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Heaven’s Prisoners | Chaplain Carroll Pickett, the protagonist of At the Death House Door, audiotaped an account of every execution he participated in... all 95 of them.

THE AMERICAN PRISON SYSTEM!
At the Death House Door
Metro Cinema | Nov 8 (8pm)
So many titles! So many award-winners! So many socially improving themes! Global Visions is such a well-programmed festival that it can be hard to know how to plan your viewing schedule. However, you really can’t go wrong with this film from Steve James and Peter Gilbert about Carroll Pickett, a chaplain at a Texas prison who has presided over nearly 100 executions in 15 years. It’s a film about a specific miscarriage of justice, but it’s also a shattering profile of a deeply religious man wrestling with his own conscience and the morality of his own profession.

RAMPAGING OIL CONGLOMERATES!
Crude
Paramount Theater | Nov 6 (10pm)
In his previous films (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, the Metallica doc Some Kind of Monster), director Joe Berlinger has proven himself one of the sharpest and most sympathetic observers of fringe American culture. But his new films takes him all the way to the Amazon rainforest to tell the story of an epic environmental legal battle pitting self-educated Brazilian indigenous peoples against Texaco. Listen to Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Berlinger on his radio show The Treatment (it’s available online) to get a full sense of how incredible this story is.

THE ENTIRE DYSFUNCTIONAL WORLD!
The Yes Men Fix the World
Paramount Theater | Nov 7 (8pm)
On the surface, this latest collection of culture-jamming pranks from Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno might look like a light-hearted antidote to the often-depressing other films in the Global Visions lineup. Who doesn’t smile at the thought of a pair of smart alecks hoodwinking corporations and major media outlets with nothing more than a few fake websites? But the film’s ultimate message is perhaps the biggest downer of the entire festival: even if corporations wanted to become globally responsible citizens, the marketplace might not let them.