Mental (2008)

When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s "all in her head." Determined to live, she sets out on a virtual journey to document her story—and four other families' stories—fighting a disease medicine forgot.

Her rise was a global phenomenon. Her downfall was a cruel national sport. People close to Britney Spears and lawyers tied to her conservatorship now reassess her career as she battles her father in court over who should control her life.

Crownsville Hospital: From Lunacy to Legacy is a feature-length documentary film highlighting the history of the Crownsville State Mental Hospital in Crownsville, MD.

Three perspectives on loneliness, how it feels and how it can be survived: “If I could just dance with somebody once more.”

Soul-touching and moving, TWO WAYS HOME compassionately follows Kathy (Tanna Frederick), a woman newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder who is released from prison on good behavior and returns to her country home in Iowa to reconnect with her estranged 12-year-old daughter (Rylie Behr) and her cantankerous elderly grandfather (Tom Bower). Her return home is turbulent and a rough, unwelcome transition in which Kathy must come to terms with her diagnosis and its implications on her identity, while also realizing that her family was happier when she was gone. Conflict with her family intensifies as she struggles to keep her head above water, putting her self-worth and well-being to the ultimate test.

In response to political pressure from Senator Lillian DeHaven, the U.S. Navy begins a program that would allow for the eventual integration of women into its services. The program begins with a single trial candidate, Lieutenant Jordan O'Neil, who is chosen specifically for her femininity. O'Neil enters the grueling training program under the command of Master Chief John James Urgayle, who unfairly pushes O'Neil until her determination wins his respect.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1991. High school freshman Charlie is a wallflower, always watching life from the sidelines, until two senior students, Sam and her stepbrother Patrick, become his mentors, helping him discover the joys of friendship, music and love.

After his older brother passes away, Lee Chandler is forced to return home to care for his 16-year-old nephew. There he is compelled to deal with a tragic past that separated him from his family and the community where he was born and raised.

When reserved and lonely teenager Fenix meets popular high school girl Scarlett, the two form a bond that shapes the rest of his life.

Troy and his young transgender son Joe are on the run from his conservative mother in the Montana wilderness, with a detective in hot pursuit.

A young nurse, Alma, is put in charge of Elisabeth Vogler: an actress who is seemingly healthy in all respects, but will not talk. As they spend time together, Alma speaks to Elisabeth constantly, never receiving any answer. The time they spend together only strengthens the crushing realization that one does not exist.

Kirsty Cotton is now all grown up and married. Her memory of the events that took place back at her parent's home and the mental institution have dimmed, but she is still traumatized. A fatal car crash kills Kirsty. Now, her husband finds himself in a strange world full of sexy women, greed and murder, making him believe that he is in hell.

A troubled loner, Bob Maconel, imagines blowing up the tower in Los Angeles where he works. He takes a revolver to his office intent on killing colleagues, and then himself. At home, he holds conversations with his fish, who encourage him to do it. His supervisor picks on him. As he's screwing his courage to the sticking place, he drops a bullet; while on the floor looking for it, another colleague does exactly what Bob has been planning. Bob emerges a hero and the one colleague he likes, a woman with a bright smile, is severely wounded. Can Bob help her through despair and find himself and joy in life? Or, as everyone says, is this impossible for a man like him?

Fox Rich, indomitable matriarch and modern-day abolitionist, strives to keep her family together while fighting for the release of her incarcerated husband. An intimate, epic, and unconventional love story, filmed over two decades.

After interning her insane husband in a remote psychiatric hospital, book editor Helga Pato returns home by train, where she meets a mysterious man who identifies himself as a psychiatrist.

While former paramedic Emily tries to live a low-key life to cope with her PTSD, her new roommate has other plans, and a long-held vendetta against medical personnel.

A young psychiatric intern unearths secrets about the mental health facility in which he works.

Alex Anna’s body is a canvas: her scars come to life to tell a new story of self-harming.

Inside the dramatic search for a cure to ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). 17 million people around the world suffer from what ME/CFS has been known as a mystery illness, delegated to the psychological realm, until now. A scientist in the only neuro immune institute in the world may have come up with the answer. An important human drama, plays out on the quest for the truth.

The class of a normal German school travel to a small village in Poland near the sea where no action of any kind can take place. Due to this fact they focus on themselves. Especially one girl, Isa, has to choose between two boys who are fighting against each other. Then a final "test" is made to come to a decision... a test with final results.

The same day of their marriage, Jean's wife dies of a strange ailment in the middle of surgery. Afflicted by the loss, the young man abandons his medical studies and takes refuge in the memories of his time of courtship. At the same time that this happens, a wave of murders shakes the city with the same pattern of behavior: the victims are surgery students whose bodies have had both hands amputated.

I love Vienna is a social comedy that explores the clash of cultures and values.

Businessmen arrange the early release from prison of Togawa, serving time for taking revenge on the truck driver whose carelessness confined Togawa's sister, Rie, to a wheelchair. They want Togawa to hijack an armored truck loaded with 120 million yen; their leverage is to promise him money for surgery for Rie. Togawa consents and plans the heist with three others. The plan is solid, but it doesn't go smoothly. Togawa must improvise, there are traitors somewhere, and double-crosses mount. Can Togawa escape with enough money to help his sister and ensure a passage out of Japan?

