Films

Films

Watch over 200 films curated from 140 countries around the globe, and featuring over 40 languages. SIMA Academy offers you unprecedented access on any device to authentic global perspectives and visually engaging current affairs media. Plus a constantly refreshed selection of international productions from independent distributors.

Films
  • Right To Identity

    With one of the lowest levels of birth registration in Africa, Tanzania’s failing infrastructure and logistical challenges have left decades of backlog in birth registrations. A Tanzanian governmental agency, RITA, joined forces with some strong partners and decided to tackle the issue of birth r...

Extras

  • Dùthchas

    After the Highland Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries, where communities were expelled from their lands in favour of sheep, legislation was brought in to give people secure tenancies, called crofts, to protect them from being cleared from the land again. In 2007 the Crofting Reform Act ope...

  • Oil On Their Hands

    For almost half a century, Quechua, Achuar, and Kichwa communities in Northern Peruvian have suffered extreme negative environmental, health, cultural, social, and economic impacts as a result of the operations of the oil companies, Occidental Petroleum (1971-2000) and subsequently Pluspetrol (20...

  • Homecoming

    “If not us, who will protect our territories? Who will manage our territories?”

    Indonesian Indigenous Youth called their fellow brothers living in the cities and finished their studies back to the community. They called it the ‘Homecoming movement.

    Youth are driving new models of sustainable ru...

  • Brighter

    What if you could pay for a young woman’s university education by providing her with a “gap year” job?

    In Uganda, where few women are encouraged, or can afford, to attend university, Liz Forkin Bohannon decided to do something about it. She taught three young women to make strappy sandals which ...

  • Into Something Beautiful

    What can a construction company do to transform personal brokenness and solve systemic injustice?

    Amid their own personal and professional brokenness, Amy and Braden King discovered that most of the employees at their new construction company had a history of addiction, homelessness, and/or crim...

  • When God Roars

    How can a real estate photography company in the U.S. help provide healthy livelihoods to trafficking survivors in the Philippines?

    Called to work with those exploited and traumatized by human trafficking, Sam and Mindy started Regenesys to create living-wage jobs for survivors. In partnership...

  • Innocence

    A group of Black and Latin women activists in San José, California drive a grassroots movement to remove police from their children's schools. Will they succeed?

    Filming for this documentary was done under the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the lead up to the pivotal 2020 elections...

  • Cries of Our Ancestors

    Award-winning filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, and conservationist Rebecca Kormos, worked with Guinee Ecologie Founder Mamadou Saliou Diallo, to film the chimpanzees of Guinea, and to speak with local community members about their relationship with the chimpanzees. They gathered myths and stories that des...

  • Harmonic Spectrum

    Sean uses the Piano to navigate life on the Autistic Spectrum. As he is drawn into new musical collaborations he must learn to balance his enthusiasm and compulsive energy with understanding and compromise, redefining his perspective in the process.

    Director: Austen McCowan & Will Hewitt
    17 min ...

  • Kanda Bode (Don't Get Whipped)

    This documentary focuses on the Hamar Tribe, a semi nomadic and rural people who live along the Omo River in Southwestern Ethiopia. Preserving the traditions of their ancestors is essential to defining Hamar life. One of the most venerated of the Hamar’s ancient traditions involves the transition...

  • Goodwill Dumping

    The stylised fashion documentary Goodwill Dumping brings the enormity of the industry surrounding donated secondhand clothing to light. The film showcases the journey that discarded pieces of clothing make and what kind of impact this has on local industries. Due to its globalised scale this imme...

  • From Sea To Rising Sea (VR/360)

    From Sea To Rising Sea is an educational musical call to action about the healing properties of the ocean and how the ocean can assist us in our mission to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This VR experience (created for the Quest 2 and also mobile devices) follows a flock of synchronize...

  • (in)Visible Sound (VR/360)

    Grace has Tinnitus so the way she perceives sounds can be radically different from the average person. Yet, appearance wise, Grace’s disability is invisible. Through virtual reality, the viewer experiences the world through Grace’s eyes and ears as she narrates in voiceover. That world is a fanta...

  • Testimony (VR/360)

    Testimony is an interactive documentary for virtual reality that shares the stories of five survivors of sexual assault and their journey to healing. Beyond just a film, Testimony is an advocacy platform to allow the public to bear witness to those who have been silenced. The Brock Turner case, B...

  • Water & Coltan (VR/360)

    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...

  • The Invisibles

    Over 200,000 migrant laborers, mostly from Africa, work in Italy’s fields. After being exploited for years, the global pandemic made these farmworkers “essential” overnight — but without labor rights or even access to basic sanitation, they are living and working in conditions that have been desc...

  • The Conscious Hood: Being Black is No Crime

    Being Black Is No Crime is the fourth episode of the web-series "The Conscious Hood" documenting social issues crucial to the residents of São Paulo's Heliópolis, the second largest urban slum in Latin America. Directed by videomaker Katherine Jinyi Li and filmed during her youth journalism works...

  • Meet Chuna: Empowering Women in Rural Nepal

    Chuna Devi - a mother of three in Nepal - once said that "being born as a girl is worthless." But at the age of 47, she found self-worth and changed her life by finally learning to read at a READ Center, starting a women's study group, and investing in her family's education. Today, her goal is t...

  • Into The Sea

    Into the Sea follows the family of Suleiman Hajazzi as they are relocated from a refugee camp in Greece to more permanent housing. Suleiman, his son and wife recount their journey escaping violence in Afghanistan and their hopes and dreams for their future.

    Director: Daphne Matziaraki
    2020 | 15 ...

  • #ISurvivedEbola

    Foday Gallah is training to become an anesthetist. While in school, he supervised six ambulances in Montserrado County, Liberia. Though difficult, the work bore few health risks. In June 2014, when the Ebola outbreak reached Montserrado, this changed. With too few ambulances, Ebola Treatment Unit...

  • $30 to Antarctica

    $30 To Antarctica follows the story of Ka Foon Chau, who grew up an impoverished child, and retired a renowned doctor. Raised in 1960s Hong Kong, Chau faced the bias of her elders who discouraged her interest in the academics. Through a small gesture of support she received from a teacher, Chau b...

  • (Un)divided

    Amina is an Iraqi American refugee and Muslim. Joe is a Trump supporter who was afraid of Muslims in America — until he met Amina. The widening political division and polarization of our world have become so personal, that the very idea of civil, open-minded conversation can seem unreachable, and...

  • Is this Love? | Kya Yahi Pyar Hai? (VR/360) *Viewer Discretion Advised*

    [Trigger Warning] In March 2016 Kausalya and her husband Shankar were brutally attacked on a crowded street in southern India. Shankar, who came from a lower Dalit caste, died of his injuries. Kausalya survives and accuses her parents of orchestrating an honour killing. She fights for justice thr...

  • Women In Sink

    In a little hair salon owned by a Christian Arab in Haifa, Israel, the director installs a minimalist film set over the washing-basin, where she chats with the clients she is shampooing. She thus paints an unexpected choral portrait of this space that provides temporary freedom, where Arab and Je...