Development Grant

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A Body to Live In

• Angelo Madsen Minax

A BODY TO LIVE IN is a film about the luminary, enigmatic, and complicated subcultural figure, Fakir Musafar (1930-2018).

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A Night at the Stone Burlesk

• Leigh Jurecka

A man’s investigation into the adult theater his eccentric grandparents secretly ran in Detroit reveals a colorful and complicated family history.

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Another World

• Tushar Madhav

An indigenous Indian artist’s suicide at a museum in Japan is mired in controversy for twenty years.

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Backside

• Raúl Paz Pastrana
• Gabriella Garcia-Pardo
• Patricia Alvarez Astacio

Backside intimately explores the daily life and expertise of the migrant workers behind the Kentucky Derby, the most famous horse race in the world.

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Chain of Rocks

• Damon Davis
• Chris Renteria

A Death Row inmate confesses to a crime after 30 years of maintaining his innocence. Now, an activist who once fought for his innocence is faced with the moral dilemma of whether the fight was in vain. CHAIN OF ROCKS is an animated feature-length documentary that explores the complexities of race and masculinity and how they skew our worldview and play a role in oppressive systems.

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John Who Lives in the Dark

• Jason Hanasik

John Who Lives in the Dark is a feature length live action and animated documentary film about John Kapellas, a man who has lived in almost complete darkness for the past fourteen years because of a rare medical condition. The film explores the wondrous world John has created in his dark apartment while examining how he is utilizing art and music to unwind the grip of his traumatic past.

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La Flaca

• Jessica Chermayeff and Ana Veselic
• Alba Jaramillo

A teenager’s flight from Honduras, through Central America suddenly snaps into focus when she gives birth on US soil — launching an epic coming-of-age tale of assimilation in America.

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Life After

• Reid Davenport
• Colleen Cassingham
• Jessica Devaney

LIFE AFTER investigates how disabled people have and continue to die under the guise of assisted suicide.

(image description: A middle-aged black man leads a group of protesters in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. He kneels with his crutches outspread and his mouth mid-yell, while holding a small American flag in one of his gloved-hands. A neon pink banner to the right reads, “NOT DEAD. We want to live!”)

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Nolandia

• Kinga Michalska
• Ashley Duong
• Katarina Soukup

Nolandia is a bold portrait of contemporary Poland from the perspective of a young generation reckoning with Poland’s role in the Holocaust. This feature-length documentary takes the viewer on a stranger-than-fiction journey where stories of first loves, summer jobs, and family vacations are interrupted by the traces of Holocaust sites.

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POSTMORTEM

• Marilyn Ness
• Beth Levison

POSTMORTEM is a documentary feature that is at once personal memoir, true crime and family history as director Marilyn Ness confronts a legacy of secrecy and trauma using the communal power of theater and film.

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The Last Nomads

• Biljana Tutorov
• Petar Glomazić

Gara, a shepherdess, and her daughter Nada, live off herding and cheesemaking in the wild highlands of Montenegro, when their pastureland is set to be occupied by an international military base. Against all odds, Gara stands up to defend the land of her ancestors and its untouched nature by challenging the ruling government and the patriarchal tradition. An intimate story unfolds against the backdrop of geopolitical stakes, unraveling complex layers bonding mother and daughter, people and their mountain, which they call “Momma”.

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The White Doctor

• Zippy Kimundu
• Ciaran Cassidy

An American missionary stands accused of pretending to be a doctor in Uganda and being responsible for the death of a number of children.

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TheyDream

• William D. Caballero

TheyDream is an animated documentary that creatively reimagines the hopes and dreams of the filmmaker’s Puerto Rican-American family, plagued by health, financial, and social problems. It features photo-realistic 3D modeled characters inhabiting miniature, hand-built environments, and is a sequel to the filmmaker’s 2010 autobiographical documentary, American Dreams Deferred.

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Untitled Residential School Documentary

• Julian Brave NoiseCat
• Emily Kassie

A search for the remains of students of a racially segregated, church-run and government-funded Indian residential school in Canada, takes a turn when the young Indigenous director behind the camera discovers his own story began in the very same place.

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Untitled Charles Burnett and Nicole Lucas Haimes

• Charles Burnett
• Nicole Lucas Haimes
• Alessandra Pasquino
• Lori Cheatle

Amidst an epidemic of the unwarranted use of deadly force by police and a nationwide call for reform, a notorious former officer comes forward for the first time to tell of the worst sins he committed in the name of fighting crime.

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Untitled Labor Union Documentary

• Brett Story
• Stephen Maing
• Samantha Curley
• Marianne Verrone

From the perspective of a single Amazon fulfillment center, Untitled Labor Union Documentary is an intimate portrait of current and former Amazon workers taking on one of the world’s most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.

