WORLD PREMIERE Roberta Flack’s place in music history was assured when she became the first artist to win back-to-back Grammy Awards for Record of the Year with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (1973) and “Killing Me Softly with His Song” (1974). The depth and complexity of her lyrical and thematic choices, as […]
NYC PREMIERE Challenging the monolithic idea of immigrants and processes of immigration, Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah’s IN SEARCH OF BENGALI HARLEM relates the specific history of Bengali Muslim immigrants who arrived in mid-20th century Harlem, often marrying into Black American families. In this fascinating uncovering of New York (and American) history, in a post- […]
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 […]
NYC PREMIERE Jonas Mekas, godfather of avant-garde cinema, emigrated to New York in 1949 and over the next 70 years drove the rise of the independent film scene. Filmmaker KD Davison allows Mekas (who died in 2019) to tell much of his own story, as he creates his celebrated diary films and searches for those […]
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE Vince Anderson made his way to New York to enter the seminary, but his true calling, music, changed his life forever. With his band, The Love Choir, Vince’s now-legendary weekly show became an institution in the Brooklyn music scene. Through powerful revival-style performance and social activism, Vince’s intimate journey of faith and […]
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE Using the only known photo of his grandfather, filmmaker Sherman De Jesus illuminates the legacy of prolific photographer James Van Der Zee. Van Der Zee took historic and elegant portraits of the Black community during the Harlem Renaissance when images of Black joy were still rare. De Jesus’s single photograph unspools several proud […]
WORLD PREMIERE The style. The fashion. The moves. Saturday Night Fever left an indelible stamp on our cultural memory of the 1970s—and there was one man behind it all. Robert Stigwood, a producer impresario, best known for managing the Bee Gees, took the swagger of a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn disco, and brought it to the […]
US PREMIERE An experimental portrait of Ilhan Mimaroglu, the legendary Turkish pioneer of electronic music who passed away in 2012. Through a multilayered structure that mirrors Ilhan Mimaroglu’s music, the film also tells the story of his vibrant wife Güngör, who migrated to the USA from Turkey in the early 1960s and became an activist […]
US PREMIERE In 1973, four young Black Muslims held up a sporting goods store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The bungled robbery triggered a response of deadly force by a then mostly-white police force and the longest hostage siege in NYPD history. Director Stefan Forbes, producer Fab Five Freddy and their team reconstruct what took place through […]
NYC PREMIERE A cinéma vérité glimpse into the lives of an eccentric New York family, Charm Circle follows filmmaker Nira Burstein as she attempts to bridge the fractured relationships between herself, her two sisters, and her parents. Emotional and accomplished, especially in the way it weaves together decades-old home videos and contemporary footage, the film […]