7.3
L writes letters to her estranged lover. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds.
7.5
A documentary telling the story of Joe Cocker's historic "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" tour through the lens of the Tedeschi Trucks Band's reunion of the Mad Dogs.
7.1
“A is for Amphetamines. B is for Blue. C is for Code Switching.” In 1970, two Chicago teachers created a new flash-card system designed to better reflect the lived experiences of Black students. In this kaleidoscopically stylized cinematic accompaniment to his album of the same name, musician and multimedia wizard Topaz Jones uses the twenty-six-letter ABC format as a jumping-off point to create a dizzying, dazzling, and highly personal odyssey through the Black American cultural consciousness.
6.7
A box of stunning family photos awakens grief and lost memories as they are viewed for the first time on camera.
6.3
Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.
6.3
Go behind the scenes with the ’80s rock hitmakers as they head to the Bahamas to film a music video for their number one single “Stuck with You.”
6.8
A sublime work of trance-state cinema, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic immersion in the world of rural Ethiopia, a place where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once prized for its supposedly mystical properties—holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. As if under the intoxicating influence of the drug itself, FAYA DAYI unfurls as a hallucinogenic cinematic reverie, capturing hushed, intimate moments in the existences of everyone from the harvesters of the crop to people lost in its narcotic haze to a desperate but determined younger generation searching for an escape from the region’s political strife. The film’s exquisite monochrome cinematography—each frame a masterpiece sculpted from light and shadow—and time-bending, elliptical editing create a ravishing sensory experience that hovers between consciousness and dreaming.
6.4
From master director Jia Zhangke comes a vital document of Chinese society and its transformation since 1949. Jia interviews three prominent authors—Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong—born in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, respectively. In their stories, we hear of the dire circumstances they faced in their rural villages and small towns, and the substantial political effort undertaken to address it, from the social revolution of the ’50s through the unrest of the late ’80s. In their faces, we see full volumes left unsaid. Weaving it all together with his usual brilliance, Jia constructs an indispensable account of a country navigating seismic social change.
7.2
This portrait of Cuba’s storied Isla de la Juventud (then known as Isla de Pinos)—the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and the site of Fidel Castro’s imprisonment by Batista—examines its rich history and culture.
7.4
Although the free jazz movement of the 1960s and '70s was much maligned in some jazz circles, its pioneers - brilliant talents like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane - are today acknowledged as central to the evolution of jazz as America's most innovative art form. FIRE MUSIC showcases the architects of a movement whose radical brand of improvisation pushed harmonic and rhythmic boundaries, and produced landmark albums like Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Inspiration and Coltrane's Ascension. A rich trove of archival footage conjures the 1960s jazz scene along with incisive reflections by critic Gary Giddins and a number of the movement's key players.
8
In 1937, tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent were exterminated by the Dominican army, the killings fueled by anti-Black hatred fomented by the Dominican government. Fast-forward to 2013, when the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity, or a homeland. In this dangerous climate, a young attorney named Rosa Iris mounts a grassroots campaign, challenging electoral corruption and advocating for social justice. In STATELESS, director Michèle Stephenson traces the complex tributaries of history and present-day politics, issuing an urgent warning about what can happen when racism runs rampant in the government.
6.2
Having spent his career examining the Cambodian genocide that claimed the lives of so many of his family members in acclaimed documentaries like THE MISSING PICTURE, director Rithy Panh turns his attention to the myriad atrocities that haunt twentieth-century history. Dividing the screen into a triptych of panels, Panh presents soul-shaking images of war’s devastation and mankind’s capacity for evil, from Auschwitz to Hiroshima to Vietnam and beyond. Set to poetic and thought-provoking narration, the result is a harrowing but undeniably necessary confrontation with real-life horror that challenges us to face it head-on.
7
Death haunts a close-knit Mexican community in this evocatively spare, slow-burn documentary spellbinder. With a remarkably unobtrusive camera, director Juan Pablo González chronicles the everyday rituals and rhythms of life in a small, struggling rural town in the state of Jalisco where daily conversation seemingly turns again and again to one topic: the recent suicide of a young caballerango (horse wrangler) whose death, we soon learn, is only the latest in a rash of suicides that have plagued the village. Finding stirring poignancy in seemingly quotidian moments, CABALLERANGO is a transcendentally sad and beautiful reflection on vanishing traditions and disappearing lives.
6.2
You never know when someone may be miscarrying; it could be happening right next to you. In this this fearlessly frank essay film, director Lori Felker relives the tangle of emotions she felt while attempting to hide a miscarriage in plain sight.
7.1
A portrait of 10 senior dogs and their owners who struggle with the thought of letting go.
6
Shot with 16 mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti–Citizenship Amendment Act protests in Delhi, LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY finds filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri tracing lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, songs, and ruins from his birth in 1989.
7.2
In Japan, there is a special way to grieve after having an abortion. Inspired by these Buddhist rituals, MIZUKO is an intimate look at how a half-Japanese American woman reevaluates the controversial drawing of “the line” in abortion ethics when she becomes pregnant herself.
7.1
Get to know the siblings whose films have captured the frenetic pulse of New York’s city streets. An original documentary featuring footage from the making of their new thriller, GOOD TIME, along with several of the brothers’ early shorts.
7.3
SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF is accompanied by The Cinema 5 Story, a series of films distributed by the legendary Cinema 5.
6.9
In this stylistically dazzling, deeply moving, and unclassifiable short, a film crew follows three grieving participants in Miami’s annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model RIP T-shirts and innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead.
6.1
Innovatively shot on a 360-degree camera by young people from Guinea-Bissau’s queer and trans community, this breathlessly immersive work from the director THE HUMAN SURGE sets a perpetually expanding poem by Mariano Blatt to a kinetic vision of their world.
7.3
When Paul Okpokam arrived in the U.S. in 1968, David Schickele decided to make a film about his Nigerian friend’s experience of coming to teach at San Francisco State College. Entering American society in a time of cultural upheaval and racial tension, Okpokam is seen by others through the prism of American racism and exoticism. Truth is stranger than fiction in BUSHMAN, a rare sort of film portrait, part document, part imagined, and poetic in its approach to real events.
5.4
Taking two antiracist and antiauthoritarian liberation movements in South London and Chicago’s South Side as a point of departure, SOUTH presents an expressionistic investigation of the power of individual and collective voice. Interlinked with director Morgan Quaintance’s own biography, the film also considers questions of mortality and the will to transcend a world typified by concrete relations.
6.6
Part poetic essay, part documentary, this rapturous film by director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION) analyzes the complexities of his relationship to his native country of Lesotho from his new home in Berlin. Addressing a mother figure who embodies the idea of home, the narration unfolds over an elegiac procession of gorgeous black-and-white images. Exploring the links between land, history, and spirituality, this stunningly assured vision announces the arrival of a major filmmaker.