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Untitled Marjolaine Grappe Film

• Marjolaine Grappe
• Amanda Pike

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Women Count

• Davina Pardo
• Alisa Payne

A school nurse in Texas is on a mission to count every woman killed by a man in the United States since 1950. Her campaign reveals staggering numbers, a painful history, and a woman haunted by forgotten victims.

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A Song for Summer and Winter

• Talal Derki, Sigrid Dyekjaer, Heba Khaled, and others

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A Still Small Voice

• Luke Lorentzen
• Kellen Quinn

An aspiring hospital chaplain begins a yearlong residency in spiritual care, only to discover that to successfully tend to her patients, she must look deep within herself.

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Against the Tide

• Sarvnik Kaur
• Koval Bhatia

A tale of love, brotherhood and resentments against the backdrop of an adoring sea, which is turning adverse under the menacing effects of an all-pervading calamity called climate change

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Agent of Happiness / Bruttó Nemzeti Boldogság

• Arun Bhattarai
• Dorottya Zurbó
• Noémi Veronika Szakonyi

Amar and Gunaraj are not only close friends, but also Happiness Agents who work together for the Happiness Ministry of Bhutan travelling door to door measuring people’s happiness level while searching for their own among the remote Himalayan mountains. On their mission, they encounter various people chasing their dreams. This satirical road movie through a mosaic of different stories discovers the real desires of a society behind a national identity created by the Happiness Ministry of Bhutan, a closed country for centuries.

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Alis

• Nicolás van Hemelryck
• Clare Weiskopf

How do you build a “new life” when you are born without opportunities? Can you change despair and project another destiny? Through a creative act, eight teenage girls who lived on the streets give life to a fictional classmate. As reality prevails and fiction fades, the innocent game becomes a descent into hell where their luminous faces guide us to the depths of the dark world they once inhabited. How to imagine a different life, break the cycle of violence and embrace the future?

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Black Mothers

• Débora Souza Silva
• David Felix Sutcliffe

Violence. Outrage. Impunity. Repeat. Black Mothers follows the journey of two women working to disrupt the cycle of racist police violence within our country’s judicial system. As one mother investigates her son’s attack by local police, the other channels her grief into organizing mothers to fight for justice.

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Black Snow

• Alina Simone
• Kirstine Barfod

When residents of a remote Siberian city discover an abandoned coal mine has caught fire beneath their neighborhood pushing toxic gas into their homes, they turn to homemaker-turned-journalist Natalia Zubkova for help.

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Coexistence My Ass

• Amber Fares
• Rachel Leah Jones

Can comedy solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Noam Shuster thinks it’s worth a try. An Israeli comedian who embodies the complex identity politics of the Middle East, Noam is on the verge of making it big in the US when COVID-19 sends her home - and straight to the hospital. As a BLM-inspired global movement takes shape, Noam realizes now is the time to focus her ambitions on home and convince her Jewish compatriots to examine their own racism - one joke at a time.

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Four Winters

• Aleksandra Maciuszek

A boy grows up in the corridors of an overcrowded tenement house in Old Havana - a neighborhood profoundly marked by the tensions of changing times. The film follows his experiences over a period of several years, creating an intimate and compelling portrait of adolescence, friendship, and the challenges of a difficult era.

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Happy Campers

• Amy Nicholson

The residents of a scrappy seasonal trailer park reveal the secrets to a rich life as market forces threaten their shabby Shangri-La.

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How to Build a Library

• Maia Lekow
• Christopher King

Two tenacious Kenyan women are transforming a dilapidated, junk-filled library in downtown Nairobi into a hub for the city’s citizens and creatives. But first they must wrangle with local government, raise several million dollars for the rebuild, and confront the ghosts of a problematic colonial history still trapped within the library walls.

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King Coal

• Elaine McMillion Sheldon
• Molly Born
• Curran Sheldon

An essay from a lost paradise weaved with surreal documentary vignettes explores how coal is imbued in identity. “King Coal” employs magical realism to discover Appalachia’s purpose and reveal an ongoing struggle for power.  A geological exploration of time, “King Coal” serves as a reminder of why change is painful.

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The Quiet World

• Jenni Olson

Lyrical, digressive, and innovative in scope and form, Jenni Olson’s latest 16mm essay film portrays the urban landscapes of California and Minnesota as it unfolds an ambitious cinematic treatise (and asserts a Luddite Manifesto). In her wide-ranging voiceover soliloquy she reflects on growing up queer and gender non-conforming in Minnesota, prompting a diverse array of digressions ranging from Prince to George Floyd to the history of French colonial brutality visited on the indigenous peoples of the state — to her Scandinavian-Minnesotan alcoholic family (astutely pondering the question: “How does anyone survive this landscape?”) The Quiet World transcends the conventional categories of cinema.

