Menashe
Set within the New York Hasidic community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Menashe follows a kind but hapless grocery store clerk trying to maintain custody of his son Rieven after his wife, Lea, passes away. Since they live in a tradition-bound culture that requires a mother present in every home, Rieven is supposed to be adopted […]
When We Were Kings
Leon Gast’s now-classic documentary on the “Rumble in the Jungle”—Muhammad Ali’s triumphant Kinshasa fight against heavyweight champion George Foreman—took more than two decades to finish. By the time of completion, it had become a reflection on the responsibilities and demands of fame, a snapshot of a moment when black Americans were starting, partly thanks to […]
The Work
Set inside a single room in Folsom Prison, “The Work” follows three men from outside as they participate in a four-day group therapy retreat with level-four convicts. Over the four days, each man in the room takes his turn at delving deep into his past. The raw and revealing process that the incarcerated men undertake […]
Whose Streets?
An embedded account of protests in Ferguson, Missouri 2014, focusing the story on people who lived through them. Storyteller Sabaah Folayan, together with artist Damon Davis, turn our attention to the young local activists standing on the frontline. The filmmakers capture how a community’s collective indignation towards state-sanctioned racist violence erupts into a new civil […]
Unrest
Struck with a debilitating illness and unable even to sit in a wheelchair after a bout of high fever, filmmaker Jennifer Brea took to her camera to make sense of what she was going through. With many questions left unanswered by medical experts, Brea turns to the internet and finds not only that her condition […]
Ten Meter Tower
A ten meter diving tower. People who have never been up there before have to choose whether to jump or climb down. The situation itself highlights a dilemma: to weigh the instinctive fear of taking the step out against the humiliation of having to climb down. (Rooftop)
Taste of Cement
Taste of Cement is a portrait of workers in exile. Ziad Kalthoum creates an essay documentary of Syrian construction workers building new skyscrapers in Beirut on the ruins caused by the Lebanese civil war. At the same time their own houses are being bombed in Syria. A Curfew prohibits them from leaving the construction site […]
Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison
Located on an Appalachian mountaintop in Wise County, Va., Red Onion State Prison is a “supermax” facility built to house individual inmates in 8’x10’ solitary-confinement cells, 23 hours a day, for months, years and sometimes decades. Directed by Kristi Jacobson, Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison explores life on both sides of the bars, raising […]
Stranger in Paradise
‘Stranger in Paradise’ is a controversial role play in three acts about a controversial topic: the refugee crisis. The scene is a classroom in Sicily, the students are real refugees hoping to get asylum. In the role of a teacher is an actor who alternates between right-wing conservative, humanist and genuine ‘realpolitik’ approaches to whether […]
Step
In Step, her joyous, pulsating portrait of the “Lethal Ladies” step dancing team of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, director Amanda Lipitz documents the team’s high-stakes senior year of high school in inner-city Baltimore. As each girl strives individually to become the first in her family to attend college, they simultaneously work hard […]