The deNovo Initiative

A courageous pastor uses his underground network to rescue and aid North Korean families as they risk their lives to embrace freedom.

Augusto and Paulina have been together for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Both fear the day he no longer recognizes her.

America’s policy of producing cheap food at all costs has long hobbled small independent farmers, ranchers, and chefs. Worried for their survival, trailblazing food writer Ruth Reichl reaches out across political and social divides to uncover the country’s broken food system and the innovators risking it all to transform it.

Focusing on the first group of Black debutantes in Canton, Ohio in a decade, this documentary follows the young women as they unpack the ball’s legacy and chart their path forward, both for tradition and themselves.

A real-time portrait of 2020 unfolds as an Asian-American family in Trump’s rural America fights to keep their restaurant and American dream alive in the face of a pandemic, Neo-Nazis, and generational scars from the Cambodian Killing Fields.

Follows some of the nation’s top competitive high school performers in Original Oratory as they square off in the world’s most intense public speaking competition: The National Speech and Debate Tournament.

The documentary team follows two happiness agents in their forties who spend a month and a half on the road twice a year, going door-to-door with their questionnaires in isolated villages in the Himalayas. The filmmakers undertake to provide an intimate insight into the daily lives and desires of Bhutanese people, and also seek the answer to the universal question of whether happiness can really be measured. Gross National Happiness promises a heart-warming journey into a mysterious, fairytale-like world, which is the exact opposite of the social order dominated by consumption and desires.

As a visibly disabled person, filmmaker Reid Davenport is often either the subject of an unwanted gaze — gawked at by strangers — or paradoxically rendered invisible, ignored or dismissed by society. The arrival of a circus tent just outside his apartment prompts him to consider the history and legacy of the freak show, in which individuals who were deemed atypical were put on display for the amusement and shock of a paying public. Contemplating how this relates to his own filmmaking practice, which explicitly foregrounds disability, Davenport sets out to make a film about how he sees the world from his wheelchair without having to be seen himself.

Futurists Martine and Bina Rothblatt commission an advanced humanoid AI named Bina48 to transfer Bina’s consciousness from a human to a robot in an attempt to continue their once-in-a-galaxy love affair for the rest of time.

In 1983, a disabled Californian woman named Elizabeth Bouvia sought the “right to die,” igniting a national debate about autonomy, dignity, and the value of disabled lives. After years of courtroom trials, Bouvia disappeared from public view. Disabled director Reid Davenport narrates this investigation of what happened to Bouvia and her story’s disturbing relevance today.

Nigel and Dayna are a happy couple with a young family when they encounter a nightmare scenario: their baby, Emily, experiences a frightening seizure. But what comes next is truly Kafkaesque. After Emily is rushed to the hospital and stabilized, a doctor claims that her episode could only be the result of severe abuse, and prosecutors arrest Nigel.