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Untitled Psychics Project

• Lana Wilson
• Kyle Martin

Untitled Psychics Project is a poetic exploration of the oldest and most popular form of therapy in human civilization: psychic readings. Set in New York City during a time of intense uncertainty, the film interweaves intimate sessions with psychics and clients from all different backgrounds, painting a kaleidoscopic portrait of collective anxiety, hope, and our fundamental desire to be seen.

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What Democracy Looks Like

• Sara Archambault
• Margo Guernsey

Once invisible to the general public, election administrators have become the central characters in an ongoing public debate about the integrity of our elections. With unprecedented access to its frontlines, What Democracy Looks Like (w.t.) follows the election process in one state - Rhode Island - and bears witness to the challenges, stresses, and strategic navigations of its elections workforce during one of the most significant votes in US history.

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What the Pier Gave Us

• Luna X Moya

A five part poetic film about immigrants who fish at a pier in New York and the immigrant experience. What the Pier Gave Us, lyrically captures the life of a pier in a year and through the seasons.

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All That Breathes

• Shaunak Sen

The darkening backdrop of Delhi’s apocalyptic air and escalating violence, two brothers devote their lives to protect one casualty of the turbulent times: the bird known as the Black Kite.

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Bitterbrush

• Emelie Mahdavian
• Su Kim

In the remote and rugged mountains of the American West, two young women work alone herding cattle.

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Confessions of a Good Samaritan

• Penny Lane
• Gabriel Sedgwick

Confessions of a Good Samaritan is an exploration of organ transplantation – past, present and most of all future – woven together through my own experience of becoming a living kidney donor. Part scientific drama and part humorous personal essay, Confessions of a Good Samaritan tells the story of how scientists made organ transplantation possible, and how scientists will make organ transplantation a thing of the past.

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Driver

• Nesa Azimi

Driver follows a dynamic community of women long-haul truck drivers. Threatened by routine sexual violence and bound by a system in which multibillion-dollar megacarriers and oppressive regulatory regimes conspire to leave the individual driver anonymous and disposable, one woman brings together a group of drivers to find strength, solidarity, and self-determination on the road.

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Forgotten Margins

• Mark Grieco

One of Latin America’s most important photojournalists heads out to Colombia’s isolated and volatile countryside, where he risks it all to reveal the fallout from the country’s historic peace accord.

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Hoodie

• Johnny Symons
• Kenyon Symons-Rogers
• Daniel Chein
• Jon Ayon Alonso

As told through 17 years of archival footage and dialogue, a Black teenager and his white father intimately navigate an unusual journey to adulthood.

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Off the Record

• Katy Chevigny
• Marilyn Ness

Weaving fictional elements with real-life scenes, enlivened by original music and grounded in a deep sense of place and time in America, OFF THE RECORD is an offbeat and funny character study of a brave songwriter carving a path to have her true voice heard.

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Phantom Parrot

• Kate Stonehill
• Steven Lake

An activist finds himself at the forefront of the battle for digital privacy when he is stopped, interrogated and prosecuted as a terrorist for refusing to share the passwords to his electronic devices during a border stop.

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Storm Lake

• Jerry Risius
• Beth Levison
• Katy Drake Bettner
• Evan Neff

Dark clouds hang over the vast cornfields of Storm Lake, Iowa, which has seen its fair share of change in the 40 years since Big Agriculture came to town. Farmers blow their life savings on new equipment they hope will keep their livelihoods intact. Migrant workers flock here—welcome and not—for their slice of the American Dream. State and county politicians make compromises to appease growing commercial interests. The people of Storm Lake confront a changing community as corporate, political and environmental forces threaten to overwhelm their already precarious existence.



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The Flag Makers

• Cynthia Wade
• Sharon Liese

The Flag Makers is a film about the unexpected people who make the American flag and invites us to ask the question: who is America and who is the American flag for?

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The Territory

• Alex Pritz
• Darren Aronofsky, Sigrid Dyekjaer, Will N. Miller, Lizzie Gillett, Gabriel Uchida

The Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people have seen their population dwindle and their culture threatened since coming into contact with non-Native Brazilians.

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Trouble Don't Last: Bruce Conner and the Soul Stirrers (working title)

• Sasha Waters Freyer
• Henry Rosenthal

In 1984, artist Bruce Conner filmed over forty hours of rehearsals, performances and interviews for a documentary on the legendary gospel group, the Soul Stirrers. When he died in 2008, the project was shelved. Until now.

