Ascension

Still image from Ascension

Mesmerizing in its imagery, Ascension is an impressionistic portrait of China’s growing class divide through staggering observations of labor, consumerism and wealth. The film is structured in three parts, ascending through the levels of the capitalist structure: workers running factory production, the middle class selling to aspirational consumers, and the elites reveling in a new […]

Flee

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FLEE tells the story of Amin Nawabi as he grapples with a painful secret he has kept hidden for 20 years, one that threatens to derail the life he has built for himself and his soon to be husband. Recounted mostly through animation to director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, he tells for the first time the […]

Faya Dayi

Still image from Faya Dayi

In her hypnotic documentary feature, Ethiopian-Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents. Though a deeply personal project—Beshir was forced to leave her hometown of Harar with her family as a teenager due to growing political strife—the film she returned to make about the city, its rural Oromo community […]

In the Same Breath

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Nanfu Wang’s fourth feature film meticulously documents the origin and spread of COVID-19 throughout 2020. With on-the-ground footage and stirring first-person interviews, the documentary is a scathing rebuke of mismanagement, misinformation, and failed leadership in the US and China. Weaving together a full picture of the collective trauma emanating from this global pandemic, the film […]

Procession

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In the American heartland, six survivors of childhood sexual abuse by Catholic priests become a makeshift family as they collaborate to create staged scenes depicting rituals of power in the church.

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Still image from Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary—part music film, part historical record created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion. Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival […]

Time

Still Image from the Documentary Time

A single moment in time can propel your life into new, unexpected directions. A single decision, a single chance, or a single mistake. We talk about time like we talk about movement, tumbling forwards, pregnant with possibility. In prison, the world races on without you, with your family and loved ones straddling parallel dimensions of […]

Notturno

Still Image from the Documentary Notturno

Gianfranco Rosi, whose last film, the Oscar-nominated documentary Fire at Sea, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, returns with an immersive work of nonfiction. Shot over the course of three years along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, Notturno (Nocturne) is a nighttime ramble through a region of the world […]

Gunda

Still Image from the Documentary Gunda

Experiential cinema in its purest form, GUNDA chronicles the unfiltered lives of a mother pig, a flock of chickens, and a herd of cows with masterful intimacy. Using stark, transcendent black and white cinematography and the farm’s ambient soundtrack, director Victor Kossakowsky invites the audience to slow down and experience life as his subjects do, […]

Dick Johnson is Dead

Still Image from the Documentary Dick Johnson is Dead

Every day we get older. We can’t stop time and beat death, but we can change the way we react. In the face of losing her father, Dick, to dementia, Kirsten Johnson takes her dad’s death into her own hands. Through a series of hilarious, heart-wrenching fake fatal accidents, action stunts, and macabre special effects, […]