Movies Similar to What Measures to Save a People?

Watched(2017)

This short 19-minute documentary is an intimate and moving exploration of the profound and far-reaching impact of surveillance on Muslim American individuals and communities. Premiering at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, WATCHED is told through the personal experience of two women, both coming of age in New York. The film charts the devastating toll of surveillance and reveals the scars it leaves behind.

Incarceration Nation(2021)

An examination of the connection between relentless government intervention since colonisation to the trauma and disadvantage experiences by Indigenous Australians - the two key drivers of incarceration.

Profiled(2016)

Profiled is a feature length documentary that knits the stories of mothers of Black and Latin unarmed youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Driven by anger when their demands for justice are ignored the women transition from grieving parents to activists participating in the grass roots movement now spreading across the country since the much-publicized deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

Hygiène raciale(2012)

Before being employed by the Nazis in what remains the most deadly program of “racial purification”, Eugenics was a very popular concept among scientists in the US and Europe. The science of “good birth”, which aims to create the perfect human being, sets out to achieve this by preventing reproduction of those perceived as weak, sick, disabled, or otherwise “degenerate”. As early as 1907, the US applied the first eugenics laws, which continued to be in force until the 1970s. In Sweden, 63,000 people were sterilized, mostly after WWII. The film switches deftly between the explanation of historians and the testimony of victims who continue to struggle for recognition of the harm they have suffered, which has been erased from the collective memory. From North Carolina to Sweden and Germany, a terrifying journey into this quest for the “best of worlds”.

A Picture of You(2014)

Kyle and Jen, estranged siblings, travel from New York City to rural Pennsylvania to pack up the home of their recently deceased mother. While there, they make a discovery that turns their world upside-down. A Picture of You is a serious movie about life that gets sideswiped in the supermarket parking lot by a funny movie about death. It’s a story about family, loss, secrets, letting go, and starting anew.

In the Heights(2021)

The story of Usnavi, a bodega owner who has mixed feelings about closing his store and retiring to the Dominican Republic or staying in Washington Heights.

The Hate U Give(2018)

Raised in a poverty-stricken slum, a 16-year-old girl named Starr now attends a suburban prep school. After she witnesses a police officer shoot her unarmed best friend, she's torn between her two very different worlds as she tries to speak her truth.

Locks(2009)

A young man in Oakland, California, wakes with a heavy heart and decides to take a walk through the neighborhood to the local barbershop.

Jimmy Murakami: Non-Alien(2010)

A documentary film about acclaimed filmmaker Jimmy T. Murakami and his emotional return to Tule Lake concentration camp in America.

Hunting Hitler's Stolen Treasures: The Monuments Men(2014)

The true story of an unlikely World War II band of brothers: the unsuspecting group of scholars, academics, historians and architects headed to the front lines to rescue thousands of years' worth of European art and culture from Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World(2002)

Paul Otlet was a Belgian, *1868, died 1944, who perfected the Dewey Classification system as "the Universal Decimal Classification", in his lifetime alone totalling 17 million index cards of human knowledge.

Giuseppe Makes a Movie(2014)

While the rest of America slept, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews has made over 30 experimental features. Set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California), they are populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs. Director Adam Rifkin creates a wildly surreal, outrageously funny and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist inhabiting a world few of us even know exists.

One Cut, One Life(2014)

When seminal documentarian Ed Pincus is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he and collaborator Lucia Small team up to make one last film, much to the chagrin of Jane, Ed’s wife of 50 years. Told from two points of view with vulnerability, intimacy and humor, ONE CUT, ONE LIFE challenges the form of first person documentary while offering a complex story of love, loss, legacy, and the delicacy of capturing the preciousness of life while time is fleeting.

Untold Odyssey: Reindeer Wrangling(2011)

A lyrical and haunting portrait of reindeer herding in the twilight expanses of the Lappish wilderness.

Voices from the Front(1992)

In New York City, a distraught activist confronts the mayor with a story of a friend who languished on a cot in an emergency room hallway for nine days, only to die 48 hours after leaving the hospital. In 1988, thousands of activists hold the Food and Drug Administration under siege, demanding speedier drug approval. In 1990 AIDS activists converge on the National Institute of Health, calling for a more equitable clinical trial system and expanded research into new drugs and treatment. Voices From the Front, the first feature-length documentary on AIDS activism in America, makes clear the emotional and political effects of community activism using the voices of those directly engaged. It is a powerful distillation of pictures and words from events organized to change public consciousness, expose the failure of the health care systems, and challenge government inaction and neglect concerning AIDS.

Elstree Story(1952)

Starting in 1927 when the first film, The White Sheik, was made there, Elstree Story features excerpts from over forty productions – including Hitchcock’s Blackmail, the first feature-length British talkie ever shown – with early appearances by some of cinema’s greatest stars; it is a most memorable and evocative journey through the years.

Berlin 10⁄90(1990)

In 1990, Robert Kramer receives a grant from the Ford Foundation. He goes to Berlin for 6 months, where he makes an hour long single video shot (for a festival) in the bathroom of his apartment. Facing the camera, the filmmaker thinks, alone, about the fall of the Berlin wall. "I've already spent 6 weeks here. With all the events in eastern Europe, it was like a hurricane. Berlin is a city where you feel the biggest changes, where you meet Polish immigrants, or others, escaping. Berlin will become a very violent city. What happens in eastern Europe is a bit like the end of the civil war in the US. The North, and all it's power stimulated by years of war, took over the South, who has lost everything. And there is this German past, the war, on all levels.

Polvere - Il grande processo dell'amianto(2011)

What's Up, Fatlip?(2003)

During the filming of Fatlip's debut solo music video for "What's Up, Fatlip?" Spike Jonze compiled a series of interviews with the rapper and put them together in a documentary.

Les Scandales de « La Religieuse »(2023)

Released in 1796 posthumously, The Nun, a novel that Diderot did not dream of publishing during his lifetime, as he knew it to be revolutionary, caused the same explosion in the 19th century France as in that of the 1960s, when Jacques Rivette decided to adapt it, with Anna Karina in the title role. “This film is banned and it will remain so!” said the General de Gaulle. Exploration of an indictment of incredible modernity which, through the tragedy of the young Suzanne, locked up in the convent against her will, denounces the inequity of a society denying women all moral, political and sexual freedom.