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Untitled Nigerian Film

• Pietra Brettkelly

In a small town on the border between the Muslim north and the Christian south, nine brothers, sisters and cousins aged between 5 and 19 are writing their own narrative … and setting it in 2049. With a single mobile camera, little electricity and wild imaginations, THE CRITICS, as they call themselves, are escaping their lives where poverty and desperation have bred one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and creating unique sci-fi films.

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Untitled Stasi

• Jamie Coughlin
• Gabriel Silverman

East Germany built a surveillance state by weaponizing citizens’ private data. Thirty years later, a victim of the secret police investigates his file and confronts those who betrayed him.

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Vivien's Wild Ride

• Vivien Hillgrove
• Janet Cole
• Dawn Valadez

When veteran film editor Vivien Hillgrove discovers that she is losing her sight, she embarks on an unconventional and magical documentary memoir. Beginning in San Francisco in the notorious 1960s, Vivien uses her adventures as an editor to reflect upon 50 years of Bay Area filmmaking, intertwined with a personal odyssey as she conjures ghosts, discovers her artistic voice, and develops a sensory survival manual.

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A Bunch of Amateurs

• Kim Hopkins
• Margareta Szabo

The word “amateur” has an apologetic ring. But it comes from “amatore”, Latin for “lover”. Britain’s oldest amateur filmmaking club struggles to survive, as its members grow old amid flickering memories and hardships. In the northern industrial town of Bradford, England, a handful of diehard amateur filmmakers desperately cling to their dreams, and to each other, in this warm and funny look at shared artistic folly that speaks to the delusional dreamer in us all.

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After the Rain

• Fan Jian
• Richard Liang
• S. Leo Chiang
• Jean Tsien

After an earthquake razed a Chinese city to the ground, 3500 families try to replace the children they lost in order to move on with their lives. “After the Rain” follows two of these families haunted by their painful past as they build towards a brighter tomorrow.

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At the Ready

• Maisie Crow
• Hillary Pierce
• Abbie Perrault

Home to one of the region’s largest law enforcement education program, students at Horizon High School in El Paso train to become police officers and Border Patrol agents as they discover the realities of their dream jobs may be at odds with the truths and people they hold most dear.

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Beyond Utopia

• Madeleine Gavin
• Jana Edelbaum & Rachel Cohen
• Hannah Song
• Sue Terry

A visceral thriller centered around one woman’s harrowing escape from North Korea. The film will span two decades and reveal a country’s people who, even today, remain shrouded in mythology, mystery and repression.

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Colour of the Wind

• Claire Sanford

Colour of the Wind is a cinematic portrait of monstrous dust storms that rise from the deserts of Western China and the people that emerge from the dust along its path. Touching down in cities and towns from the deserts of western China to the shores of California, we meet characters confronted by the dust - from its most ominous form as an enormous, devastating storm in a drying desert to its tiniest incarnation as a speck studied under a microscope. More than a journalistic look at an environmental problem, the film is a lyrical journey that rides the winds of our changing planet, exploring what life is like under the dust along the way and the very relationship people have to the air they breathe.

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Fathom

• Drew Xanthopoulos
• Andrea Meditch
• Megan Gilbride

Fathom follows the world’s most immersed whale researchers to explore their groundbreaking work and how a life at sea among whales has shaped them personally.

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Ghost Wives

• Eva Weber

Walking the razor’s edge between true-crime documentary and stylish noir mystery, “Ghost Wives” tells the story of a Chinese journalist who investigates the case of a real-life serial killer - Song Tiantang, a 53-year old man, who killed six women to sell their bodies for ghost weddings, an ancient tradition in parts of rural China.

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Greener Pastures

• Andrew Cohn
• Sam Mirpoorian

Greener Pastures is an immersive dive into the lives of four American families, tracking the rise of suicide rates and growing mental health issues among Midwestern farmers.

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Joonam

• Sierra Urich

A deeply personal story following three generations of women, Joonam explores the tender and turbulent relationships between mother and daughter, Iran and America, and the immigrant experience as it ripples over time.

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Let the Little Light Shine

• Kevin Shaw
• Rachel Dickson

When a thriving, top-ranked African American elementary school is threatened to be replaced by a new high school favoring the community’s wealthier residents, parents, students and educators fight for the elementary school’s survival.

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Lift

• David Petersen
• Mary Recine

Through the eyes of four young and homeless ballet dancers, Lift shines a spotlight on the invisible story of homelessness in America.

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Mayor

• David Osit

Mayor is a real-life political saga about a search for identity behind the battle lines of a global conflict. With startling and unprecedented access, MAYOR follows a charismatic leader’s quixotic quest to build the city of the future in a land paralyzed by its past.

