Videoteca

location_onSan Francisco, CaliforniapublicUS

The In Between 2024
Following the death of her brother, filmmaker Robie Flores returns to her hometown Eagle Pass on the Texas/Mexico border, wanting to turn back time. She collides with unruly experiences of adolescence – quinceañeras, Rio Grande river excursions, teen makeovers and beyond – that invite her to soak up the details of the home her brother adored and she ignored. What emerges is a playful dance between a personal and collective coming-of-age portrait of kids on the border and Robie herself as she rediscovers the possibilities of joy in the aftermath of grief.

Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined 2024 star_border 8
Explore the story of Dominican-American poet and novelist Julia Alvarez, who burst onto the literary scene and blazed a trail for a generation of Latino authors.

Sister Úna Lived a Good Death 2024
Following a cancer diagnosis, Sister Úna—a mischievous, rule-breaking Catholic nun dedicated to social justice—chooses to live as she’s dying. In this touching end-of-life documentary, the self-proclaimed “leader of the misfits” plans her funeral in her last nine months to live.

And So It Begins 2024
Amidst the traditional pomp and circumstance of Filipino elections, a quirky people’s movement rises to defend the nation against deepening threats to truth and democracy. In a collective act of joy as a form of resistance, hope flickers against the backdrop of increasing autocracy.

My Sweet Land 2024
For 11-year-old Vrej, life in his homeland Artsakh is like a paradise, but when war starts again, can he carry a nation’s hopes on his young shoulders?

Emergent City 2024 star_border 8
When global developers purchase Industry City — a series of connected industrial buildings within a primarily immigrant, working class community in Brooklyn — conflicting views draw battlelines between residents, city officials and master planners as the fate of the city and contemporary urban development hangs in the balance.

Home Court 2024
Filmed over three years, the film follows Ashley Chea, a Cambodian-American basketball phenom. Exploring the highs and lowsher immigrant family, surmounting racial and class differences, as well as personal trials that include a devastating knee injury. Despite the intensity of basketball recruiting, Ashley’s humor shines through and her natural talent inspires the support of those around her.

Matter of Mind: My Parkinson's 2024
In Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s, three people navigate their lives with resourcefulness and determination in the face of a degenerative illness, Parkinson’s disease. An optician pursues deep brain stimulation surgery; a mother raising a pre-teen daughter becomes a boxing coach and an advocate for exercise; and a cartoonist contemplates how he will continue to draw as his motor control declines.

Light of the Setting Sun 2024
A Taiwanese American filmmaker questions her family’s silence around the cycles of violence that have persisted since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.

The Tuba Thieves 2024 star_border 8
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.

Brief Tender Light 2024
At America's elite MIT, a Ghanaian alum follows four African students as they strive to graduate and become agents of change for their home countries Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Over an intimate, nearly decade-long journey, all must decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.

Three Chaplains 2023
Muslim chaplains work for change inside the U.S. military, fighting for equality and religious freedom.

Murders That Matter 2023
How would you handle the trauma of losing a loved one? Murders That Matter documents African American Muslim mother Movita Johnson-Harrell over five years as she transforms from a victim of violent trauma into a fierce advocate against gun violence in Black communities.

A Thousand Pines 2023
In this tale of labor and family that shines a light on the precarity of temporary work visas, Raymundo Morales leads a crew of workers who have to make the challenging decision to leave their families in rural Mexico to plant commercial pine forests in the United States.

If Dreams Were Lightning 2023
Ramin Bahrani explores a precarious community ill-equipped to handle catastrophe, and in so doing captures the human cost of inequality, a moral failure in the richest nation in the world.

Breaking the News 2023 star_border 10
A group of women and non-binary journalists, bucking the white male status quo, launch The 19th*—a digital news startup that asks who has been omitted from mainstream coverage and how they can be included.

Razing Liberty Square 2023
Eight miles inland of Miami’s beaches, Liberty City residents fight to save their community from climate gentrification: their land, sitting on a ridge, becomes real estate gold.

Underground 2023
On New York’s packed subways, violations of personal space are unavoidable—an inevitability that emboldens more predatory behavior. Underground brings these stories into the light.

Matter of Mind: My ALS 2023
Matter of Mind: My ALS follows three people living with the fatal illness ALS, in an intimate exploration of the complex choices confronting them and the different paths they find.

The Team 2023 star_border 5
An unlikely collaboration between a forensic scientist from Texas and a group of Latin American students changes the course of forensic science and international human rights.

Show more expand_more

Asian Americans 2020
This five-part series traces the story of Asian Americans, spanning 150 years of immigration, racial politics, international relations, and cultural innovation. It is a timely, clear-eyed look at the vital role that Asian Americans have played in defining who we are as a nation. Their stories are a celebration of the grit and resilience of a people that reflects the experience of all Americans.

Makers: Women Who Make America 2013 star_border 4.5
The story of the modern American women’s movement and its impact on work fields once largely closed to women.

FutureStates 2010 star_border 6
What will become of America in five, 25, or even 50 years from today? This series of independent mini-features explores possible future scenarios through the prism of today’s global realities. Immerse yourself in the visions of these independent prognosticators as they inhabit a future of their own imagining.

This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys 2003
Celebrate the triumph of the African-American religious experience through the last three centuries. From the arrival of the early African slaves through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Era, and into the 21st Century, explore the epic struggle of a people whose faith was continually tested, and how that faith became a force for social change that helped transform America socially, politically and culturally.

Independent Lens 1999 star_border 6.8
This acclaimed Emmy Award-winning anthology series features documentaries and a limited number of fiction films united by the creative freedom, artistic achievement and unflinching visions of their independent producers and featuring unforgettable stories about a unique individual, community or moment in history.