WORLD PREMIERE After the death of her mother 18-year-old Sahar is left in charge of her poor, mentally disabled father in an isolated village in Iran. Sahar dreams of attending university and becoming a doctor, but extended family insist she play the role of caretaker unless her father remarries. This warm and intimate observational portrait […]
NYC PREMIERE Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso) crafts a portrait of the legendary composer Ennio Morricone. With a treasure trove of footage and interviews with directors, screenwriters, musicians, songwriters, critics and collaborators including Hans Zimmer, Bernardo Bertolucci, Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, and Bruce Springsteen, the film is an extraordinary tribute to the man and his legacy. […]
US PREMIERE Leonie is a rising teen influencer living on the outskirts of Berlin. As her fame grows, her parents see the economic opportunity of social media and become her managers. The pressure to create content and appease brands soon blurs the lines of their relationship, however, as it begins to dominate all of Leonie’s […]
US PREMIERE As a suicidal 16-year-old Marusya Syroechkovskaya falls in love with a humorous grunge kid named Kimi. Fueled by drugs and music, the inseparable couple films the euphoria, anxiety and misery of their precarious existence under the shadow of their oppressive government. Captured over 12 years, this raw, exuberant, and moving love story, provides […]
WORLD PREMIERE Jeanette Lee, aka Black Widow, dominated pool halls and competitions in the ‘90s and early 2000s. The Asian American icon brought style, power and skill to the billiards scene. With her recent cancer diagnosis, Lee recounts growing up in NYC, her storied career and the hidden challenges she faced. Filmmaker Ursula Liang (9-Man […]
WORLD PREMIERE In Santiago de Cuba, rival conga bands scour the sparse marketplace for materials to create show-stopping numbers for the annual Carnival competition. O’Reilly’s film follows young, innovative Lázaro, who is determined to beat “the Shark,” his older and more establishment-favored competitor. Tensions build and tempers flare as the government restrictions and scarcity of […]
NYC PREMIERE Incarcerated for ten years for dealing drugs, self-taught classical painter George Anthony Morton returns to his hometown of Kansas City to confront his damaged relationship with his mother, who has serious legal problems of her own. As George explores African influences on realism and the style of the Dutch Old Masters, filmmaker Rosa […]
NYC PREMIERE The challenges of getting accepted to top colleges for today’s American high schoolers are captured by two Sacramento teachers in a new original musical theater production that speaks to the present moment like nothing else. As schools from Silicon Valley to West Virginia to The Bronx’s Fordham High School for the Arts mount […]
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE An extraordinary and necessary essay film constructed entirely out of a vast archive of news footage from the ‘80s and ‘90s, OUR MOVIE (NUESTRA PELICULA) is a response to the violent history that imprinted itself on the director in her formative years in Colombia. Images of blood spatters, bullet holes, coffins, and Colombians […]
WORLD PREMIERE Using his camera as a “weapon against injustice,” Chinese-American photographer Corky Lee brought art and politics together through his decades-long documentation of the Asian American experience. The Queens, NY native captured all aspects of the AAPI experience, from Lunar New Year to street protests, from Pakistani Independence Day to Diwali and more, uplifting […]