Off the coast of South Korea’s Jeju Island, a community of fisherwomen known as haenyeo have been harvesting seafood for centuries. They are like mermaids, trained to free dive by holding their breath for up to two minutes. The Last of the Sea Women explores how their tradition is at risk due to generational changes […]
NYC PREMIERE In a smoke sauna in Estonia, as the hot-damp air hangs heavy, a group of Voro women gather. Their sweat, tears, and laughter mingle, and in the ethereal in betweenness of light and darkness, they find a way to shed the toil and shame that sticks to their bodies. Anna Hints’ debut feature […]
With the film’s first image of a lone elderly man trekking through an untouched snowy landscape, we sense that director Margreth Olin is taking us somewhere special. The man is her father Jørgen who shares his journey to stunning vistas of glaciers, waterfalls, and fjords. The film’s artistry has won the support of executive producers […]
When talented art director Ken August Meyer is diagnosed with systemic scleroderma, a rare life-threating disease, he struggles to cope with the disease’s ravages on his body, and the unanswerable question: why me? Receiving no answer from the silent universe, Meyer turns to a study of Paul Klee, a Swiss-German painter of the 1930s who […]
For a class assignment in 2009, film student Lea Glob begins documenting a young bohemian painter from France. The assignment blossoms into something deeper, that spans 13 years in the life of a talented artist and her circle, from Paris to New York and Los Angeles and back again. Lea finds in Apolonia Sokol a […]
NYC PREMIERE The Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma has a hard-hitting news outlet, Mvskoke Media, but reporter Angel Ellis has watched with concern as free press within her community becomes increasingly fragile. When she strives to expose corruption in her government, she runs headlong into censorship and threats, in a battle that has wide-ranging implications. – Jaie […]
Intertwining two nail-biting stories of dangerous escape attempts from North Korea, BEYOND UTOPIA shows us the reality of life in one of the most repressive totalitarian countries on Earth. Filmmaker Madeleine Gavin takes us on a harrowing journey, crosscutting between jaw-dropping cellphone video, and anguished cellphone audio, as she examines the high-stakes operation of an […]
When Russia escalated its war against Ukraine in 2022, Polish director Maciek Hamela bought a van and volunteered to drive Ukrainian refugees – mostly women and children – on their quest to escape. From his passenger seat we meet the vanloads of people forced to leave everything behind. Today, as the war stretches on, it’s […]
From the film’s opening monologue about a sex worker wrestling with a client over a gun, KOKOMO CITY is riveting. Filmmaker D. Smith makes a stellar debut as director, cinematographer, editor, and composer as she profiles four Black transgender sex workers in New York City and Atlanta. The women are raw and hilarious as they […]
Lawand is a deaf 5-year-old boy from Iraq whose extraordinary family goes to great lengths to move to England and enroll him at the Royal School for the Deaf Derby. There, he learns British Sign Language (BSL) and begins to blossom. But will the British government allow Lawand to stay and continue his education? Filmmaker […]