Created in 2009, the Rights! Camera! Action! film series features documentaries from the Full Frame Archive that focus on human rights related themes across the globe. The series provides an opportunity to connect the Rubenstein Library’s extensive holdings on human rights and social justice to the Duke and Durham community. Every year, there are four film screenings followed by panel discussions with Duke faculty or students, community activists and occasionally the film makers.
The Full Frame Archive, now part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at the Rubenstein Library, acquires and preserves all of the award-winning films from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival going back to their first year in 1998 through 2011. A complete list of the films maintained in the archive can be found in the collection guide.
Spring 2026 Films
A Road Out
Unlikely as it may sound, public health in the American South was profoundly shaped by a handful of progressive doctors in flight from apartheid South Africa. Their ideas lie at the heart of this film. A Road Out explores how the experiences of these community-focused clinicians in deeply divided societies changed our understanding of the ways that race, poverty, and socioeconomic status shape health outcomes.
Screening on February 19 at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
The Infiltrators
A true story of two young immigrants who get purposefully arrested by Border Patrol, and put in a shadowy for-profit detention center. The film follows Marco and Viri, members of a group of radical Dreamers who are on a mission to stop deportations. And the best place to stop deportations, they believe, is in detention.
Screening in February - event information to come soon
Homegoings
Through the eyes of funeral director Isaiah Owens, the beauty and grace of African-American funerals are brought to life. Filmed at Owens Funeral Home in New York City's historic Harlem neighborhood, HOMEGOINGS takes an up-close look at the rarely seen world of undertaking in the black community, where funeral rites draw on a rich palette of tradition, history and celebration. Combining cinéma vérité with intimate interviews and archival photographs, the film paints a portrait of the dearly departed, their grieving families and a man who sends loved ones “home.”
Screening in February - event information to come soon
Fall 2025 Films
Plan 75
In a dystopian future, Japan’s government launches Plan 75, a program encouraging the elderly to terminate their own lives to relieve its rapidly aging population’s social and economic burdens. Hayakawa’s view is far from grim, however, as these characters soon learn to fully reckon with their own lives and what it truly means to live.
To see a list of documentary films from past years, visit our Rights! Camera! Action! Film Series Archive.