In 2004 the photographer Mikel Aristregi traveled to Cambodia to document the daily lives of the street children of Phnom Penh. There he meets Pich, an 11 year old boy addicted to glue and meth who ends up entering a rehabilitation center. In 2013 Aristregi goes back to Phnom Penh with the intent...

Waves follows three young girls growing up in one of South Africa's most violent communities. The film looks at the effects that high levels of violence, rape and femicide have on the psyche of young girls growing up amongst it, and how they learn to cope.

Director: Jessie Ayles
4 min | South Af...

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...

Evan W. Gadda is a student at the University of Nevada, Reno studying Musical Theatre. The team at @One Digital Media within the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center was able to bring a virtual reality experience to him with the hopes to bring this to more people.

Director: Michelle Rebaleati
Producer...

After a construction site accident, Robert Woo was paralyzed from the chest down. Woo spent the next four years in a wheelchair. But even as he learned how to live his new life, he couldn’t stop asking one very simple question: How could humans build skyscrapers, but not something better than a w...

There’s a crisis underground. From the mines of Southern Africa, a river of one of humanity’s oldest diseases is flowing out across the world. Mine workers in sub-Saharan Africa have the highest rates of tuberculosis in the world, with more than 760,000 new cases per year connected to the mining ...

Life can be difficult for children living in the creative, but sometimes volatile, inner-city neighborhoods of Kingston, Jamaica. If an adolescent is a victim of a crime and has to go to court, the case could fall apart because the child is too frightened to testify. This is why development group...

The film follows three innovative social business ideas from students in Africa to take on major challenges faced by their continent. As they compete with hundreds of projects from around the world, one project starts to demonstrate that it just might have what it takes to make it all the way; a ...

When doctors told Karen Aiach there was no cure for her daughter’s brain disease, she took matters into her own hands. With no scientific background, she created a gene therapy business that can fix the faulty genes in patients like her daughter. Now she’s racing against the clock to extend her d...

As Ellice gets low, her room gets messy - she never sees it coming, but it always happens. There seems to be no way to break out of the endless highs or lows that make up bipolar, or even to pick up her clothes up off the floor.

Director: Dorothy Allen-Pickard
Producers: Lauren Pringle
4 min | U...

Kathleen is a hairdresser. Always has been, always will be. Even at 83 she is still doing hair, just not in the way you would expect. Kathleen's work is special—for the last 31 years, she has done the hair of the terminally ill in palliative care. In this short, poetic documentary, Kathleen refle...

A photojournalist, during lockdown in Cape Town, documents a strange and conflicted society and discovers his own sense of morality during a time of great hardship.

Director: Jasyn Howes
Producers: Jasyn Howes and Anna Telford
2020 | 16 min
Cape Town
Language: English

FILMMAKER Q&A:
https://sim...

In the foothills of Nepal, extreme deforestation has pushed many rural communities onto marginal lands. In “Scaling the Mountain,” villagers in Jogimara and Naubise find that combining conservation efforts with reproductive health services helps them support their families and their communities m...

Stripped of her rights, a woman's life changes when she ventures with her husband to remedy an impossible situation.

Directors: Will Hawkes, Melissa Center
Producers: Will Hawkes, Melissa Center
11 min | USA
Languages: English

FILMMAKER Q&A:
https://simaacademy.com/filmmaker-qa/rv/

Clowns Without Borders South Africa (www.cwbsa.org) presents OUR STORY YOUR STORY – an intergenerational project connecting elders and youth through autobiographical storytelling. Storytelling has immense power to build connections between individuals, between generations, and between the past an...

OpenBCI has developed a 3D-printed headset that allows our brains to interact with software. Want to measure the effect of meditation on your brain? It's possible. Want to control a prosthetic limb with your mind? It's possible. Right now, the only thing OpenBCI's tech can't do are the things we ...

A glimpse into the everyday life of Juanita, a Mayan traditional doctor, midwife, nurse and activist. Leader of "The Awakening of the Women who Heal," an organization of midwives in the Orient of Yucatan, Mexico. Juanita has dedicated her life to helping others with her gift for healing. The film...

In Indonesia where 14 million people suffer from mental health disorders and shackling is still practised, this story is about how a man’s decade-long struggle with schizophrenia almost cost him his family and how he reclaimed his life with the help of Rumah Berdaya (meaning Home of Empowerment)....

Of the 30,000 humanitarian organizations operating in Nepal, a tiny Nepalese NGO accomplishes what naysayers said could not be done. From award-winning humanitarian journalist Debi Lang comes Hearts In The Himalayas, a documentary about the extraordinary efforts of Himalayan HealthCare. Using the...

Pristine nature, widespread school campuses, Institute for visually challenged, a health center, an artificial limb center, a neatly built food mess, spacious dorms, open playground and more - well this is how HEAL PARADISE looks like. No one would believe this to be an orphanage when they enter ...

Lynda, an indigenous woman whose sons died tragically, and Max, the sole survivor of a horrific car accident, are heroin users in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, infamous as Canada’s poorest neighborhood. As participants in a radical opioid-assisted therapy program, the first of its kind in North ...

In painting and dance, Marie-Hélène, a respected figure on the Canadian contemporary art scene, finds an outlet for her creativity and her resilient spirit, after losing both her legs as a child. The arrival of her daughters sparks a new sense of freedom, pushing herself to let go self-censorship...

“People come here to inject because they can easily run away if the police show up,” says Vova, a street outreach worker with the Andrey Rylkov Foundation (ARF). There are many hotspots that outreach workers of the ARF visit every day to provide sterile injecting equipment, condoms and other form...

[Trigger Warning] A roadside bomb in Iraq left Jerral Hancock paralyzed and without his left arm. But rather than letting his injuries define him, Jerral is fighting back. He’s working with a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins to test the most advanced prosthetic arm in the world that could h...