Censored Voices

In 2008, Gretchen divided her twerking between the stage and the podium. The singer and dancer – also known as the "Booty Queen" – traveled through villages in the northeast of Brazil, making a living as an artist in local circuses and making noise in her campaign for mayor of Itamaracá Island, in Pernambuco. From circus to circus, the film records the performer's experiences to face her political opponents and her new audience, the electorate.

From the Institute of Legal Medicine, "The Room of Bones" follows several mothers from El Salvador who search for the remains of their children, who were disappeared amidst violence in their country. The film is a look at the twenty or more bodies that are received at the morgue on a monthly basis and remain unclaimed; the story of DNA with no name, or identifiable family, of bodies that became cadavers after being struck for belonging to a rival gang.

A short documentary about the Uyghur minority of western China.

Elliott Leyton, the subject of this riveting documentary by filmmaker Barbara Doran, can't help but be fascinating; that's because Leyton, who teaches at the Memorial University in Newfoundland, is also a valuable ally for law enforcement officials who need his expertise in psychology and criminal behavior to catch some of the most heinous criminals: serial killers.

In the 1980s archaeologist Harry Bell came to believe that Glasgow - a city built and re-built on over centuries - was laid out to a hidden design. For years he investigated the lost corners and invisible history of the landscape, plotting his 'Secret Geometry'. Unknown to Harry, psychiatric patient Mary Ross also wandered the city, visiting many of the same significant places. Her medical case file reveals a poignant quest to understand her troubled past and present. The Devil's Plantation unites the lives of these two strangers, retracing their steps to reveal an ancient secret and a timeless story of how we all live.

In 1991, the Manic Street Preachers planned to sell 16 million copies of their debut and split up. Many years, many hits and one big mystery later, this colourful band and its fans appear in a unique documentary that tells their full story.

A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

If all pictures became current, in that they pass by and in doing so, are connectable with one another, whether elegantly or obscenely, through translation or association—how would it be possible to fasten down a picture? Hito Steyerl’s light-hearted picture translations are about fastening things in an elegant-obscene way: In Tokyo she is looking for a photo series that she posed for in 1987 as a “rope bondage” model. While making inquiries with experts and authorities in the bondage arts (which are mainly marketed online nowadays), she found what she was looking for in a magazine archive. The cinematic tension is extremely high just now says the translator while Steyerl looks through photos of herself from her days as a film student.

This real-life look at FBI counterterrorism operations features access to both sides of a sting: the government informant and the radicalized target.

‘In Football We Trust’ captures a snapshot in time amid the rise of the Pacific Islander presence in the NFL. Presenting a new take on the American immigrant story, this feature length documentary transports viewers deep inside the tightly-knit Polynesian community in Salt Lake City, Utah. With unprecedented access and shot over a four-year time period, the film intimately portrays four young Polynesian men striving to overcome gang violence and near poverty through American football. Viewed as the "salvation" for their families, these young players reveal the culture clash they experience as they transform out of their adolescence and into the high stakes world of collegiate recruiting and rigors of societal expectations.

Filmmaker Amy Berg sheds light on the sexual, financial and spiritual abuses heaped upon members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by their former leader, Warren Jeffs.