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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
7.2
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.
7.3
SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF is accompanied by The Cinema 5 Story, a series of films distributed by the legendary Cinema 5.
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.
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.
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.
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.
6.5
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.
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.
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.
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.
6.6
Traversing New York City, a dancer seeks freedom and peace through movement.
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.
6.4
Ghostly images of Colombia’s jungle landscapes are set to radio transmissions sent by family members to their kidnapped loved ones—heartrending messages of grief, support, and, against all odds, hope.
6.8
In the Florida Everglades, rabbit hunting is considered a rite of passage for young men. THE RABBIT HUNT follows seventeen-year-old Chris and his family as they hunt in the fields of the largest industrial sugar farms in the U.S. The film records a tradition by which migrant farm workers in the communities surrounding Lake Okeechobee have been hunting and preparing rabbits since the early 1900s.
6.5
In 2017, Jessica Beshir directed this short film about a portrait painter whose sole subject is his ex-wife.
6.9
In 2016, Jessica Beshir directed this short film about Fred Nelson, a man she met in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park who tap-dances every day on a worn piece of wood.
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.
7.8
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, Varda acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—the wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography VARDA BY AGNÈS is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.
