Minding the Gap
Shirkers
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 […]
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, […]
Communion
Ola is only 14 but she is the head of a small dysfunctional family. She looks after her father who has lost touch with reality, just watches TV and drinks beer all day long and a 13-year old autistic brother, Nikodem. Ola‘s mother lives with another man and they have a baby together. But Ola […]
Brimstone and Glory
Through stunning cinematography, director Viktor Jakovleski takes us inside preparations for the annual pyrotechnic festival in Tultepec, Mexico. The job of making each exhibit bigger and better than before falls to local families who have been doing it for generations – often by trial and error. While the men strive for greater and greater glory, […]
Strong Island
The best documentary mysteries are rarely about the “who” and more often about the “why.” Strong Island, the debut film from Yance Ford, mines his intense personal history of growing up on Long Island in the ’80s, with a focus on the murder of his brother and the shockwaves it sent through their entire family. […]
When Two Worlds Collide
In this tense and immersive tour de force, audiences are taken directly into the line of fire between powerful, opposing Peruvian leaders who will stop at nothing to keep their respective goals intact. On the one side is President Alan Garcia, who, eager to enter the world stage, begins aggressively extracting oil, minerals, and gas […]
Tickled
When David Farrier came across social-media notice of a “competitive endurance tickling” event in Los Angeles, he thought he’d lit upon another amusingly weird topic for his lighthearted reports on New Zealand television. But the Donkey Lady, frog-eating survivalists and Justin Bieber were nothing compared with what the pop-culture journalist would uncover. In the captivating […]
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 […]