Third World Newsreel

The film looks back at the life of a man named Oda and other Japanese Americans through the decades as they face great challenges and joys living in the United States.

They speak the same language, share a similar culture and once belonged to a single nation. When the Korean War ended in 1953, ten million families were torn apart. By the early 90s, as the rest of the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, Koreans remain separated between North and South, fearing the threat of mutual destruction. Beginning with one man's journey to reunite with his sister in North Korea, filmmakers Takagi and Choy reveal the personal, social and political dimensions of one of the last divided nations on earth. The film was also the first US project to get permission to film in both South & North Korea.

The film looks at men and women of color in the U.S. Merchant Marine from 1938-1975. Through chronicling the lives of these men and women who, with a median age of 82, are beset with a host of life-threatening illnesses, the movie tells how they navigated issues of racism, disparities in the workplace, gender and familial relations.

This raw, gutsy portrait of New York's Chinatown captures the early days of an emerging consciousness in the community. We see a Chinatown rarely depicted, a vibrant community whose young and old join forces to protest police brutality and hostile real estate developers. With bold strokes, it paints an overview of the community and its history, from the early laborers driving spikes into the transcontinental railroad to the garment workers of today.

They're called bar women, hostesses, or sex workers and "western princesses." They come from poor families, struggling to earn a decent wage, only to be forced into the world's oldest profession. They're the women who work in the camptowns that surround U.S. military bases in South Korea. In 40 years, over a million women have worked in Korea's military sex industry, but their existence has never been officially acknowledged by either government. In The Women Outside, a film by J.T. Orinne Takagi and Hye Jung Park, some of these women bravely speak out about their lives for the first time. The film raises provocative questions about military policy, economic survival, and the role of women in global geopolitics

The career of iconic and influential poet and writer Audre Lorde is seen up until death.

Filmed in Palestine by Newsreel, WE ARE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE shows the refugee camps of the Middle East, the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Movement and Israel's relation ship to the Western imperialism. There is footage of the guerrillas in training, and interviews with Palestinian leaders and militants who work in many programs of the liberation struggle of the time.

DocumentaThis film focuses on the historic 1971 Attica prison rebellion in upstate New York. It targets the conditions that caused prisoners to take drastic steps toward securing their basic rights. The film questions the reactions of prison warden Oswald, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and President Nixon, as well as the death of 31 inmates and prison guards from bullets fired by the National Guard. Through on-site footage taken during and following the rebellion, and follow-up interviews with inmates, this film relates a powerful message concerning prisoner's rights and provides an important historical document. A Third World Newsreel production.ry about the 1971 rebellion at Attica State Prison.

In 2003, Sakia Gunn was fatally stabbed in a gay hate crime in Newark, New Jersey. She was fifteen years old and called herself an Aggressive, a homosexual woman of color who dresses in masculine attire but does not necessarily identify as either lesbian or female-to-male transgender. DREAMS DEFERRED depicts the homophobia that caused her untimely death and questions the lack of national media coverage of the murder of a Black gay youth.

THE LOWER 9: A STORY OF HOME showcases four determined Lower Ninth Ward residents who share their most intimate stories of home, as they resume their lives years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged their neighborhood. Each story finds a voice in a narrative that intersperses contemporary interviews, abstract cinematography of destruction, and powerful scenes of present, everyday lives.

This documentary examines the re-settlement of South-East Asian refugees in the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The film begins with a montage of riveting footage depicting the devastating effects of the war. It then unveils the mixed reception given Vietnamese refugees in the United States, from battles with local fishermen in Monterey, California, to conflicts in Philadelphia where their arrival in the city's poorest neighborhoods kindled resentment in the Black community. The film also explores their struggle to cope with life in the U.S. and maintain their identity.

This film exposes the daily humiliation regularly faced by women in U.S. prisons using firsthand accounts of inmates at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women and the Correctional Institute for Women at Riker's Island, New York.

A film by Hugh King and Lamar Williams - a powerful mix of archival material, news clips and documentary footage chronicles impassioned community response to decades of deadly force against people of color by members of the Philadelphia police force. Community leaders, politicians, police officers, survivors of police brutality and sympathizers unravel a pattern of biased violent police behavior from the tenure of Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo to the bombing of Osage Avenue. This documentary is a testimony to long-standing tensions between police and people of color in communities throughout the United States.

This short film offers a rare look at Noam Chomsky in the late 1960s as he speaks candidly about the war in Vietnam and articulates critiques that have an eerie resonance in the present day. Includes a draft-refusal demonstration, and material about the indictments against Benjamin Spock, William S. Coffin Jr and others.

This documentary traces the tangled paths and multifaceted identity of a black Cuban family in the Bronx. The subjects of this film experienced firsthand some of the great historical events of the 20th century – they saw Castro’s arrival in Havana and had their neighborhood bombed in the Bay of Pigs invasion; one son fought in Vietnam and a daughter marched against it. Both working-class and professional, black and Latino, foreign and native, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, the family is shown in the constant process of negotiating its identity. On their arrival in Miami, the family immediately encountered racial segregation, and as children in a mixed Puerto Rican/African-American neighborhood in the Bronx, they were forced by their playmates to choose their identity: “Are you black or Spanish?” Even the family’s roots in Cuba are complex - the grandfather was the son of Jamaican immigrants to Cuba – and their relation to the Cuban Revolution is ambiguous.

A profile of a grassroots anti-war group in Boston, this short film documents some of the tactics and activities used by draft resistance groups across the country during the Vietnam War. Using the law to keep young men out of the war, this group helped over 150 people each week escape service and educate themselves and their communities about alternatives to combat.

This film is an odyssey through the eyes, words and music of individuals who pioneered Afro-Cuban music in the United States. The video offers a rich overview of a wide number of musical styles from "Cubop" to Salsa, Big Band to jazz, and of musicians from Chano Ponzo to Tito Puente and Desi Arnaz to Johnny Colon. It examines the significant role of women performers and contains interviews with Mario Bauza and Dizzy Gillespie as they reveal the parallel course of jazz with the "latin sound".

Art, dance, music and poetry became a vital necessity for the liberated areas of South Vietnam in their daily efforts to survive the bombings and napalming of the Vietnam War. In this moving film, teenagers in the NLF liberated zones make beautiful puppets from the remains of downed U.S. warplanes. They work their puppet shows in dramatic ballet form. Armed with these puppets, they travel through the countryside, performing for village children even as U.S. planes circle overhead.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic speech captured by Third World Newreel

Narrated by American documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio, this is an intimate look at a journey made by ordinary Americans to provide humanitarian aid to Nicaragua during the U.S.- sponsored contra war and economic embargo. A concerned group collected fifty tons of medical supplies from churches, human and went by ship with the supplies to Nicaragua's East Coast. Once there, they traveled to the interior, where local farmers, doctors and teachers revealed the crucial changes being made by the Sandinistas in health care, education, farming and the treatment of Miskito Indians.