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A year in the life of a city grappling with urban violence.

This documentary explores the growing difference in the voting patterns of men and women (the gender gap) that could no longer be denied by the mid-1980's. Issues like compensation equality, environmental preservation, subsidized childcare and healthcare became wedge issues in Ronald Reagan's America as more and more women joined the workforce.

For two years, filmmaker Maria Finitzo followed five strong young women between the ages of 13 and 17. Unlike the myriad reports, books and "specials" that focus on young women as passive and powerless, 5 Girls explores the ways these girls discover the resources necessary to successfully navigate the rocky waters of adolescence. It focuses on the positive ways girls learn to adapt to challenge in their lives by understanding and exercising choices, by believing in their strength when others do not and by resisting powerful cultural messages, which urge them to be silent.

Sonia Reich- who survived the Holocaust as a child by running and hiding - suddenly believes that she is being hunted again, 60 years later. Prisoner of Her Past is the story of a woman who appeared to be a normal, self-sufficient adult until she ran out of her house in the middle of the night, convinced that someone was trying "to put a bullet in [her] head." In effect, Sonia was re-enacting the traumatic events of her lost childhood. Separated from her family, she was deprived of 5 years of adolescence, as she fled from the Nazis during the Second World War. During that time, we know that her mother and most of her extended family were killed in mass executions. We also know that she was starving, frostbitten, constantly endangered and, as one psychiatrist described it, "a jungle child." What she witnessed and how she survived, we may never know. She refuses to discuss her past. Prisoner of Her Past is a documentary film that tells the story of Sonia and her son, Chicago Tribune journalist Howard Reich, and his journey to uncover Sonia's tragic childhood in order to understand why she is reliving it, so many years later. The film also reveals the interventions that are being done for today's young trauma survivors: children who survived death and destruction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans.

Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate skeptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe they live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to help Americans recognize, and free themselves from, a logic that is already destroying the Earth.

A life and death story about extreme heat, the politics of "disaster" and survival by zip code.

Three homeless teenagers brave Chicago winters, the pressures of high school, and life alone on the streets to build a brighter future.

The last American officials were airlifted out of Vietnam from the embassy roof in Saigon in 1975. Most have never returned. In 1998, World T.E.A.M. (The Exceptional Athlete Matters) Sports organized a 16-day, 1100 mile bicycle expedition through once war-torn Northern and Southern Vietnam. A non-profit organization that focuses on events for the disabled, World T.E.A.M. Sports drew an array of veterans from the U.S. and Vietnam, as well as celebrity riders like Greg La Monde and Senator John Kerry. Those without use of their legs used special hand-powered bikes, while blind riders pedaled from the back of tandem bikes. What is immediately apparent on the veterans' arrival in Vietnam is that their biggest handicaps are the ghosts of their pasts. Past enemies ride as one team in peace across a landscape they once killed to stay alive on. Much more than a race, the ride is an exorcism; the real finish line is the painful emotional confrontation each must make alone along the way.

Raising Bertie is a longitudinal documentary feature following three young African American boys over the course of six years as they grow into adulthood in Bertie County, a rural African American-led community in Eastern North Carolina. Through the intimate portrayal of these boys, this powerful vérité film offers a rare in-depth look at the issues facing America's rural youth and the complex relationships between generational poverty, educational equity, and race. The evocative result is an experience that encourages us to recognize the value and complexity in lives all too often ignored.

Higher Goals encourages young athletes to put their dreams of professional sports in perspective and focus on getting an education. The real life stories of two high school athletes demonstrate that the sports skills of practice and discipline can be applied to academics as well.

Terra Incognita is a feature length documentary film and companion civic engagement campaign featuring the story of Dr. Jack Kessler, the current chair of Northwestern University's Department of Neurology and Clinical Neurological Sciences, and his daughter, Allison, an undergraduate student at Harvard University. When Kessler was invited to head up the Neurology Department at Northwestern, his focus was on using stem cells to help cure diabetes. However, soon after his move to Chicago, Allison -- then age 15, was injured in a skiing accident and paralyzed from the waist down. In the moments following the accident, Dr. Kessler made the decision to change the focus of his research to begin looking for a cure for spinal cord injuries using embryonic stem cells. Through Kessler's story, we bring the stem cell debate to the public for discussion. The film follows the constantly evolving interplay between the promise of new discoveries, the controversy of modern science and the resilience and courage of people living every day with devastating disease and injury.

