Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which parents, teachers, physicians, policy-makers and legal personnel are not concerned with fixing behaviors, making diagnoses, suppressing symptoms and judging, but seek instead to understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring in the wounded human soul. The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr Gabor Maté, normal. But not in the way you might think.
One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness in any given year. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15-24, and kills over 700,000 people a year globally and 48,300 in the USA . Drug overdose kills 81,000 in the USA annually. The autoimmunity epidemic affects 24 million people in the USA. What is going on? “So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.” — Gabor Maté
A groundbreaking documentary thriller about Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, Alexei Navalny. In August 2020, a plane traveling to Moscow made an emergency landing. One of its passengers, Alexei Navalny, was deathly ill. Evacuated to Berlin, German authorities confirmed that he had been poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent implicated in attacks on other opponents of the Russian government. President Vladimir Putin immediately cast doubt on the findings and denied any involvement. Recovering in Berlin, he makes shocking discoveries about his assassination attempt and bravely decides to return home--whatever the consequences.
In this revealing documentary, Giancarlo Granda, former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Hotel, shares the intimate details of his 7-year relationship with a charming older woman, Becki Falwell, and her husband, the Evangelical Trump stalwart Jerry Falwell Jr. Directed by Billy Corben, the film outlines Granda's entanglement with the Falwell's seemingly perfect lives and the overarching influence this affair had on a presidential election. The life of Jerry Falwell — the late Moral Majority televangelist who for decades helped catalyze the rightward shift of American evangelicals before his death in 2007 — is a quintessentially American story. But it’s in the next generation that the Falwell narrative becomes at once soap opera and morality tale. The film covers the graceless fall of Jerry Falwell Jr., who after the death of his father was placed in the presidency of the family’s conservative organ Liberty University. There, he seemed to remain painfully in thrall to his appetites. We hear testimony about his alleged tendency to drink on the job and discomfiting, slurry interviews between him and sympathetic media — but most crucially, we receive the testimony of Giancarlo Granda. Granda was a pool attendant at a Miami hotel when he met Falwell and his wife, Becki, in 2012. Today, he alleges that he was persuaded to have sex with Becki while Falwell watched, and that the pair engaged in an ongoing campaign of communication with him that could be described as coercive. His energies were consumed with managing their tempers and occasionally threatening behavior, and he blames the swirl of scandal around them for derailing his professional future. Plainspoken and only occasionally visibly emotional, Granda is his own best advocate as he describes a couple who, he says, craved his body and were willing to discard the rest of him.
From the age of 15, Whitney Houston began to enter the world of music. In 1983, she signed a contract with Clive David from Arista Records. From then on, she began a life of excess, luxury, fame, drugs, and many scandals. The documentary pays special attention to her relationships with her mother, father, husband and daughter, as well as her former best friend Robyn Crawford. It also addresses the singer's history of drug use, including overdose allegations in the 1990s, her early days as a gospel singer, her discovery by Arista Records boss Clive Davis, and key moments such as the releases of her debut album in 1985 and the film The Bodyguard in 1992. The film tells the story of the life and death of Whitney Houston, who marked a before and after in the history of music. It has been made with archival footage of the artist, from her concerts, interviews and home videos.
A young mother's mysterious death and her son's subsequent kidnapping blow open a decades-long mystery about the woman's true identity and the murderous federal fugitive at the center of it all. It's late at night in Oklahoma City, in April of 1990. Two or three guys are in a truck driving along the road and they see some kind of debris. And then they see off to the side, there's a body. It appears to be a young woman, a blonde-haired woman and they call an ambulance. She's rushed to the hospital, and her husband, Clarence, eventually shows up. He says her name is Tonya Hughes, that she's a stripper in Tulsa, and that they have a young son named Michael. And he's much older and he's just kind of this weird guy. So, the doctors, as they continue to examine her, they see old bruises and old injuries. There's something wrong with this picture. Ultimately, she passes away. The girls Tonya danced with want to find her family. So they call this woman and they tell her that her daughter died. And she says, 'What are you talking about? My daughter died 20 years ago, she was only 18 months old.' They realize that who they just buried was not Tonya Hughes, so now they're asking, 'What happened?'.
Acquitted in life, back on trial after death. The film takes an investigative look into the legal battles of the global superstar. Close friends, former staff and researchers paint an intimate portrait of Jackson's complicated world and put allegations of abuse under the microscope. 'Michael Jackson: Chase the Truth' defends the singer against allegations of child sexual abuse made by Wade Robson and James Safechuck in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland. It focuses on research from biographer and journalist Mike Smallcombe and statements by Jackson's former bodyguard Matt Fiddes and actor Mark Lester. Fiddes and Smallcombe assert that allegations made against Jackson always had a financial incentive.
The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr Gabor Maté, normal. But not in the way you might think. One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness in any given year. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15-24, and kills over 700,000 people a year globally and 48,300 in the USA . Drug overdose kills 81,000 in the USA annually. The autoimmunity epidemic affects 24 million people in the USA. What is going on?
“So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.” — Gabor Maté