Orphans of Mathare documents the lives of former street children—many orphaned by HIV/AIDS—now living at the Good Samaritan Children’s Home, an orphanage and school in the Mathare Slum of Nairobi, Kenya. By following the lives of several orphans, the film lays bare the complicated relationship between poverty, violence, disease, Christianity, tradition, and the orphan crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa. Orphans of Mathare brings new urgency to the issue of the AIDS pandemic in its revelation that global AIDS is not simply a medical crisis but a socio-cultural one that threatens to create a generation of children without parents. The film encourages Western audiences to ask questions of themselves regarding their role in dealing with this global problem.

Stolen Childhoods is a powerful exposé told primarily in the words of laboring children who live on three different continents but share a common fate. Children are shown working in dumps, quarries, and brick kilns; making charcoal; laboring on fishing platforms; picking tobacco, coffee, or vegetables; working in sweatshops, as domestics, and making rugs; and selling their bodies on the street. The film places these children’s stories in the broader context of the worldwide struggle against child labor. Stolen Childhoods provides an understanding of the causes of child labor as it investigates what it costs the global community, how it contributes to global insecurity, and what it will take to eliminate it.