Feels Good Man
In 2005, artist Matt Furie posted a cartoon strip to Myspace starring four stoner friends—Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe. Inspired by impish humor and boyhood mischief, Furie’s story about a little frog who likes to pee-pee with his pants down became wildly popular on new social media platforms such as 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter. As […]
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
An inspired, lyrical and intimate portrait of a place and its people, award-winning photographer Ross’s directorial debut follows two young African American men from rural Alabama over the course of five years. Capturing the mundane and monumental in the center of the historic Black Belt region, HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING offers a new […]
Hooligan Sparrow
Intrepid young filmmaker, Nanfu Wang, follows activist “Hooligan Sparrow,” and her band of colleagues to China’s Hainan Province to protest the case of six elementary school girls who were sexually abused by their principal. Marked as enemies of the state, the activists are under constant government surveillance and face interrogation, harassment, and imprisonment. Through smuggled […]
Jacinta
An astonishing record of the hereditary nature of trauma, Jacinta follows the lives of three generations of women struggling to find stability amid years of dependency. Jacinta leaves the Maine Correctional Center, leaving her mother behind to complete her own sentence, and attempts to rebuild her relationship with Caylynn, her preternaturally wise pre-teen daughter who […]
Jawline
Austyn Tester—handsome and 16—feels oppressed by the confines of life in his small hometown in Tennessee. But in the online-streaming world, Austyn is adored by thousands of young girls, all eager for his “likes,” his attention, or just to hear him say their name. For Austyn and many like him, a big enough fan base […]
Machines
An inferno of sound and images from an Indian textile factory’s dark heart in the blind spot of globalization. The machines are rumbling like furious, choleric giants in an inferno of noise, chemicals and work routines. The Indian director Rahul Jain leads us right into the dark heart of a textile factory in a film, […]
Mavis!
“I’ve been singing for more than 60 years and I have no intention of retiring,” 75-year-old Mavis Staples tells us at the beginning of this documentary. The Chicago-born singer broke through at a young age when she and her sisters and brother formed a gospel group called The Staple Singers, managed and led by their […]
Minding the Gap
Mr. Soul!
From 1968 to 1973, the public-television variety show SOUL!, guided by the enigmatic producer and host Ellis Haizlip, offered an unfiltered, uncompromising celebration of black literature, poetry, music, and politics—voices that had few other options for national exposure, and, as a result, found the program an improbable place to call home. With participants’ recollections and […]
Rat Film
Rats, the most under-loved rodents on the planet, live in the shadows, mostly confined to cages, sewers, and trash cans. What does the ghettoization of rats tell us about our own species? In his feature-film debut, director Theo Anthony creates a sweeping map of Baltimore through this denigrated animal. An eerie, futuristic narrator guides you […]