Film Library

Christina Willings’ documentary Beauty explores the lives of five gender-creative kids, each uniquely engaged in shaping their ideas of what it means to be fully human.

In this courageous, deeply personal new film, Diane Israel examines Western culture’s toxic emphasis on thinness, beauty, and physical perfection. Israel, a psychotherapist and former champion triathlete, talks candidly about her own struggle with eating disorders and obsessive exercising, fearlessly confronting her own painful past as she tries to come to terms with our unhealthy fixation on self-destructive ideals of beauty and competitiveness. The film lends context to Israel’s personal odyssey with fascinating insights from athletes, body builders, fashion models, and inner-city teens, as well as prominent cultural critics and authors such as Eve Ensler, Paul Campos, and Naomi Wolf.

Environmentalist Leanne Allison and wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer follow a herd of 120,000 caribou on foot, across 1,500 kilometers of rugged Arctic tundra.

BEING MICHELLE is an award-winning feature-length documentary film about a deaf woman with autism who survived incarceration and abuse and now uses her artwork to depict the trauma she survived and heal from her past.

When an unlikely duo discovers a pattern of illegal sterilizations in women’s prisons, they wage a near impossible battle against the Department of corrections. Filmed over seven years with extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, Belly of the Beast exposes modern-day eugenics and reproductive injustice in California prisons.

A powerful, honest portrait of one of America’s greatest 20th century photographers. A film that celebrates the individual woman who chooses”the road less traveled.”

Better This World is a 2011 documentary film that was directed by Kelly Duane and Katie Galloway. It had its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 23, 2011, where it won two Golden Gate Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Bay Area Documentary Feature.

For her entire professional life, renowned ecologist Nalini Nadkarni pioneered climbing techniques to study “what grows back” after an ecological disturbance in the rainforest canopy. Now, after surviving a life-threatening fall from a tree, she must turn her research question onto herself in order to understand the effects of disturbance and recovery throughout her life.

Mary Katzke got both the idea and the money for her latest documentary unexpectedly: via a life-threatening illness. Misdiagnosed in 1991, Katzke later found she had advanced breast cancer, requiring massive chemotherapy. Dropped by her insurance company, she sued her doctor to cover medical bills, promising herself that if she survived five years, she’d make a film for other women in the same crisis. With her settlement, she created a life-affirming video, Between Us, for hospitals to give to new breast cancer patients.

BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN tells the story of the internet’s elusive Boogeyman and two 12-year-old girls who would kill for him. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured their best friend into the woods, stabbed her 19 times, then set out on an odyssey to meet the tall and faceless man known online as Slenderman. Shot over 18 months with heartbreaking access to the families of the would-be murderers, the film plunges deep down the rabbit hole of their crime, a Boogeyman and our society’s most impressionable consumers of media. The entrance to the internet can quickly lead us to its dark basement, within just a matter of clicks. How much do we hold children responsible for what they find there?

Bold literary visionary Margaret Anderson founded the journal Little Review in 1914, an overlooked but profound influence on American literature. Anderson introduced writers such as Gertrude Stein, Emma Goldman, Djuna Barnes and Ezra Pound, and went to trial for publishing excerpts from James Joyce’s new work, ULYSSES. Immersed in her own pointed, charismatic writings, this engrossing profile follows Anderson’s inspiring life and travels. Anderson resisted censorship, meager finances and mediocrity in her unflagging search for literary enchantment; this film reveals her life to be her greatest creation.