6.8
Ever since the onset of her dementia, reality, dream and nightmare have become intertwined for Rose, making her something like a maverick time traveler. Her filmmaker daughter Rea Tajiri is also her caregiver. In this fond portrait, she visualizes Rose’s spiritual, philosophical and sometimes surprisingly specific stories in the order they come: a non-linear sequence illustrated by her own footage shot over many years, accompanied by snatches of conversations and images from the family archive. Rose’s eventful journey through time is rich with memories and sensitively accompanied by a fitting soundtrack.
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.
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.
6.5
A poetic exploration of the fluid nature of identity, MY TWO VOICES introduces us to Ana, Claudia, and Marinela, three Latin American women who share their intimate experiences of immigrating to Canada while reflecting on themes of violence, belonging, motherhood, and reconciliation. Weaving together carefully framed close-ups of hands and faces with contemplative images of private and public spaces against a richly layered soundscape, this unique documentary from acclaimed director Lina Rodriguez creates an impressionistic tapestry that resists a centralized perspective and echoes the protagonists’ fragmented and hybrid identities.
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.
6.7
A box of stunning family photos awakens grief and lost memories as they are viewed for the first time on camera.
7.3
SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF is accompanied by The Cinema 5 Story, a series of films distributed by the legendary Cinema 5.
7.6
This epic, indispensable work of cinema scholarship from archivist and filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is a remarkable, in-depth portrait of director Jiří Menzel (CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS) and the Czechoslovak New Wave that he helped forge. Featuring extensive interviews with Menzel and compatriots like Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jan Němec, and Ivan Passer, CZECHMATE is a deeply personal tribute to a singular artist and an illuminating look at the turbulent social and political circumstances that gave rise to one of the most explosive creative movements in all of cinema history.
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.
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.
7.1
A portrait of 10 senior dogs and their owners who struggle with the thought of letting go.
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.
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.
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.
6.9
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.
7.9
Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka, as they embark on an unprecedented uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing their community to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories. Through wrenching interviews with the victims whose lives have been shattered by the agonizing effects of asbestosis, SENNAN ASBESTOS DISASTER paints a damning portrait of how decades of negligence exacted a devastating human toll while revealing the ways in which the tragedy is deeply entwined with issues of class and anti-Korean discrimination. It’s also a galvanizing look at the power of collective action and what happens when ordinary people take on their own government—going up against an unfeeling, often maddeningly slow-moving bureaucracy in their unceasing fight for justice.
7.1
This heartfelt tribute to the little studio that could charts the unlikely rise of HandMade Films—the independent producer/distributor that revitalized the 1980s British film industry with its idiosyncratic, auteur-driven ethos—through the eyes of filmmakers, key personnel, and the man who started it all: former Beatle George Harrison. Through unseen archival footage of Harrison and interviews with the artists he championed like Terry Gilliam and Bob Hoskins, AN ACCIDENTAL STUDIO explores HandMade’s baptism by fire, the risks it took in producing uniquely crafted and intelligent films, and the stories that grew up around it.
6.9
A dystopian plunge into an enormous Moroccan dog shelter teeming with hundreds of strays doubles as a haunting commentary on poverty and the plight of refugees.
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
This portrait of renowned percussionist and founding pioneer of avant-garde jazz Milford Graves finds him exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity. The film draws the viewer through the artist’s lush garden and ornate home, into the martial arts dojo in his backyard and the laboratory in his basement—all just blocks from where he grew up in the housing projects of South Jamaica, Queens. Graves tells stories of discovery, struggle, and survival, ruminates on the essence of “swing,” activates electronic stethoscopes in his basement lab to process the sound of his heart, and travels to Japan to perform at a school for children with autism. Oscillating from present to past and weaving intimate glimpses of the artist’s complex cosmology with blistering performances, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS is cinema full of fluidity, polyrhythm, and intensity, embodying the essence of Graves’s music.
6.9
This haunting, lyrical documentary recounts the long untold story of gay men who were imprisoned on a remote island by Mussolini’s Fascist regime in the 1930s.
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.
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.
7
Yussuf Mume Saleh journeys nightly into the outskirts of the walled city of Harar to bond with his beloved hyenas, a ritual he has practiced for over thirty-five years. Shot in black and white, HAIRAT is a meditation on this uniquely symbiotic relationship between man and wild beast.
