The Rider
The hardscrabble economy of America’s rodeo country, where, for some, riding and winning is the only source of pleasure and income, is depicted with exceptional compassion and truth by a filmmaker who is in no way an insider: Zhao was born in Beijing and educated at Mount Holyoke and NYU. Set on the Pine Ridge […]
You Have No Idea How Much I Love You
Relationships with the people you love most are often the most complicated. This is the problem Hania and her mother Ewa face during their sessions with a psychotherapist, filmed intimately and with the utmost respect by director Pawel Lozinski. The camera always focuses on one person at a time, revealing every emotion hidden behind the […]
The Florida Project
Sean Baker supplants the West Hollywood setting of his 2015 festival hit TANGERINE with the cheap motels laying in the shadow of a certain Orlando mouse-themed amusement park, in another free-flowing and sincere look at those living in the shadows of the cities they call home. Living in one of the rooms are 6-year-old Moonee […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Fits
Eleven-year-old Toni is a tomboy who is drawn from boxing with her brother to a tight-knit dance team in Cincinnati’s West End. Enamored by the power and confidence of this strong community of girls, Toni eagerly absorbs routines, masters drills, and even pierces her own ears to fit in. When a mysterious outbreak of fainting […]
Mountains May Depart
At once an intimate drama and a decades-spanning epic that leaps from the recent past to the present to the speculative near-future, the new film from Chinese master Jia Zhang-ke is an intensely moving study of how China’s economic boom—and the culture of materialism it has spawned—has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love. […]
Neon Bull
Strange and erotic, with an unexpected view of gender roles, this film is set in the macho world of bull wrangling yet its male protagonist is interested in fashion and designs dresses. In dusty farmland with scattered signs of heavy industrialization in Northeast Brazil, a cowhand, Iremar, nurtures his passion on the side. Drawing clothes […]
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 […]
All These Sleepless Nights
After a breakup with his girlfriend, Kris sets off with his friend Michal in search of new experiences. Stylishly capturing the romantic yearning, drunken debating, aimless wandering and self-indulgent philosophizing of youth, Michal Marczak’s highly constructed documentary/fiction hybrid is a moody collage of a year’s journey through house parties, parks and clubs of Warsaw. (DokuFest)