True Crime

True Crime

For lovers of true crime! These documentaries follow real people and feature brazen behavior from all sides, whether it is a grandfather getting away with murder, massive overreach by the FBI in West Philadelphia or former mafia hitmen who now work with law enforcement. On the flip side, there is a pair of well-meaning cops who just want to solve a teenage boy's senseless murder and law students trying to free an innocent man from jail. Follow both the good and bad of law enforcement and see how a crime that at first appears incomprehensible can eventually be solved.

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True Crime
  • Sarkozy-Gaddafi: The Scandal of All Scandals

    Movie

    It’s a scandal that has all the trappings of a Hollywood thriller. A secret meeting by the Eiffel Tower. Millions of euros crossing borders in suitcases. Cash payments to key people close to politicians. A former member of a terrorist regime whisked from his jail cell in another country. A presid...

  • 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...

  • Roubaix, Police Department, Ordinary Business

    Directed by Mosco Boucault • Documentary • 2007 • 87 minutes

    A teenage runaway. A stabbing spree during a Christmas dinner that leaves multiple casualties. A series of sexual assaults in a subway station. This is the “ordinary business” that police in the working class northern French town of Ro...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • Stealing Rodin

    Directed by Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos • Documentary • 2017 • 80 minutes

    In the style of Exit Through the Gift Shop, Stealing Rodin is a critical and humorous statement about Art and the market around it. The documentary traces the story of Luis Onfray’s artistic and criminal act. In 2005, the...

  • Red Squad

    Directed by Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher, Howard Blatt and Francis Freedland • Documentary • 1972 • 45 minutes

    An investigative (but frequently humorous) documentary on the surveillance activities of the New York City Police Department's Bureau of Special Services, known as the Red Squad.

  • 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...

  • Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery

    Directed by Arne Birkenstock • Documentary • With Wolfgang Beltracchi, Henrik Hanstein, Sofia Komarova • 2015 • 93 minutes

    For nearly 40 years, Wolfgang Beltracchi fooled the international art world and was responsible for the biggest art forgery scandal of the postwar era. An expert in art hist...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • Latin Kings: A Street Gang Story

    Directed by Jon Alpert • Documentary • 2003 • 75 minutes

    Assembled by DCTV co-founder, award-winning documentarian Jon Alpert, LATIN KINGS: A STREET GANG STORY follows the notorious New York gang's ex-leader, Antonio "King Tone" Fernandez. Under house arrest at the time of filming, Fernandez ins...

  • Let the Fire Burn

    Directed by Jason Osder • Documentary • 2013 • 95 minutes

    In the astonishingly gripping Let the Fire Burn, director Jason Osder has crafted that rarest of cinematic objects: a found-footage film that unfurls with the tension of a great thriller. On May 13, 1985, a longtime feud between the city ...

  • South

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 1999 • 70 minutes

    Inspired by her love of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, renowned director Chantal Akerman had planned to produce a meditation on the American South. However, just days before she was to begin filming, James Byrd, Jr. was murdered ...

  • A Witch Story

    Directed by Yolanda Pividal Garcia • Documentary • 2022 • 73 minutes

    Young writer Alice was a teenager when she discovered something that changed her life forever: she was a descendant of Martha Allen Carrier, a woman hanged for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. At 24, after scou...

  • Mellodrama

    Directed by Dianna Dilworth • Documentary • With Rod Argent, Jon Brion, Brian Wilson, Richard Chamberlin, Ian McDonald, Rick Nielsen, Michael Penn, Mike Pinder, Matthew Sweet, Pea Hicks • 2008 • 75 minutes

    Mellodrama, a documentary by Dianna Dilworth, explores the rising and falling fortunes of ...

  • 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...

  • Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?

    Directed by Travis Wilkerson • Documentary • 2018 • 90 minutes

    “In 1946, my great-grandfather murdered a black man named Bill Spann and got away with it.” So begins Travis Wilkerson’s critically acclaimed documentary, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, which takes us on a journey through the Ame...

  • 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...

  • 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...

  • 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...