Year after year, just after the monsoon season has finished, thousands of families travel to a bleak desert in Gujerat, India, where they will stay for an endless eight months and extract salt from the earth, using the same painstaking, manual techniques as generations before them. Director Farida Pacha spent a season with one of these families, observing the very particular rhythms of their lives.

The portrait of Eldridge Cleaver, the "Minister of Information" for the Black Panthers movement, in exile in Algiers.

Villagers in Turkey's Black Sea village of Camburnu struggle with the government's decision to turn their community into a garbage dump.

A series of 32 short scenes, uniformly set in West German instructional and training classes, that show various tasks among the citizenry being done solely as the result of exhaustive preparation - everything from women preparing to give birth, to strippers stripping, to policemen making arrests. Farocki uses the material to savagely dissect the West German mode of life. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

Paul Otlet was a Belgian, *1868, died 1944, who perfected the Dewey Classification system as "the Universal Decimal Classification", in his lifetime alone totalling 17 million index cards of human knowledge.

At the height of Reign of Terror Maximilien Robespierre orchestrates the trial and execution of several of his fellow leading French revolutionaries including Georges Danton.

It is 1980. Sadatomo is at a secondary school in a small town. His parents barely take any notice of him. The strict teacher Kobayashi has hung up a 'humanity index' in the classroom, divided into the categories 'delinquents', 'scum' and 'people'. In each category he has hung name-cards of pupils. One day Kobayashi finds out that Sadatomo and his friends have stolen some things from a shop for fun. Their fathers are informed and as punishment, the children have to write a 'self-critical' essay of no less than thirty pages. For the first time, Sadatomo is beaten by his father. Shocked, he writes a piece entitled 'I am an onion', in which the teacher thinks he can detect a first sign of humanity. That is the start of a confusing situation in which it gets hard to distinguish lies, truth, justified self-criticism and opportunist wheeler dealing, even for the boys.

The film follows William, thirty-ish, out of work and looking for a new life after apparently having been thrown out of his previous one. He meets up with Noelle, who seems intrigued by his restlessness - until her economist boyfriend shows up. Yet plot details do little to convey the power of the film, which lay in its capturing the anarchic texture of William's life - a life whose lack of direction was read as a rebuke of the Swiss myth of orderliness and self-satisfaction. With his roots in documentary, Soutter excelled at creating a loose, vibrant cinema, full of quick zooms and dynamic hand-held shots, with dialogue that often alternated between outright quotations and stylized interviews.

Farmer Ivan Dunaev gets up early. He feeds his piglets, does paperwork, fixes the tractor, and weighs the meat he'll take in his old pickup truck to the market to sell. He has a wife, a teenage daughter, and a young son. And he loves to hunt. His world revolves around these things. Then, one day, two new workers, Lyuba and Raya, on work release from the local prison colony, arrive on the farm. Ivan doesn't notice it at first, but something begins to change.

This tragic drama shows a young man fettered by Bushido, the way of the Samurai, who tried to escape the chains of his position, but was being forced to die. When the Tokugawa Shogunate ruled the land, Tatsuno castle in Wakisaka Clan's home of Harima held an established custom, the inspection of the arms warehouse. The Government Inspector Okuno Magodayu found a slight bit of dirt on the point of a spear and mentioned it with disdain. Ezaki Shinpachi heard it and started an argument with him. Magodayu then sent a a letter of challenge to him because he felt insulted by a low-ranking underling without a title. As it turned out Magodayu was killed. Since then, Shinpachi and the Okuno family have had continuous revenge duels. The tension mounts as this story builds to an extremely violent climax, when blood must pay for blood if the clan is to survive!

Four nights in Caracas. A documentary essay about chaos and civilization.

The Wrecker is a British film that tells the story of a crook who organises train crashes to discredit the railway, in favour of a rival bus company. The stunts in this film were groundbreaking for 1920s British cinema A scene wich has been discribed as "the most spectacular rail crash in cinema history" was recorded by 22 cameras.

Can and his girlfriend, Jale, live with their young daughter, Meral, in a tough Turkish neighbourhood of Berlin and barely manage to scrape enough money together for their existence. Can is a small-time dealer and errand-boy for drug boss Hakan, who has to keep his customers supplied within his narrowly staked out territory. Jale, who works in the ware-house of a department store, has been pressing Can to give up this activity. Can, also fed up with his situation, sees a bright new beginning for himself and his family when Hakan offers him the prospective chance to run a bar on his very own. But Can has little control over the pressures that gradually begin to build up around him and soon finds himself floundering in quicksand.

A recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path movement in their morning marches to their bedtime chants. Kept isolated in their own cellblocks, the guerrillas refused to acknowledge that were imprisoned. Their cellblocks were another front in the People's War: "shining trenches of combat". This film shows the intense indoctrination and belief system of the brutal Latin American insurgency.

A presidential advisor discovers that the President has assembled a secret army of vigilantes to suppress dissent and is setting up concentration camps in which to imprison protestors, hippies and other "social undesirables."

A performance artist works tirelessly to fulfill her dream of adopting Sudanese twins, placing her marriage and career at risk in this documentary.