Ladies First

What if you looked at war as though women mattered? What if you looked at peace as though women mattered? These two questions were at the heart of this critically acclaimed five-part special series.

A talented group of orphaned children in Swaziland create a fictional heroine and send her on a dangerous quest.

Baba, a young Ghanaian woman, goes in search of her father for his blessing on her impending marriage. This turns to a nightmare as he insists she a different man, and that she undergo female genital mutilation as is the custom in his tribe. She is forced to flee her father's village, seeking refugee status in the U.S. Instead she becomes enmeshed in the U.S. immigration system.

Missing in Brooks County follows the journey of two families who have come to Brooks County to look for their loved ones who went missing. As they search for answers, they encounter a haunted land where death is a part of everyday life. A gripping documentary mystery, it is also a deeply humane portrait of the law enforcement agents, human rights workers, and activists who come face to face with the life and death consequences of a broken system.

When 24-year-old Hend Nafea is arrested and tortured for demonstrating peacefully in Cairo's Tahrir Square, her pursuit of justice reflects post-revolution Egypt at an uncertain crossroads.

Based on the memoir of Nicaraguan writer and revolutionary Omar Cabezas, this documentary traces his journey from student activist to guerrilla fighter during the Sandinista revolution.

Following three female police officers in Minneapolis, Women in Blue charts their progress and efforts to remake the department to become more inclusive. When the killing of Justine Damond results in the resignation of Chief Harteau, it threatens the gains women have made in the department.

A documentary examining the decade of the 1970s as a turning point in American cinema. Some of today's best filmmakers interview the influential directors of that time.

Cynthia Lowen’s powerful documentary Netizens highlights three women as each wages war against one of the internet’s most malevolent forces: prevalent and un-policed misogyny, harassment, and stalking. Directed at thousands of women daily by way of social media, it lies in plain sight, and its ramifications never remain only online. The film deftly depicts not only the forms digital abuse can take, from non-consensual pornography to invasion of privacy, but also the consequences for its victims.

A documentary that resurrects the buried history of the outrageous, often brilliant women who founded the modern women's movement from 1966 to 1971.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell chronicles the remarkable story of the Liberian women who came together to end a bloody civil war and bring peace to their shattered country.

At a 2012 pre-season high-school football party in Steubenville, Ohio, a young woman was raped by members of the beloved high school football team. The aftermath exposed an entire culture of complicity—and Roll Red Roll maps out the roles that peer pressure, denial, sports machismo, and social media each played in the tragedy.

As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.

A first-ever look at the realities of the professional “amateur” porn world and the steady stream of 18-to-19-year old girls entering into it.

Iranian musician Shahin Najafi flees his homeland and heads to Cologne, Germany after harsh criticism by several clerics over the release of his song speaking out against human rights abuses resulted in a fatwa being issued.

In a year when women are mobilizing and running for office in unprecedented numbers, see how some of the biggest international stories of recent memory are shaped by women. An all-female cast of directors present four never-before-told stories about the women who risked their lives for peace, changing history in the process.