1. Defending Our Lives
Documentary about the magnitude and severity of domestic violence. This film features four women imprisoned for killing their batterers and their terrifying personal testimonies. It won an Oscar at the 66th Academy Awards in 1994 for Documentary Short Subject.
It has an average vote of 5.8 on TMDB.
2. The words of Ventotene (Le parole di Ventotene)
The film focuses on Ernesto Rossi , who was imprisoned by the fascist regime between 1930 and 1943 for his political ideas. Exiled on the island of Ventotene, he co-authored the Ventotene manifesto.
3. Cages (Celas)
The final months of pregnancy and the first ones after the birth of a baby are unique experiences in a woman's life. And when this daily life is lived inside a prison?
4. Preschool to Prison
Preschool to Prison is a compelling examination of how the United States public school system is built and operated like prisons. Zero-tolerance policies are used to justify suspension and arrests that set up a pathway to send children of color and children with special needs from school to prison. Children are being suspended, restrained, dragged, physically manhandled, and subsequently arrested for minor offenses such as throwing candy on a school bus. These personal accounts from people affected by the school-to-prison pipeline give riveting tales about the generational impact on society.
5. What happened to the children? (Vad Hände Med Barnen?)
In this documentary we meet five children in Sweden and see what happened in their lives. Robin was nine years old, but he already knew what a prison looked like and the bad a punishment can do. Frida was not yet born when we filmed her mother Angela in 1983. Her sister Malin lived for several years in a foster family. Bosse was 14 years old and in 9th grade when we met him in 1978. He was the only guy in the class who had glasses. Marie received many postcards and letters from her father, but very rarely met him while she was growing up.
It has an average vote of 8 on TMDB.
6. They Call Us Monsters
Behind the walls of the Compound, LA’s most violent juvenile offenders await their trials. To their advocates, they’re kids. To the system, they’re adults. To their victims, they’re monsters. Who are they to you?
It has an average vote of 6.7 on TMDB.
7. Pull of Gravity
North Philadelphia, PA – Kev, El and Andy are three men united by one struggle: they are trying to defy gravity. As part of the 700,000 prisoners released into society every year, they find themselves faced with a chilling outlook: 67% of ex-offenders re-offend within three years. What explains this invisible force that keeps former inmates in a seemingly unending cycle of incarceration? Filmed on the street over the course of two years, Pull of Gravity is an intimate portrait of these three men that confronts head-on the gritty details of lives cut short by poverty and drugs, where dealing is seen as the only route to economic prosperity, where using offers an escape from powerlessness, and where prison is too often the next stop. The film’s unfiltered lense captures its subjects as they lay bare their stories, fears, and tentative dreams.
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
8. Inside Pinochet's Prisons
The horrifying story of what went on inside General Pinochet's secret prisons.
9. Standard Operating Procedure
Errol Morris examines the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison.
It has an average vote of 6.842 on TMDB.
10. Women Behind Bars with Trevor McDonald
Trevor McDonald goes to Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana to speak with some of the women that live there.
11. Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica
Forty years after the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War, the dead remain buried along with the truth. Until now. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses who just now are telling their stories, as well as access to newly discovered documents, the film sheds new light on exactly what happened at Attica between September 9-13, 1971. Criminal Injustice raises compelling new questions about the 39 deaths at Attica, White House involvement, and the corrupting influence of Nelson Rockefeller’s political aspirations before, during, and long after the deadly retaking of the prison. Former hostage Michael Smith said that “the cover up started as soon as the shooting stopped.” This film reveals that the truth actually may have been concealed long before that.
12. Near Light
A young man, convicted murderer, has a chance of redemption when he enters the best Italian university of economics, going back and forth from prison to university every day.
It has an average vote of 6 on TMDB.
13. 13th
An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.
It has an average vote of 7.912 on TMDB.
14. The Condemned
With unprecedented access, this documentary looks into the hidden world of one of Russia's most impenetrable and remote institutions - a maximum security prison exclusively for murderers. Deep inside the land of the gulags, this is the end of the line for some of Russia's most dangerous criminals - 260 men who have collectively killed nearly 800 people. The film delves deep into the mind and soul of some of these prisoners. In brutally frank and uncensored interviews the inmates speak of their crimes, life and death, redemption and remorselessness, insanity and hope. The film tracks them though their unrelenting days over several months, lifting the veil on one of Russia's most secretive subcultures to reveal what happens when a man is locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours every day, for life. A startling insight into inscrutable minds and the forbidding world they have been condemned to.
It has an average vote of 6.5 on TMDB.
15. Art & Krimes by Krimes
While locked-up for six years in federal prison, artist Jesse Krimes secretly creates monumental works of art—including an astonishing 40-foot mural made with prison bed sheets, hair gel, and newspaper. He smuggles out each panel piece-by-piece with the help of fellow artists, only seeing the mural in totality upon coming home. As Jesse's work captures the art world's attention, he struggles to adjust to life outside, living with the threat that any misstep will trigger a life sentence.
16. Foute vrienden (Foute vrienden)
Documentary about four maffia-like friends based in Amsterdam.
It has an average vote of 5.8 on TMDB.
17. Champagne
The true story of a young teenage girl whose mother is incarcerated for murder. Living in a Catholic Children's home run by an order of nuns, she provides poignant commentary about her mother, her own situation and her outlook for the future.
18. The Big One
The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.
It has an average vote of 6.7 on TMDB.
19. HMP Styal: The Mother of All Prisons
Behind the scenes at one of the most unique and controversial prisons in the UK, home to some of Britain's worst female criminals
20. Nemesis (Nemesis)
The film explores the destruction of a unique train station in Zurich and the construction of the new prison and police centre in its place. From the perspective of the filmmaker’s window, and with testimony from prisoners awaiting deportation, the film probes how we deal with the extinction of history and its replacement with total security.
It has an average vote of 7.5 on TMDB.