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Pray Away

• Kristine Stolakis
• Jessica Devaney

Pray Away tells the story of the history and continuation of the reparative therapy or “pray the gay away” movement.

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Razing Liberty Square

• Katja Esson
• Ann Bennett
• Hector David Rosales

Despite its eclectic mix of cultures, Miami is one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. Over the course of three years we will follow three female protagonists who are trying to save one of Miami’s last African American communities, historic ‘Liberty Square,’ best known as the setting for the Oscar winning film Moonlight. By challenging the city’s plan how to wipe out the oldest public housing projects in the US, they are fighting to defend their community against the onslaught of Climate Gentrification and cultural erasure by reclaiming its place in Miami’s past, present and future.

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The Grenada Invasion

• Greg Campbell
• Daniel Junge

The Grenada Invasion gives an insider’s perspective on a pivotal yet often overlooked moment in the Cold War — the United States’ military invasion of the island nation of Grenada and its lingering after effects.

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Tour Guide

• Kimi Takesue

TOUR GUIDE explores the legacy of the Cambodian genocide through the eyes of local tour guides as they lead foreigners to the Killing Fields and other “dark tourism” sites.

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Trans*Formed

• Lisa Leeman

In 1990, filmmaker Lisa Leeman intimately chronicled devout Christian Gary P’s gender transition into Gabi in the groundbreaking documentary Metamorphosis (Sundance Filmmakers’ Trophy). Twenty-five years later, Leeman revisits her subject and must confront thorny questions about the filmmaker/subject relationship and the responsibilities filmmakers have to the people whose lives they film.

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Us Kids

• Kim A. Snyder
• Maria Cuomo Cole
• Lori Cheatle

Determined to turn unfathomable tragedy into action, the teenage survivors of Parkland, Florida catalyze a powerful, unprecedented youth movement that spreads with lightning speed across the country, as a generation of mobilized youth take back democracy in this powerful coming-of-age story.

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Welcome to Chechnya

• David France
• Alice Henty, Askold Kurov, and Joy A. Tomchin

This searing investigative work shadows a group of activists risking unimaginable peril to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ pogrom raging in the repressive and closed Russian republic. Unfettered access and a remarkable approach to protecting anonymity exposes this under- reported atrocity–and an extraordinary group of people confronting evil.

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Without Arrows

• Jonathan Olshefski

Three generations of the Fiddler family from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe reservation experience both tenderness and tragedy over the course of nearly ten years.

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A Revolution on Canvas

• Sara Nodjoumi
• Till Schauder

When the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art exhibits paintings by the acclaimed artist Nicky Nodjoumi shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, religious hardliners ambush the work sparking a family journey filled with art, survival, estrangement and love. This hybrid political thriller and verité portrait dives into the mystery surrounding the “treasonous” paintings by the seminal painter who is not only one of the most celebrated Iranian modern artists, but also Sara’s father.

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A Thousand Cuts

• Ramona S. Diaz
• Leah Marino, Julie Goldman, Chris Clements, and Carolyn Hepburn

Nowhere is the worldwide erosion of democracy, fueled by social media disinformation campaigns, more starkly evident than in the authoritarian regime of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Journalist Maria Ressa places the tools of the free press—and her freedom—on the line in defense of truth and democracy.

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Flickering Lights

• Anirban Dutta
• Anupama Srinivasan

A village on the Indo-Myanmar border; 70 years after Indian independence, news floats in that electricity may arrive. Life flickers between hope and frustration, and humor is the only constant.

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Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni film

• Joe Brewster
• Michèle Stephenson
• Amilca Palmer

Through intimate vérité, archival footage, and visually innovative treatments of her poetry, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Film pushes the boundaries of biographical documentary film to reveal the enduring influence of one of America’s greatest living artists and social commentators.

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Hail Satan?

• Penny Lane
• Gabriel Sedgwick

A look at the intersection of religion and activism, tracing the rise of The Satanic Temple: only six years old and already one of the most controversial religious movements in American history. The Temple is calling for a Satanic revolution to save the nation’s soul. But are they for real?

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In the Bones

• Kelly Duane de la Vega
• Zandashé Brown
• Jessica Anthony

A lyrical documentary that explores the personal and political by interweaving the lives of 12 characters living in Mississippi during a legislative session in which equal pay for equal work and abortion rights are being decided. Although set in three distinct regions of Mississippi, IN THE BONES is a much broader exploration of our culture, an unsettling portrayal of America that lingers, shining a light on the weight women live under in this country and also the resilience expressed in everyday acts of survival.