Unbroken Glass is a documentary about filmmaker Dinesh Sabu's journey to understand his parents, who died 20 years ago when he was six years old. Traveling to India, Lousiana, California, and New Mexico, Dinesh pieces together the story of his mother's schizophrenia and how his family dealt with it in an age and culture where mental illness was often misunderstood, scorned and taboo. Dwarka and Susheela Sabu lived complicated lives bridging two countries and cultures. Unbroken Glass is more than a story about immigrants or mental illness, it is a nuanced story of one family and their struggles. More than a linear narrative of their lives, Unbroken Glass is an impressionistic portrait of who Dinesh's parents were-- as immigrants, family members, as complex people subject to social forces. It weaves together his journey of discovery with cinema-verite scenes of his family dealing with still raw emotions and consequences of his parents lives and deaths. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, roughly 1% of the US population is affected by schizophrenia, and there is a proven genetic component to the illness. Some research has pointed to a link between "acculturative stress," the kind of stress immigrants experience adjusting to a new life, and the onset of mental illness. Dinesh hopes that telling this story will raise awareness about schizophrenia and empower families of the mentally

Mossadegh & Me is a film about how we remember the 1950s in Iran, and the CIA coup that ousted then Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. In 1979, the Iranian Hostage Crisis shocked the world. The crisis received more non-stop press coverage than any other event since World War II. Americans, for the first time, asked, "Why do they hate us?" As an Iranian-American kid, director Gita Saedi Kiely asked that question, too. That's when her father told her about Mohammed Mossadegh.

In 1864, George Pullman began selling his famous railroad sleeping cars which helped him build a vast industrial empire that was supposed to last forever. In 1981, however, Pullman workers found themselves in the midst of a fight not only for their jobs but the future of the American rail car industry. One hundred years of government, union and corporate policies are traced in this engaging story.

A Good Man follows acclaimed director/choreographer Bill T. Jones for two tumultuous years, as he tackles the most ambitious work of his career, an original dance-theater piece in honor of Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial.

It is America of the 1950s and 1960s, when a woman's most important contribution to society is generally considered to be her ability to raise happy, well-adjusted children. But for the mother whose child is diagnosed with autism, her life's purpose will soon become a twisted nightmare. Looking for help and support, she encounters instead a medical establishment that pins the blame for her child's bizarre behaviors on her supposedly frigid and detached mothering. Along with a heartbreaking label for her child, she receives a devastating label of her own. She is a "refrigerator mother". Refrigerator Mothers paints an intimate portrait of an entire generation of mothers, already laden with the challenge of raising profoundly disordered children, who lived for years under the dehumanizing shadow of professionally promoted "mother blame." Once isolated and unheard, these mothers have emerged with strong, resilient voices to share the details of their personal journeys. Through their poignant stories, Refrigerator Mothers puts a human face on what can happen when authority goes unquestioned and humanity is removed from the search for scientific answers.

Two young nuns explore Chicago--from a supermart to the Art Institute and in front of churches on Sunday--confronting people with the crucial question, "Are you happy?" They meet many people--a lonely girl, a happy mother, a nun, some lovers, two hippie musicians, a lady sociologist, a college professor, even Stepin Fetchit; and receive many answers--"Happiness is the absence of fear," "Avoiding people," "Rasberries," "Joy in knowing Christ." The humor and sadness of these honest encounters lift the film beyond its interview format to a serious and moving inquiry into the concerns of contemporary man, and also into the circumstances in which men will actually express their concerns.

