Virtual Library

On the heels of Woodstock, a group of teen campers are inspired to join the fight for disability civil rights. A spirited look at grassroots activism.

Following riots in Gujarat, Arati experiences guilt when she did not open her door to shelter an injured Muslim woman. Her husband, Sanjay, had looted merchandise from shops, and his brother, Devan, had even sexually molested Muslim women. A young lad, Mohsin, leaves the safety of an army-guarded camp to look for his father. Meanwhile a music maestro, Jahangir Khan, faces isolation. Sameer Shaikh and his Hindu wife, Anuradha, decide to re-locate to Delhi. Muneera suspects her Hindu friend, Jyoti, of setting her house on fire, while biased police officers continue oppressing Muslims and five Muslim men find a gun and attempt to seek vengeance.

More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II. Filmmaker Ai Weiwei examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over the course of one year in 23 countries, Weiwei follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretch across the globe, including Afghanistan, France, Greece, Germany and Iraq.

Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.

Can a modern democracy impose a prolonged military occupation on another people while retaining its core democratic values? Since Israel conquered the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war, the military has imposed thousands of orders and laws, established military courts, sentenced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, enabled half a million Israeli "settlers" to move to the Occupied Territories and developed a system of long-term jurisdiction by an occupying army that is unique in the entire world.

The Law In These Parts attempts to ask some crucial questions that are often skirted or avoided: Can such an occupation be achieved within a legal framework that includes genuine adherence to the principles of rule-of-law? Should it? What are the costs that a society engaged in such a long term exercise must bear? And what are the implications of the very effort to make a documentary film about such a system?

The Missing Picture is filmmaker Rithy Panh’s personal quest to reimagine his childhood memories. From the time when the repressive Khmer Rouge ruled over Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, the only recorded artifacts that remain are propaganda footage. Using beautifully detailed clay figurines and elaborate dioramas, Panh poignantly and poetically recreates the missing images from his past, giving new life to his recollections of his friends and family both before and after the regime’s rule. The result is a heartrending, one-of-a-kind memory piece that manages to preserve a devastating chapter of human history that could all too easily have been lost to time.

In this collection of provocative essays about art and culture, Trinh Minh-ha challenges Western regimes of knowledge. Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, she examines topics such as Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology.

When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game."