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Instant Life

• Mark Becker
• Aaron Schock

Instant Life tells the story of Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut, the heiress to the Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys fortune, who is engaged in a David and Goliath legal battle with a large toy company to regain control over her husband’s iconic aquatic novelty.

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Land of Gold

• Jon Else
• Camille Servan-Schreiber

This intense short documentary explores the deep roots of modern American excess through the prism of a John Adams and Peter Sellars’s new opera about the California Gold Rush.

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Life Overtakes Me

• Kristine Samuelson
• John Haptas

Facing deportation, hundreds of refugee children in Sweden have become afflicted with Resignation Syndrome, withdrawing from the world into a comalike state, as if frozen, for months, or even years.

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Rebel Hearts

• Pedro Kos
• Kira Carstensen
• Shawnee Isaac-Smith
• Judy Korin

Rebel Hearts tells the story of an unlikely resistance group – Catholic nuns in Los Angeles who stood up to the patriarchy of the Church over fifty years ago, and continue to walk their talk today.

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Riotsville, USA

• Sierra Pettengill
• Sara Archambault
• Jamila Wignot
• Jonathan Rapoport

Riotsville, USA is an archival documentary about the US Army’s response to the riots of the late 1960s: take a military base, build a mock inner-city set, casts soldiers to play rioters, burn the place down, and film it all.

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Searching for Saraswati

• Shirley Abraham
• Amit Madheshiya

In India, the Haryana state government is in quest of holy river Saraswati, believed to have been lost 4,000 years ago and since found only in myth. 

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Simple as Water

• Megan Mylan
• Robin Hessman
• Alaá Hassan

Portraits of Syrian families displaced and fractured by war create a meditation on parental love that is both urgent and timeless.

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Sunset and the Mockingbird

• Jyllian Gunther
• Kali Holloway
• Sarit Work

Sunset and the Mockingbird is the love story of jazz legend Junior Mance and his wife, manager and soulmate Gloria Mance. As he loses his identity to dementia, she must reckon with her own.

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The Liegnitz Plot

• Dan Sturman
• Dylan Nelson
• Gary Gilbert

The Liegnitz Plot investigates a story dating back to the Holocaust: that a mysterious Nazi stole priceless stamp collections from concentration camp victims and then buried the stolen stamps somewhere in Poland. The filmmakers set out to confirm the story, recover the stamps, and return them to their rightful owners.

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The Rashomon Effect

• Lyric R. Cabral
• Jessica Devaney

What happened when unarmed Black teen Michael Brown was fatally shot by White police officer Darren Wilson?

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Through the Night

• Loira Limbal
• Jameka Autry

In today’s economy, many Americans work longer hours across multiple jobs to make ends meet. The result is an unexpected phenomenon: the flourishing of 24-hour daycare centers.

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Untitled Ghost Town Murder Film

• Keven McAlester

A mystery that forces viewers to examine their accepted views of crime, punishment, and justice—and whether these views shift from absolute to relative when a system designed to protect us all protects the seemingly wrong person.

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When We Were Bullies

• Jay Rosenblatt

The Ants Are Still Burning will explore a grade school event from 50 years ago and explore the nature of trauma, memory, and shame.

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American Factory

• Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert

In 2014, a Chinese billionaire opened a Fuyao factory in a shuttered General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio. For thousands of locals, the arrival of this multinational car-glass manufacturer meant regaining their jobs—and dignity—after the recession left them high and dry. American Factory takes us inside the facility to observe what happens when workers from profoundly different cultures collide.

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American Saint

• Allison Berg

American Saint is the extraordinary story of Fulton Sheen, an Emmy-award winning Catholic Bishop on the verge of becoming the first American-born man to become a saint. 

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Anbessa

• Mo Scarpelli

A curious boy living at the very edge of the modern world seeks his place within it, exposing the hope, tension and a hidden fear of ‘progress’ engulfing his country.

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Crip Camp

• Jim LeBrecht
• Nicole Newnham
• Sara Bolder

Down the road from Woodstock in the early 1970s, a revolution blossomed in a ramshackle summer camp for disabled teenagers, transforming their young lives and igniting a landmark movement.

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For the Love of Rutland

• Jennifer Maytorena Taylor

As her small, blue-collar city struggles to emerge from the opioid epidemic and gets caught up in battles over change, identity, and self-mythology, FOR THE LOVE OF RUTLAND closely follows the story of Stacie Griffin – a remarkable and resilient woman who lives in the toughest neighborhood of the heroin-battered town of Rutland, Vermont.

