"It’s not easy to find a foster family for you," an orphanage supervisor explains to nine-year-old Alicia. "After all, you are a very special girl." Alicia is crying. "I’m not special. I’m just a girl." This disturbing scene sets the tone for this film about Alicia, who was taken away from her teenage mother by the Child Welfare Bureau when she was 12 months old. She’s been living in an orphanage since the age of five, and they have never managed to find a foster family for her. In Alicia, we watch as she becomes a teenager, still craving safety and love. Over the course of three years, filmmaker Maasja Ooms follows her daily life up close. Alicia's yearning and powerlessness are palpable in these observations, which painfully reveal the effects of having no prospects.
At the consulting service for immigrants at the Avicenne Hospital in suburban Paris, we observe the ...
We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They...
As the healthcare system in Venezuela comes crashing down and millions of people flee the country, a...
Cats might be cute but they are decimating the environment just like other invasive species. As ecol...
Traces the lives of the Hartings, a blind Montreal family of three who make their living singing in ...
Two Bangladeshi girls born and raised in London have weddings arranged for them against their will b...
In a darkened classroom, the white cracked walls serve as a movie screen. We are in a remote mountai...
A documentary about a 78-year-old Indian woman in New York who is the world's most passionate theate...
The power of fostering animals in need is undeniable. Hopalong Animal Rescue, based in Oakland, CA, ...
THE DEPARTMENT is a feature documentary which takes us inside the never-before-seen child protection...
A boy posts a message on the Internet seeking a suicide partner. A girl reads it and flies to meet h...
Three young men commit themselves to one of the best summers of their lives...marching in a World Cl...
A raw and telling portrait of a people left behind by the modern world, inspired by the work of phot...
In China more people are on death row than the rest of the world combined. The children of the convi...
Somewhere in Myanmar is a forest rich in amber and controlled by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA)....
Single mother Anna and her four children live in the front-line war zone of Donbas, Ukraine. While t...
The story of Tim Reilly (84) whose son Matthew disappeared in1999. All that remains of him today are...
A direct, uncompromising look into the complex machinery of Quebec’s youth protection services (know...
More than sixty years after her birth, the Barbie doll is still as seductive as ever. Between stereo...