Movies Similar to When Women Kill

Holloway(2025)

Holloway — once the largest women's prison in Europe, now abandoned. Six ex-inmates revisit, recounting experiences, giving voice to incarcerated women. They explore vacant cells and corridors, recalling memories from their time inside.

Women's Prison(1965)

Women's Prison recounts the life of the prisoners and the problems their families encounter in their struggle to survive. Here again filmmaker Kamran Shirdel employs the cinema verité style. The interviews with the prisoners, social workers and teachers serve as commentaries for "constructed" documentary images.

Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street(2000)

The film follows a simple structure, and shows the drug-related degradation of five youths (Jake, Tracey, Jessica, Alice, Oreo) during the course of three years. The film depicts drug-related crimes and diseases: prostitution, male prostitution, AIDS, and lethal overdoses.

Born in Evin(2019)

Follows filmmaker and actress, Maryam Zaree, on her quest to find out the violent circumstances surrounding her birth inside one of the most notorious political prisons in the world.

Women Behind Bars with Trevor McDonald(2013)

Trevor McDonald goes to Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana to speak with some of the women that live there.

Free CeCe(2016)

This film confronts the culture of violence surrounding trans women of color. It is told through the voices of Laverne Cox and Cece McDonald.

Die Kinder sind tot(2004)

A documentary exploring a crime that shocked Germany in the summer of 1999.

Debut(2017)

The soulless atmosphere of a women's penitentiary destroys the prisoners' personality, kills all femininity in them. The film looks at the rationality of the long prison terms for women with children.

Máma z basy(2017)

In Paradisum(1993)

In Paradisum relates two disturbing stories simultaneously. The female narrator tells her personal tale of imprisonment as the wife of the notorious Estonian serial killer, Andreas Hanni. Although her story is bizarre, it touches familiar themes that run throughout modern life: the desire to be loved and the fear of being alone. Pille Hanni's tale unfolds over cinema vérité images of life in several Estonian prisons. At times the images reflect in a literary way the events of the narration, yet they are representations and impressions, rather than traditional documentary style footage of the people involved. This opens the story to a more general interpretation, often with unsettling results. The parallel contents reveal, at two levels of story and social organisation, how the bizarre and inhuman can be tolerable and even addictive in the face of our fears.

Sister Hearts(2018)

Maryam Henderson-Uloho spent thirteen years in prison in Louisiana, seven in solitary confinement. After her release she struggled to find housing or employment. She began selling secondhand goods out of a suitcase on a street corner in New Orleans. In just three years, she grew her business to a brick-and-mortar thrift store—one that also provides housing and employment for other formerly-incarcerated women. She calls those women—and her store—Sister Hearts.

Of Monsters and Skirts(2008)

Libertad, Enriqueta, Maricarmen and Albert evoke the years when their mothers and his aunt stayed in Les Corts jail, times of innocence, hopelessness and distress. Their childhood stories inmmerse us in a world whose main characters are memories, oblivion and the passing of time.

Ashley Smith : Out of Control(2010)

Ashley Smith was a troubled 19-year-old when she choked herself to death at Ontario's Grand Valley Institution for Women. Her death made national headlines and led to a scathing report by Canada’s federal prison ombudsman. Incarceration for Ashley began at a youth detention centre in New Brunswick. Her crime: she had tossed crabapples at a mailman. Her one-month sentence stretched to almost four years, served in five provinces. With the prison videotapes and exclusive access to Smith’s parents, along with a fellow inmate, this documentary exposes a system that fails the many Ashley Smiths still incarcerated in Canadian institutions.

Cages(2017)

The final months of pregnancy and the first ones after the birth of a baby are unique experiences in a woman's life. And when this daily life is lived inside a prison?

Like a Rose

A short documentary from 1975 about two women serving 25 years in a Missouri penitentiary. Made with an all-female crew.

A Mother's Right: The Elizabeth Morgan Story(1992)

Based on the custody case involving Elizabeth Morgan and the subsequent Elizabeth Morgan Act.

Madea Goes to Jail(2009)

After a high-speed car chase, Madea winds up behind bars because her quick temper gets the best of her. Meanwhile, Assistant District Attorney Josh Hardaway lands a case that's too personal to handle: that of a young prostitute and former drug addict named Candace, also a childhood friend. When Candace winds up in jail, Madea takes the young woman under her protective wing.

White Oleander(2002)

A teenager journeys through a series of foster homes after her mother goes to prison for committing a crime of passion.

People I Know(2002)

A New York press agent must scramble when his major client becomes embroiled in a huge scandal.

Charlie's Death Wish(2005)

When a stripper finds out that her sister has been murdered while in prison, she seeks revenge in this pulse-racing action-thriller. The cast features a glorious mixture of lawless rock & roll stars such as Lemmy (from Motorhead) and Tracii Guns, scream queen Phoebe Dollar, and acclaimed porn star Ron Jeremy in a rare fully-clothed role.