Films
Watch over 200 films curated from 140 countries around the globe, and featuring over 40 languages. SIMA Academy offers you unprecedented access on any device to authentic global perspectives and visually engaging current affairs media. Plus a constantly refreshed selection of international productions from independent distributors.
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From Gangs to Gardens
Organic gardener and vegan chef Ietef Vita is an award winning international recording artist and activist who uses Hip-Hop culture to inspire young people to connect to the earth by teaching them how to grow food, and cultivate healthy eating habits. Through his lyrics and gardens, Ietef is plan...
Extras
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From The Same Soil
The film portrays the lives of two gay men and one transgender woman who left their home countries because of discrimination and persecution. Now in South Africa they applied for refugee status on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Despite the fact that in South Africa both national law...
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Girls in Control: Tanzania
On any given day millions of girls and women worldwide are menstruating. In Tanzania, 75% of rural schoolgirls never used commercial sanitary pads. This is a striking story of Vanencia, a 14-year-old student. As the leader of the school Health Club she aims to break the silence on menstruation- w...
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International Aid Hurts Palestinian Civil Society
In International Aid Hurts Palestinian Civil Society grassroots civil society activists discuss their experiences with international aid. Frustration and anger are evident as Palestinians explain how their work is undermined by policies and procedures imposed by international donors and NGOs. Thi...
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Men Buy Sex *Viewer Discretion Advised*
Viewer Discretion Advised
This is a documentary about paying for sex. Three men share three radically different experiences while three women lip sync to their words. This frank exploration of gender inequality uses subverted perspectives to ask: what can these stories tell us about our society,...
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Path of Freedom
In the harsh environment of a Rhode Island men's prison, a group of fifty inmates are transforming their lives through the practice of meditation. Path of Freedom follows former inmate Fleet Maull as he visits prison to share his strategies for surviving on the inside. The film offers a rare glim...
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Right To Identity
With one of the lowest levels of birth registration in Africa, Tanzania’s failing infrastructure and logistical challenges have left decades of backlog in birth registrations. A Tanzanian governmental agency, RITA, joined forces with some strong partners and decided to tackle the issue of birth r...
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Dùthchas
After the Highland Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries, where communities were expelled from their lands in favour of sheep, legislation was brought in to give people secure tenancies, called crofts, to protect them from being cleared from the land again. In 2007 the Crofting Reform Act ope...
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Oil On Their Hands
For almost half a century, Quechua, Achuar, and Kichwa communities in Northern Peruvian have suffered extreme negative environmental, health, cultural, social, and economic impacts as a result of the operations of the oil companies, Occidental Petroleum (1971-2000) and subsequently Pluspetrol (20...
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Homecoming
“If not us, who will protect our territories? Who will manage our territories?”
Indonesian Indigenous Youth called their fellow brothers living in the cities and finished their studies back to the community. They called it the ‘Homecoming movement.
Youth are driving new models of sustainable ru...
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Brighter
What if you could pay for a young woman’s university education by providing her with a “gap year” job?
In Uganda, where few women are encouraged, or can afford, to attend university, Liz Forkin Bohannon decided to do something about it. She taught three young women to make strappy sandals which ...
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Into Something Beautiful
What can a construction company do to transform personal brokenness and solve systemic injustice?
Amid their own personal and professional brokenness, Amy and Braden King discovered that most of the employees at their new construction company had a history of addiction, homelessness, and/or crim...
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When God Roars
How can a real estate photography company in the U.S. help provide healthy livelihoods to trafficking survivors in the Philippines?
Called to work with those exploited and traumatized by human trafficking, Sam and Mindy started Regenesys to create living-wage jobs for survivors. In partnership...
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Innocence
A group of Black and Latin women activists in San José, California drive a grassroots movement to remove police from their children's schools. Will they succeed?
Filming for this documentary was done under the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the lead up to the pivotal 2020 elections... -
Cries of Our Ancestors
Award-winning filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, and conservationist Rebecca Kormos, worked with Guinee Ecologie Founder Mamadou Saliou Diallo, to film the chimpanzees of Guinea, and to speak with local community members about their relationship with the chimpanzees. They gathered myths and stories that des...
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Harmonic Spectrum
Sean uses the Piano to navigate life on the Autistic Spectrum. As he is drawn into new musical collaborations he must learn to balance his enthusiasm and compulsive energy with understanding and compromise, redefining his perspective in the process.
Director: Austen McCowan & Will Hewitt
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Kanda Bode (Don't Get Whipped)
This documentary focuses on the Hamar Tribe, a semi nomadic and rural people who live along the Omo River in Southwestern Ethiopia. Preserving the traditions of their ancestors is essential to defining Hamar life. One of the most venerated of the Hamar’s ancient traditions involves the transition...
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Goodwill Dumping
The stylised fashion documentary Goodwill Dumping brings the enormity of the industry surrounding donated secondhand clothing to light. The film showcases the journey that discarded pieces of clothing make and what kind of impact this has on local industries. Due to its globalised scale this imme...
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From Sea To Rising Sea (VR/360)
From Sea To Rising Sea is an educational musical call to action about the healing properties of the ocean and how the ocean can assist us in our mission to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This VR experience (created for the Quest 2 and also mobile devices) follows a flock of synchronize...
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(in)Visible Sound (VR/360)
Grace has Tinnitus so the way she perceives sounds can be radically different from the average person. Yet, appearance wise, Grace’s disability is invisible. Through virtual reality, the viewer experiences the world through Grace’s eyes and ears as she narrates in voiceover. That world is a fanta...
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Testimony (VR/360) *Viewer Discretion Advised*
Testimony is an interactive documentary for virtual reality that shares the stories of five survivors of sexual assault and their journey to healing. Beyond just a film, Testimony is an advocacy platform to allow the public to bear witness to those who have been silenced. The Brock Turner case, B...
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Water & Coltan (VR/360)
Water & Coltan deals with the consequences of mining on landscape and communities in West Germany and DR Congo. While WATER sketches posthuman near-future scenarios for the former coal mining Ruhr area, COLTAN transports its audience directly to the places of exchange and work of women in artisan...
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The Invisibles
Over 200,000 migrant laborers, mostly from Africa, work in Italy’s fields. After being exploited for years, the global pandemic made these farmworkers “essential” overnight — but without labor rights or even access to basic sanitation, they are living and working in conditions that have been desc...
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The Conscious Hood: Being Black is No Crime
Being Black Is No Crime is the fourth episode of the web-series "The Conscious Hood" documenting social issues crucial to the residents of São Paulo's Heliópolis, the second largest urban slum in Latin America. Directed by videomaker Katherine Jinyi Li and filmed during her youth journalism works...
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Meet Chuna: Empowering Women in Rural Nepal
Chuna Devi - a mother of three in Nepal - once said that "being born as a girl is worthless." But at the age of 47, she found self-worth and changed her life by finally learning to read at a READ Center, starting a women's study group, and investing in her family's education. Today, her goal is t...