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Midnight Family

• Luke Lorentzen
• Kellen Quinn

The Ochoa family runs a for-profit ambulance in Mexico City, competing with other EMTs for patients in need of urgent help. While making a living in this cutthroat industry, they struggle to keep their financial needs from jeopardizing the people in their care. When a crackdown by corrupt police forces the family to try legitimizing their operation, their desperate financial situation pushes them into ethically dubious practices even as they continue providing essential emergency medical services.

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Our Time Machine

• Yang Su
• S. Leo Chiang

When artist Maleonn realizes that his father suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, he creates “Papa’s Time Machine,” a magical, autobiographical stage performance featuring life-size mechanical puppets. Through the production of this play, the two men confront their mortality before time runs out and memories are lost forever.

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Punch 9 for Harold Washington

• Joe Winston

Punch 9 for Harold Washington tells, for the first time, the story of how Harold Washington, by becoming Chicago’s first Black mayor, changed American politics. The coalition he forged transformed the local and national Democratic Party and helped launch the career of Barack Obama.

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Scars

• Agnieszka Zwiefka

Vetrichelvi is a former LTTE terrorist, a handicapped victim of war and a writer. Her name means Mrs. Victory and she is about to go on a mission - to find her former comrades and write a book about untold stories of civil war in Sri Lanka, even if it means risking her life.

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The Feeling of Being Watched

• Assia Boundaoui
• Jessica Devaney

Journalist Assia Boundaoui sets out to investigate long-brewing rumors that her quiet, predominantly Arab-American neighborhood was being monitored by the FBI — and in the process, she exposes a surveillance program on a scale no one could have imagined.

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The Oldest Person in the World

• Sam Green

The Oldest Person in the World weaves together portraits of the people who hold the Guinness Record for being the oldest person alive, serving as a meditation on time and the poignancy of being alive.

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The Quiet Zone

• Katie Dellamaggiore

Heavenly and earthly questions abound in the radio-silent town of Green Bank, West Virginia; while astronomers search for life beyond Earth, local residents contemplate their sublime connection to technology.

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Those That Breathe

• Kitra Cahana
• Ed Ou
• Becky Korman

Set in the Canadian Arctic, against the threat of climate change, Those That Breathe is the powerful and intimate story of an Inuit community struggling to hold on to their culture and their land.

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Time for Ilhan

• Norah Shapiro
• Jennifer Steinman Sternin

In November 2016, Ilhan Omar made history as the first Somali Muslim woman to be elected for state office in America. Time for Ilhan offers an inspiring look at her campaign and the changing face of American politics.

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When We Walk

• Jason DaSilva

If you were an independent filmmaker and could no longer independently create—no longer see well, edit, or use the camera, but could still talk—how would you reinvent your creative identity as you battled against an ever-shortening timeline? I am living in the interiority.

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17 Blocks

• Davy Rothbart

17 Blocks follows three siblings in inner-city Washington. D.C. over the course of 15 years, focusing on the youngest child, Emmanuel Durant, Jr., from age 9 to his tragic death as a victim of gun violence at age 19. It’s a raw, intimate, and deeply personal documentary that illuminates an ongoing crisis in American cities through one family’s heartbreaking, courageous, and ultimately redemptive story.

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All We've Lost

• Preston Randolph

An aging mother, despite continuous denial, battles the State of Montana to free her son from prison while discovering their story has inspired historic change.

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Amal

• Mohammed Siam

Post adolescence meets post revolution. When violence became a language in the Egyptian streets, anger became Amal’s destiny and destination.

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Charm City

• Marilyn Ness
• Katy Chevigny

Charm City takes viewers beyond the television headlines and over the front lines of violence in Baltimore; in doing so, it reveals the grit and compassion of the city’s citizens, police, and government officials trying to reclaim their future.

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City of the Sun

• Rati Oneli

The lives, dreams and destinies of several extraordinary characters unfold amid the ruins of a post­ apocalyptic mining town. Zurab, a music teacher is on a quest to destroy gigantic buildings to keep his sanity and provide for his family; Archil, a miner­-turned­-actor has to make a life­altering choice between his dream and his day job; and two malnourished champion athletes have to overcome the odds and win the next Olympic games to survive.

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Eat Your Catfish

• Adam Isenberg
• Noah Arjomand

A fearless portrait of the simmering anger and buried guilt of a New York family caring for the mother, Kathryn, who is paralyzed and terminally ill.

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Elephant Path / Njaia Njoku

• Todd McGrain
• Scott Anger

Against a backdrop of luminous natural beauty, pierced by callous human violence, an American biologist, a Bayaka tracker, a Bantu eco-guard, and an Israeli security contractor form an unlikely alliance. As their lives converge on the paths of the last wild herd of forest elephants in the Central African Republic, each will be tested by the realities of war and the limits of hope for the majestic animals they have committed their lives to study and protect.

