) during the course of three years. The film depicts drug-related crimes and diseases: prostitution, male prostitution, AIDS, and lethal overdoses.

Like a Rose

Invalid date •English

A short documentary from 1975 about two women serving 25 years in a Missouri penitentiary. Made with an all-female crew.

Of Monsters and Skirts

January 2008 •Catalan

Libertad, Enriqueta, Maricarmen and Albert evoke the years when their mothers and his aunt stayed in Les Corts jail, times of innocence, hopelessness and distress. Their childhood stories inmmerse us in a world whose main characters are memories, oblivion and the passing of time.

Ashley Smith : Out of Control

January 2010 •English

Ashley Smith was a troubled 19-year-old when she choked herself to death at Ontario's Grand Valley Institution for Women. Her death made national headlines and led to a scathing report by Canada’s federal prison ombudsman. Incarceration for Ashley began at a youth detention centre in New Brunswick. Her crime: she had tossed crabapples at a mailman. Her one-month sentence stretched to almost four years, served in five provinces. With the prison videotapes and exclusive access to Smith’s parents, along with a fellow inmate, this documentary exposes a system that fails the many Ashley Smiths still incarcerated in Canadian institutions.

In Paradisum

September 1993 •Estonian

In Paradisum relates two disturbing stories simultaneously. The female narrator tells her personal tale of imprisonment as the wife of the notorious Estonian serial killer, Andreas Hanni. Although her story is bizarre, it touches familiar themes that run throughout modern life: the desire to be loved and the fear of being alone. Pille Hanni's tale unfolds over cinema vérité images of life in several Estonian prisons. At times the images reflect in a literary way the events of the narration, yet they are representations and impressions, rather than traditional documentary style footage of the people involved. This opens the story to a more general interpretation, often with unsettling results. The parallel contents reveal, at two levels of story and social organisation, how the bizarre and inhuman can be tolerable and even addictive in the face of our fears.

Debut

November 2017 •Russian

The soulless atmosphere of a women's penitentiary destroys the prisoners' personality, kills all femininity in them. The film looks at the rationality of the long prison terms for women with children.

Free CeCe

June 2016 •English

This film confronts the culture of violence surrounding trans women of color. It is told through the voices of Laverne Cox and Cece McDonald.

Máma z basy

September 2017 •Czech

Cages

July 2017 •Portuguese

The final months of pregnancy and the first ones after the birth of a baby are unique experiences in a woman's life. And when this daily life is lived inside a prison?

Women of Whirlpool Island

February 1960 •Japanese

Double Jeopardy

September 1999 •English

Libby Parsons, wrongly convicted for her husband Nick's murder, thinks he is still alive and wants to settle the score and find their son. As she has been tried for the crime, she cannot be re-prosecuted if she finds and kills Nick.

102 Dalmatians

October 2000 •English

Get ready for a howling good time as an all new assortment of irresistible animal heroes are unleashed in this great family tail! In an unlikely alliance, the outrageous Waddlesworth - a parrot who thinks he's a Rottweiler - teams up with Oddball - an un-marked Dalmatian puppy eager to earn her spots! Together they embark on a laugh-packed quest to outwit the ever-scheming Cruella De Vil.

The Reader

December 2008 •English

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.