Crime & Punishment
Crime, fictionalized or “true”, the go-to zone of our streaming world. While we pick through evidence and revel in mystery in our own special ways, OVID also makes space for some other angles — including the blatant injustices of our punishment industries (WHEN JUSTICE ISN’T JUST, AMERICA’S BRUTAL PRISONS...) or the stories of a choice few defendants who might have got away (THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER, THE PINOCHET CASE….).
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Ghosts of Attica
Directed by Brad Lichtenstein • Documentary • With Susan Sarandon • 2001 • 90 minutes
Attica. Like Watergate and Vietnam, it is an icon of recent history. Gov. Rockefeller's brutal re-taking of the prison - a nine-minute, 1600-bullet assault that took the lives of 29 inmates and 10 guards - put ...
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State of Terrorism
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Before September 11, 2001, only some 400 people had pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda. But now there are tens of thousands of jihadist militants on several continents. Terrorist attacks have multiplied around the world, straining relations between the West, its minority populations and Muslim nation...
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The Resolute
Directed by Giovanni Donfrancesco • Documentary • 2017 • 159 minutes
An 87-year-old Italian who has retired to the woods of Vermont meets a filmmaker and seizes the occasion to look back on his long life. Wartime memories long suppressed trigger recollections of his inconvenient past as a child ...
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Bidder 70
Directed by Beth Gage and George Gage • Documentary • 2012 • 73 minutes
In 2008, as George W. Bush tried to gift the energy and mining industries thousands of acres of pristine Utah wilderness via a widely disputed federal auction, college student Tim DeChristopher monkey-wrenched the process. B...
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Conviction
Directed by Antoine Raimbault • Drama • With Marina Foïs, Olivier Gourmet • 2019 • 110 minutes
As a juror at Jacques Viguier’s trial, Nora (Marina Foïs) is convinced that he did not kill his wife. This intuition quickly becomes an obsession. She persuades Eric Dupond-Moretti (Olivier Gourmet), ...
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Damages
Directed by Thomas Balmes • Documentary • 2008 • 69 minutes
In the United States, when someone dies as a result of the negligence or liability of another person-medical malpractice, a highway accident, murder-a wrongful death lawsuit, seeking monetary damages for the loss of financial or emotion...
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Bullets in the Hood: A Bed-Stuy Story
Directed by Terrence Fisher, Daniel Howard • Documentary • 2005 • 23 minutes
Terrence Fisher, a teen living in the Louis Armstrong housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, has had seven of his friends shot and killed with guns. Terrence is not a gang member or a drug dealer˜just a normal...
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To A More Perfect Union: U.S. v. Windsor
Directed by Donna Zaccaro • Documentary • With Edie Windsor, Nina Totenberg • 2018 • 63 minutes
To a More Perfect Union tells a story of love, marriage and a fight for equality. The film chronicles two unlikely heroes, octogenarian Edie Windsor and her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, on their quest fo...
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Trust Me
Directed by Emil Trier • Documentary • 2021 • 93 minutes
The charismatic young entrepreneur Waleed Ahmed started his own company at age 18, and was referred to as "The Norwegian Mark Zuckerberg". He quickly gained access to politicians, diplomats, and royalty. His short-lived and grandiose caree...
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Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun • Documentary • 2016 • 82 minutes
In 2013, former Chadian dictator Hissein Habre's arrest in Senegal marked the end of a long combat for the survivors of his regime. Accompanied by the Chairman of the Association of the Victims of the Hissein Habre Regime, Mahama...
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The Questioning
Directed by Zhu Rikun • Documentary • 2013 • 21 minutes
'Early in the morning on July 24th, 2012, after meeting some friends in Hongkong, I drove a car of my brother back to Shenzhen and got Guo Feixiong and three other friends who take part in human rights protection to the car and went on driv...
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The Pinochet Case
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2001 • 109 minutes
Augusto Pinochet, the general who overthrew President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, was the first dictator in Latin America—or the world—to be humbled by the international justice system since the Nuremberg trials.
THE PINOCHE...
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Frame Up!
Directed by Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher and Howard Blatt • Documentary • 1974 • 30 minutes
Examining the case of Martin Sostre, a black Puerto Rican bookstore owner in Buffalo, New York who was framed on drug possession charges in 1967 and sentenced to prison, this film shows how the American j...
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Hotel Terminus: The Life And Times Of Klaus Barbie
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Directed by Marcel Ophüls • Documentary • With Klaus Barbie, Claude Lanzmann, Marcel Ophüls • 1988 • 267 minutes
A brilliant and epic Academy Award-winning examination of the Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon", HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE weaves t...
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The Law
Directed by Jules Dassin • Drama • With Gina Lollobrigida, Pierre Brasseur, Marcello Mastroianni, Melina Mercouri • 1959 • 121 minutes
THE LAW (previously released in the US as Where the Hot Wind Blows) stars Gina Lollobrigida, Marcello Mastroianni, Yves Montand, Melina Mercouri, and Pierre Bras...
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Lock-Up: The Prisoners of Rikers Island
Directed by Nina Rosenblum, Jon Alpert • Documentary • 1994 • 75 minutes
If you’re arrested in New York City and can’t make bail, you’ll be sent to Rikers Island—a mammoth holding facility for 17,000 men and women awaiting trial. Jon Alpert spent ten months filming there, coming away with a grap...
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super-max
Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2003 • 13 minutes
"Finn's chilling super-max is a tour of maximum security prisons shot from a moving car, their hulking forms framed by telephone poles and power lines that divide landscape and sky. The concluding voice-over, making reference to Lewis and Cl...
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The Mafia Kills Only in Summer
Directed by Pierfrancesco Diliberto • Drama • With Cristiana Capotondi, Alex Bisconti • 2017 • 90 minutes
Pierfrancesco Diliberto (a renowned TV host and political comedian, better known as Pif) wrote, directed, and stars in this subversive, irreverent feature debut about Arturo, a young boy who...
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Cocaine Unwrapped
Directed by Rachel Seifert • Documentary • 2013 • 83 minutes
COCAINE UNWRAPPED tells the story of cocaine: coca farmers in Colombia, drug mules in Ecuadorian prisons, cocaine factories in the Bolivian jungle, dealers on the streets of Mexico, law enforcement officials on the streets of Baltimore...
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Red Hook Justice
Directed by Meema Spadola • Documentary • 2004 • 55 minutes
Each year, our nation's courts process over 11 million low-level crimes, many of which involve repeat offenders. In 2000, an experimental court opened its doors in Red Hook, Brooklyn-a neighborhood plagued by a cycle of unemployment, po...
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Presumed Guilty
Directed by Roberto Hernández • Documentary • 2009 • 88 minutes
In December 2005 Tono Zuniga was picked up off the street in Mexico City, Mexico, and sentenced to 20 years for murder based on the testimony of a single, shaky eyewitness. PRESUMED GUILTY tells the heart-wrenching story of a man wh...
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El Sicario, Room 164
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi and Charles Bowden • Documentary • 2011 • 84 minutes
The term sicario goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Sicarii, used concealed daggers (sicae) in their murders of Romans and their supporters. In modern language, a sicario is a professional killer...
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Seats At The Table
Directed by Chris Farina • Documentary • 2020 • 87 minutes
SEATS AT THE TABLE portrays a remarkable college class which connects university students with prisoners of a maximum security juvenile facility as they discuss classic works of Russian Literature.
University of Virginia Lecturer Andrew...
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When Justice Isn't Just
Directed by David Massey • Documentary • 2016 • 42 minutes
Directed by Oscar-nominated and NAACP Image Award winner David Massey, this dynamic documentary explores why so many unarmed black people have been targeted and killed by police officers. The filmmakers talk to legal experts, activists a...