La Laguna
Deep in the rainforests of southern Mexico, a pair of Mayan boys run free among the relics of their ancient civilization. In their village school, however, 12-year-old Yu’uk and 8-year-old José find themselves lost in a world they can’t fully comprehend, governed by a language they can’t fully grasp. In this breathtaking coming-of-age film, Emmy-nominated […]
Kate Plays Christine
In 1974, a Sarasota, Florida newscaster Christine Chubbuck shocked morning viewers and coworkers by pulling out a gun and shooting herself in the head on the air. Forty years later, in an attempt to investigate how history has remembered her, rising film star Kate Lyn Sheil agrees to portray the journalist in a film. In […]
In Pursuit of Silence
In a modern world where we are constantly (in)voluntarily surrounded by sound, silence is the ultimate experience of sound itself. That silence is also the ultimate avant-garde innovator was proven by the composer John Cage with his now classic, almost four-and-a-half-minute long piece of music, which consisted of nothing else. But do we ever have […]
I Am Not Your Negro
Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck (Moloch Tropical, Murder in Pacot) creates a stunning meditation on what it means to be Black in America. Built exclusively around Baldwin’s words, Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro delves into the complex legacy of three lives (and deaths) that permanently marked […]
How to Dance in Ohio
Finding a date, getting dressed up, and going dancing can be difficult for any teenager. For many living with autism, the idea of going to a spring formal and navigating social cues they don’t understand is even more intimidating and frightening. Alexandra Shiva’s How to Dance in Ohio follows a group of teenagers as they […]
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 […]
Heroin: Cape Cod, USA
Heroin: Cape Cod, USA is a cinema-verité look at the heroin epidemic currently sweeping America’s small towns and communities, focusing on eight young heroin addicts in idyllic Cape Cod, Mass. (HBO)
Happy Valley
Happy Valley centers on the people of State College, Pennsylvania and its conflicted reactions to the Penn State football scandal in the months following Jerry Sandusky’s arrest for child molestation. With interviews with those directly involved and die-hard fans alike, documentarian Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story, My Kid Could Paint That) captures the college town […]
Gleason
After former New Orleans Saints defensive back Steve Gleason receives a devastating diagnosis of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, he turns the camera on himself to provide his then-unborn son a sense of the father he may otherwise never know in this emotionally powerful portrait. Steve and his steadfast wife Michel use humor to cope […]
Fire at Sea
Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary observes Europe’s migrant crisis from the vantage point of a Mediterranean island where hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing war and poverty, have landed in recent decades. Rosi shows the harrowing work of rescue operations but devotes most of the film […]