Leon Golub's massive canvasses depict scenes most of us would prefer not to see - mercenary killings, torture, and death squads. Golub offers not simply a profile of a painter with a political conscience, but an investigation into the power of the artist to reflect our times and to change the way we think about our world. This one-hour film juxtaposes scenes of violence and political repression around the world, statements by American politicians and others, the responses of viewers to Golub's exhibitions and an extended sequence capturing the artist at work. In his New York studio, he creates a huge canvas that depicts a brutal assassination - a reminder, he says, of U.S. subsidized activity in El Salvador. While tracking a major retrospective of Golub's work across the United States and Canada, the documentary also follows the creation of his monumental canvases, detailing his complex and unorthodox techniques. It then accompanies the finished painting, White Squad X, to its European opening in Derry, Northern Ireland in a joint exhibition with Nancy Spero, Golub's wife. Interviews and discussions filmed in Derry raise questions about First Amendment rights and the venues available for art to speak to these issues. When a women in the audience talks about a lack of safety for Irish artists who "reflect reality" Nancy Spero says, "...it's different in the United States. I don't think that they're afraid of what an artist has to say." And Golub responds, "Society does not censor you until it really thinks you're dangerous, and we have not been considered sufficiently dangerous."

An elderly "outsider" artist living in at-risk conditions befriends two filmmakers and causes controversy at his first major exhibition.

63 Boycott chronicles the Chicago School boycott of 1963 when more than 200,000 Chicagoans, mostly CPS students, marched to protest the segregationist policies of CPS Superintendent Benjamin Willis, who placed aluminum mobile school units on vacant lots as a permanent solution to overcrowding in black schools. The Kartemquin film features then and now interviews with organizers and participants of the boycott with never-released 16mm footage of the march and student interviews. 63 Boycott and its companion website will provide a modern perspective on the impact and legacy of this forgotten history 50 years later as it reconnects the participants to each other and the event itself.

A video made to accompany an art exhibit at The Spertus Museum addressing the relationships of African Americans and American Jews. This video takes you in to the studios of 12 artists, six Black and six Jewish, as they prepare their work for the show.

Taylor Chain I tells the gritty realities of a seven-week strike at a small Indiana chain factory. Volatile union meetings and tension-filled interactions on the picket line provide an inside view of the tensions and conflicts inherent to labor negotiations.

Depicts the experiences of two elderly people in their first month at a home for the aged--a man, isolated from the world he knew, and a woman, wrenched from a family setting. The film focuses on the feelings of the two new residents in their encounters with other residents, medical staff, social workers, psychiatrists and family. A touching, sometimes painfully honest dramatic experience, it is valuable for in-service staff training, and for all other audiences both professional and non professional, interested in the problems of the aged.

Now We Live on Clifton follows 10 year old Pam Taylor and her 12 year old brother Scott around their multiracial West Lincoln Park neighborhood. The kids worry that they'll be forced out of the neighborhood they grew up in by the gentrification following the expansion of DePaul University.

The work and times of American artist, Leon Golubfrom 1985 to his death in 2004, taking us from images of interrogations and torture to the ironies and dark humor of old-age. Over-sized canvasses with screaming mercenaries and rioters urinating on a corpse; photographic fragments used as information and inspiration; the making of one of Golub's death-squad series from start to finish and to its exhibition in Derry, Northern Ireland; news footage from around the world; museum-goers' responses; disturbing music: out of these disparate elements the film creates a dialogue between image and audience that reflects what Golub calls the "disjunctiveness" of modern life. In the aftermath of September 11, and with the photos from Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Golub's ferocious, monumental work of the 70's and 80's (used to this day by human rights groups such as Amnesty International) remain prophetic and essential, even as they give way to the snarling dogs, erotica, and wise-cracking meditations on mortality which began to appear in his paintings in the 1990's. When we revisit Golub in 2001, the aging artist tells us "my work these days is sort of political, sort of metaphysical, and sort of smart-ass. I'm playful and hostile. Let's see if you can keep up with my slipping around." Half empty canvasses are dotted with birds of prey, smoking skulls, neon chorus girls, pierced hearts, and snickering text: "Bite your tongue. Save your ass." The film captures an historic artistic journey, shared with his wife and studio partner of 50 years, the prominent anti-war and feminist artist, Nancy Spero. We see them as each other's most valued critic and most ardent supporter. Golub continued in his later paintings to "report" on what's going on in the world, but he does it with the kind of dissonances and discontinuities that led Theodor Adorno in his essay on Beethoven to proclaim, "In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes."