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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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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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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Concrete, Steel & Paint
Directed by Tony Heriza, Cindy Burstein • Documentary • 2009 • 55 minutes
"Concrete, Steel & Paint" tells the complex story of men in prison, victims of crime, and an artistic partnership that helps break down barriers between them. As prisoners, victims, and victim advocates collaborate on a mu...
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Heroes for a Semester
Directed by Axel Breuer • Documentary • 2012 • 82 minutes
Chicago. A man has been innocently imprisoned - for more than twenty years. All claims have been rejected. He is condemned to life sentence. His only chance: a handful of law students.
At the Northwestern University of Chicago, several g...
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This Stolen Country of Mine (w/ Fernando Villavicencio)
Directed by Marc Wiese • Documentary • With Paúl Jarrín Mosquera, Fernando Villavicencio • 2022 • 93 minutes
Chinese mining in Ecuador’s mountains sets the stage for an epic battle between eco-guerrillas and a corrupt government in an intensely dramatic documentary.
This Stolen Country of Mine ...
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The Apology
Directed by Tiffany Hsiung • Documentary • 2016 • 104 minutes
THE APOLOGY follows the personal journeys of three former 'comfort women' who were among the 200,000 girls and young women kidnapped and forced into military sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
Some 70 ...
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Las Abogadas: Attorneys on the Front Lines of the Migrant Crisis
Directed by Victoria Bruce • Documentary • 2022 • 92 minutes
The first Trump administration tried to shut down immigration to the United States, and even with no changes to the actual law, they nearly succeeded. Things didn't get much better when Biden came into office. But activist lawyers, mos...
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Hotel Terminus: The Life And Times Of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls)
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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 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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The Waldheim Waltz
Directed by Ruth Beckermann • Documentary • With Ruth Beckermann • 2018 • 94 minutes
THE WALDHEIM WALTZ is a film about truth and lies or “alternative facts”. About individual and collective consciousness.
“Waldheim no, Waldheim no” shouts a crowd in the center of Vienna in 1986. Ruth Beckerman...
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Art and Craft
Directed by Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker • Documentary • With Mark A. Landis • 2014 • 90 minutes
Mark Landis has been called one of the most prolific art forgers in US history. His impressive body of work spans thirty years, covering a wide range of painting styles and periods ...
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A Murder in Abidjan
Directed by Mosco Boucault • Documentary • 1997 • 86 minutes
Warning: This film contains graphic sequences of police violence, brutality, and torture.
1995. On the outskirts of Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast, a policeman is murdered. Shot outside his vehicle, while his fiancée sits in...
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What These Walls Won't Hold
Directed by Adamu Chan • Documentary • With Isabella Borgeson, Rahsaan Thomas, Lonnie Morris • 2023 • 43 minutes
Transcending the grim realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, Adamu Chan's powerful documentary, What These Walls Won't Hold, paints a poignant portrait of resilience and hope blossoming ...
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My Worst Enemy
Directed by Mehran Tamadon • Documentary • With Mehran Tamadon, Zar Amir Ebrahimi • 2023 • 82 minutes
“What are you thinking? You’re thinking, ‘This is cinema. I’m sowing seeds to create a dialogue.’ Maybe you’ll be able to open a dialogue. A dialogue without any outcome.” — Zar Amir Ebrahimi
F...
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The Shooting on Mole Street
Directed by Mosco Boucault • Documentary • 1998 • 90 minutes
On March 1, 1996, 15-year-old Shafeeq Murrel was killed on the street in South Philadelphia — innocently caught in the crossfire between rival pairs of crack dealers out for revenge. Shafeeq’s murder was one of 435 in Philadelphia that...
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Where God is Not
Directed by Mehran Tamadon • Documentary • 2023 • 112 minutes
Taghi, Homa and Mazyar were arrested and interrogated by the Iranian regime. All three testify with their bodies, with their gestures and tell what it means to resist, what it means to break. Is there any hope that the torturer will o...
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Mona Lisa is Missing
Directed by Joe Medeiros • Documentary • 2013 • 86 minutes
How did an unassuming housepainter from Italy pull off the greatest little known art heist in modern time? Was his motivation more than money?
Writer-director Joe Medeiros traces the path of Vincenzo Peruggia, charged with the 1911 thef...
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The Dmitriev Affair (Jessica Gorter)
Directed by Jessica Gorter • Documentary • 2024 • 96 minutes
Yuri Dmitriev exhumes what the Russian rulers would rather forget. After years of searching the pine forests of Karelia in northwestern Russia, he discovers a mass grave containing thousands of people who were secretly executed during ...
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Ok, Joe!
Directed by Philippe Baron • Documentary • 2024 • 52 minutes
After the landing of the Allied forces in 1944, writer Louis Guilloux was recruited as an interpreter for the American army. He would soon be confronted with the dark side of liberation: the rapes and murders committed by American sold...
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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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Mafioso, Into the Heart of Darkness
Directed by Mosco Levi Boucault • Documentary • 2022 • 52 minutes
They claimed to be “men of honour”. In reality, they were killers for the Cosa Nostra (Sicily). Arrested in the early 1990s, they chose to work with the Italian justice and obtained the status of “pentiti” (state witnesses). Three...
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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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Seduced and Blackmailed
Directed by Aldo Gugolz and Romeo Regenass • Documentary • 2012 • 51 minutes
Helg Sgarbi, a Swiss man with a radiant smile, tries to extort 14 million Euro from BMW’s major shareholder Susanne Klatten by threatening to publish intimate photos.
Susanne Klatten however, isn't afraid: the richest...
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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...