Watch The Department (2021) Online Free
THE DEPARTMENT is a feature documentary which takes us inside the never-before-seen child protection system at work in NSW. Filmed in an observational style, it follows caseworkers across the state as they navigate the complexities of keeping children safe in families experiencing domestic violence, addiction, poverty, mental health issues and intergenerational trauma.
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A Home with the Street Inside It
People experiencing homelessness, social work professionals, and film artists join forces to transform fragments of real life into fictional short films.
2025
Las Brigadistas
tells the experience of a group of medical students who travel to the north of Argentina to assist different indigenous communities that suffer the dispossession of their lands and structural poverty.
2024
No Place to Grow Old
No Place to Grow Old is the first documentary to capture a growing crisis unfolding quietly across America: older adults aging into homelessness. Set in Portland, Oregon, this film follows the lives of three older adults navigating the harsh realities of life without a home. Through their stories of hardship and resilience, the film offers an intimate portrayal of their challenges while illuminating the systemic issues contributing to their plight. Featuring insights from local and national experts, No Place to Grow Old is a powerful call to action that emphasizes dignity and hope, envisioning a future where everyone, regardless of age, has a safe and secure place to call home.
2024
Helambu
A stranger arrives in a remote Himalayan valley seeking to provide access to education to the community.
2022
Älskade Husby
Soledad, Mattias, Bahar, Facundo, and Josselin were born in 1976 and were the first generation of young people to grow up in Husby. Now, almost 30 years later, they too tell their stories.
2020
I Am Another You
Through the eyes of a young drifter who rejects society's rules and intentionally chooses to live on the streets, Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang explores the meaning of personal freedom – and its limits.
2017
Meth Storm
As police and DEA agents battle sophisticated cartels, rural, economically-disadvantaged users and dealers–whose addiction to ICE and lack of job opportunities have landed them in an endless cycle of poverty and incarceration–are caught in the middle.
2017
Stranger
In the ‘poor crescent’ around Brussels one child in three lives on the poverty line. But they can find refuge with BX Brussels of Vincent Kompany – a sports and social project. Stranger follows recent immigrant Senegalese football coach Moussa as he struggles to give them hope in their sport … and in their life.
2017
Los posibles
Santiago Mitre co-directs his first movement following The Student together with choreographer Onofri Barbato. Although it would have been more accurate to say “his first film-story-adventure-movie-great movie following The Student”, the word movement fits perfectly in Los posibles, the most overwhelmingly kinetic work Argentine cinema has delivered in many, many years. The film deals with the adaptation of a dance show directed by Onofri together with a group of teenagers who came to Casa La Salle, a center of social integration located in González Catán, trying to find some refuge from hardship. Already entitled Los posibles, the piece opened in the La Plata Tacec and was later staged in the AB Hall of the San Martín Cultural Center. Now, it dazzles audiences out of a film screen, with extraordinary muscles and a huge heart: Los posibles is a rhapsody of roughen bodies and torn emotions. Precise and exciting, it’s our own delayed, necessary, and incandescent West Side Story.
2013
Casablanca, les enfants du bitume
There are at least seven thousand children and adolescents wandering the streets of Morocco's economic capital. Sold by their parents, abused, beaten, or abandoned, they struggle to survive. Since 1995, the Bayti association has been fighting to reintegrate these sacrificed children and give them a second chance.
2009
Blood and Water
When the 2004 tsunami hit the coast of Sri Lanka, 65-year-old Anton Ambrose's wife and daughter were killed. "In five minutes," he says, "I lost everything." A year later, Anton returns to Sri Lanka. With him is his nephew, award-winning filmmaker Rohan Fernando. A Tamil, Anton moved to California in the 1970s and became a very successful gynecologist. His daughter, Orlantha, made the opposite journey, returning to Sri Lanka where she ran a non-profit group that gave underprivileged children free violin lessons. Blood and Water is the story of one man's search for meaning in the face of overwhelming loss, but it is also filled with improbable characters, unintentional comedy and situational ironies.
2007
20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup
Documentary tells the story of Maxim Vakhmin, a veritable alleycat of a man. Revered as both an angel and a devil, Maxim (once known as a successful artist in his native Russia) is losing friends and finding new ones as a homeless person in the USA.
2003
Homeland
Following four Lakota families over three years, Homeland explores what it takes for the Lakota community to build a better future in the face of tribal and government corruption, scarce housing, unemployment, and alcoholism. Intimate interviews with a spiritual leader, a grandmother, an artist, and a community activist from South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation reveal how each survives through family ties, cultural tradition, humor, and a palpable yearning for self-reliance and personal freedom.
2000
Gangstresses
Gangstresses, a documentary by Harry Davis, tells the story of violence, poverty, and survival in the streets from a female perspective. Over a two-year period, Davis interviews female hustlers, drug dealers, rappers, porn stars, prostitutes, mothers, and daughters. Among them are Champagne, a well-known African American porn star who has a small child; Mama Mayhem, a street hustler; Uneek, a rapper from the Bronx; and Vanessa Del Rio, a famous porn actress. Musicians Lil' Kim, Mary J. Blige, Ice T, and Tupac Shakur also share personal stories of survival. The documentary conducts follow-up research on the women's complicated lives, offering glimpses of both tragic reality and hopeful recovery.
2000
Megacities
Megacities is a documentary about the slums of five different metropolitan cities.
1998
The Journey
Peter Watkins' global look at the impact of military use of nuclear technology and people's perception of it, as well as a meditation on the inherent bias of the media, and documentaries themselves.
1987
The Fall of the I-Hotel
The Fall of the I-Hotel brings to life the battle for housing in San Francisco. The brutal eviction of the International Hotel's tenants culminated a decade of spirited resistance to the razing of Manilatown. The Fall of the I-Hotel works on several levels. It not only documents the struggle to save the I-Hotel, but also gives an overview of Filipino American history.
1983
Morte e Vida Severina
The story of Severino, a man who tries to escape the misery and the drought prevailing in the rural backcountry of the Northeast of Brazil. He heads for Recife, passing through desert and forest regions, expecting to find a better life.
1977
Dokkoi! Songs from the Bottom
After the waning of the protests in Sanrizuka, Ogawa Pro started questioning the future of the collective and looking for other subjects to film. Following the method developed in the previous films, the filmmakers moved to the slum of Kotobuchi in the port city of Yokohama, where more than 6000 people were struggling to get by without any means of survival, exposed to industrial accidents and diseases. The result is one of the most moving films produced by the collective, a series of beautifully filmed portraits, voicing the silenced stories and songs of a group of people living in this community. Credit: ICA London
1975
Land Without Bread
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.
1933