A one-take recording captures a family’s visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice, from land and labor, from Haifa to Beirut to a Gulf offshore oil platform. A STONE’S THROW trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labor in the region and the colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil laborers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.
In the Southern Illinois region of Little Egypt, a sound recordist gathers sonic ephemera as he revisits the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts—the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of his hometown, Cairo, a town famous for confluences and collisions: between North and South; the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers; and Black liberation and white supremacy.
A playful audiovisual experiment layers ping pong games at New York City’s Seward Park with advice from an immigration lawyer.
“Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs?”
THE CALLERS combines anonymous documentary testimony with imagined creative scenes to tell the story of those who have called the oldest queer support line in the UK, seeking guidance on everything from where to find the nearest leather club to how to come out, start a family, or mend a broken heart. The film is a love letter to queer memory and possibility, LGBTQ+ community and care, and the power of collective imagination to create our dream lives.
Director Billy Woodberry examines the life and legacy of Mário Pinto de Andrade, a Pan-African thinker, activist, and founder of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) whose work was critical to the African liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, Woodberry sheds light on a revolutionary figure whose legacy is evident in his analyses of African politics; his quest for a proper understanding of the origins of African identity; his poetry, plays, and screenplays; and in the memories of his family, friends, and disciples, who tell of his great spirit and rigorous mind.
What happened in 1940s London when two women of different generations, both fighting against colonialism, came together to put their fervor and imagination into writing a revolutionary play?
“When we dream, we dream in patois.” Una (Clover Webb), a Jamaican woman living in 1980s London, reveals her feelings of alienation through a poetic, patois-inflected inner monologue (as voiced by Tamara Lawrance). As she takes a moment of solace to make the popular Caribbean dessert burnt milk, she is flooded with powerful sense memories that take her back home—visualized by director Joseph Douglas Elmhirst in an intoxicating head rush of ecstatically evocative, stream-of-consciousness imagery.
Filmed in the Yakutian Arctic and constructed out of personal poems and notes, this visual essay poses questions about our perception of contemporaneity and image production’s intersection with the creation of narratives around the idea of love (romantic, platonic, intimate, and maternal),
In this intimate look at family, memory, and economy, the filmmaker returns to her hometown in West Texas to document the effects of the boom-and-bust nature of the oil industry.
Omari’s young life in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines revolves around playing football, and through the sport he sees the world. That all changes when his grandfather, the last of the Barrouallie whalers, teaches him about the traditional practice of hunting “blackfish.”
A SEASON WITH ISABELLA ROSSELLINI catches up with the celebrated actor, model, animal-behavior expert, and all-around creative force as she is turning seventy, facing life with the same spirited curiosity and playfulness that have sustained her singular career across decades. Following her at work—on the set of Alice Rohrwacher’s film LA CHIMERA and rehearsing her own new play, “Darwin’s Smile”—and at home on Long Island, surrounded by her herds of sheep and goats, the film shows Rossellini at home in multiple worlds: a cosmopolitan European with a rich family history and an American pioneer with a twenty-eight-acre sustainable farm.
This punk-rock fairytale doubles as a portrait of Shoog McDaniel, a fat, queer, and disabled photographer working in and around northern Florida’s vast network of freshwater springs, the state’s source of precious drinking water. Bringing Shoog’s photography to life, the film immerses audiences in a world of fat beauty and liberation, one in which marginalized bodies—including bodies of water—are sacred.
Following the shooting of a documentary on the death of her daughter, a mother reflects on her own life and especially on the passing of time.
MNM is an exuberant portrait of chosen sisters Mermaid and Milan, two emerging runway divas in the drag ballroom community. Celebrating their joy, siblinghood, and unapologetic personas, the film explores the power and beauty of being nonbinary in a community that prizes gender “realness.”
A year of stormy weather and temporal rupture is recalled in fragments in this collage of seizure dreams, horses, long-distance conversations from bed, and loose reenactments from Marguerite Duras’s BAXTER, VERA BAXTER.
In the latest slacker anthem by underground auteur Joel Potrykus, recent college grads Patty (Kandy Kapelle) and Patti (Dani Parker) enter the workplace seeking gainful unemployment—only to find that gaming the system isn’t so easy. Surreal slapstick—think ketchup and mustard facials, shovelfuls of spaghetti, and severed limbs—meets anticapitalist allegory, brimming with queer, anarcho-punk spirit.
Between nuclear reactors and military curfews, fourteen-year-old Jani lives in a dystopian world oppressively devoid of empathy. Together, she and her slippery new friend Kiefer the talking catfish gear up to strike a surreal blow for freedom.
Blending personal interviews with dramatized genre recreations, THE SCRIPT explores the complicated relationship between trans and nonbinary communities and medical providers regarding gender-affirming care. With a playful approach to experimentation, the film invites its participants and its audience to examine the limits of language and the nature of performance in building safe and affirming futures.
LIVE FROM THE CLOUDS is a kaleidoscopic journey through the imaginations of the filmmaker’s family and their longings to find home.
In 1979, the Pacific Club was opened in a basement in La Défense, the business district of Paris. It was the first nightclub for Arabs from the suburbs—a parallel world of dance, sweat, young loves, and one-night utopias. Azedine, seventeen years old at the time, tells us the forgotten story of this club and of a generation who dreamed of integrating into French society but who soon came face-to-face with racism, the AIDS epidemic, and heroin.
A queer Black DJ finds a haven in New York’s underground club scene—until an old friend reenters his life and jeopardizes everything.
A timely, riveting documentary that unfurls with the energy and suspense of a thriller, BAD PRESS—winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression—offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of Indigenous politics. Imagine you lived in a world where your only reliable news source became government propaganda overnight. That’s exactly what happened to the citizens of the Muscogee Nation in 2018. Out of 574 federally recognized tribes, the Muscogee Nation was one of only five to establish a free and independent press—until the nation’s legislative branch abruptly repealed the landmark Free Press Act in advance of an election. Refusing to accept this flagrant act of oppression, one defiant journalist, Angel Ellis, charges headfirst into a historic battle against her tribal government’s censorship and corruption.