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Extremis

• Dan Krauss

Extremis plunges viewers into the harrowing decision-making process faced by physicians, patients and families in urgent end-of-life cases, offering a uniquely intimate look at the intersection of science, faith, and humanity.

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Freedom to Marry

• Eddie Rosenstein

An intimate and epic film that pulls back the curtain to reveal the masterminds of one of the greatest civil rights movements of our time as they embark on their final, thrilling battle to win same sex marriage for the entire United States.

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Pleistocene Park

• Luke Griswold-Tergis

An eccentric Russian scientists’ quixotic quest to recreate a vanished ice age ecosystem and save the world from a catastrophic global warming feedback loop.

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The Oslo Diaries

• Mor Loushy
• Daniel Sivan
• Hilla Medalia

The Oslo Diaries provides new insights as why peace has not been achieved in the longest ongoing conflict of our times. Personal diaries written by Israeli and Palestinian participants of the secret peace talks and archival footage create a dramatic journey into the backstage of Oslo accord.

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The Raft

• Marcus Lindeen
• Erik Gandini
• Julie Goldman

In 1973 five men and six women went on a dramatic raft expedition across the Atlantic Ocean for 101 days to study human aggression and sexuality. This documentary reunites them forty years later to reveal what actually happened during one of history’s strangest group experiments.

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Wild, Wild Country

• Chapman Way
• Maclain Way
• Julie Lembi

On a quiet day in 1981, disciples of an obscenely wealthy religious guru named Bhagwan Rajneesh suddenly appear in the small, conservative Oregon town of Antelope, dressed in all red and with portraits of their leader hanging from their necks. This, of course, makes the townsfolk uneasy.

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Atomic Homefront

• Rebecca Cammisa

Atomic Homefront reveals St. Louis, Missouri’s past as a uranium processing center for the atomic bomb and the governmental and corporate negligence that led to the illegal dumping of Manhattan film radioactive waste throughout North County neighborhoods. The film is a case study of how citizens are confronting state and federal agencies to uncover the truth about the extent of the contamination and are fighting to keep their families safe.

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Cameraperson

• Kirsten Johnson
• Mariyln Ness

Exposing her role behind the camera, Johnson reaches into the vast trove of footage she has shot over decades around the world. What emerges is a visually bold memoir and a revelatory interrogation of the power of the camera.

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Dream Away

• Marouan Omara
• Johanna Domke

Dream Away follows a generation of young Egyptians to the surreal tourist hub Sharm El Sheikh on their search for a new identity.

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Left on Purpose

• Justin Schein

Left on Purpose is a documentary film about the friendship between an aging anti-war activist who has decided that his last political act will be to take his own life and the filmmaker struggling to tell his story.

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Night School

• Andrew Cohn

Indianapolis has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the country. For adult learners Greg, Melissa and Shynika, finally earning their high school diplomas could be a life-changing achievement.

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Once Upon a Time in Venezuela

• Anabel Rodriguez
• Sepp R. Brudermann

Swimming in oil, sinking in violence, one village, one country.

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Pieces of a Man - Gil Scott-Heron Documentary

• Orlando Bagwell

As the 1960s fade, Gil Scott Heron emerges as a voice of truth through poetry and song. His art is liberating for many, yet, he can’t free himself from a life at odds with an enduring legacy.

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Ringside

• Andre Hörmann
• Ingmar Trost
• Julie Goldman
• Carolyn Hepburn
• Vincent Assmann
• Tom Bergmann
• Christopher Clements

RINGSIDE looks at the dangerous, volatile world of Chicago’s South Side from the perspective of two remarkably gifted young boxers and the fathers who train them; as one begins a rising career in the ring, the other serves an eight-year-prison sentence for criminal trespass and burglary.

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Survivors

• Arthur Pratt
• Banker White
• Anna Fitch
• Lansana Mansaray

Through the eyes of Sierra Leonean filmmakers, Survivors presents a heart-connected portrait of their country during the Ebola outbreak, exposing the complexity of the epidemic and the socio-political turmoil that lies in its wake.

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Tashi and the Monk

• Andrew Hinton
• Johnny Burke

Tashi and the Monk is the story of a remarkable community in the Himalayas created to heal trauma and give its young members the joys of childhood.

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The First Angry Man

• Jason Cohn
• Camille Servan-Schreiber

The First Angry Man tells the story of Howard Jarvis and his landmark California ballot measure, Proposition 13, which launched a “permanent” national tax revolt and fundamentally altered the course of American politics to the current day.

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The Reagan Show

• Pacho Velez
• Sierra Pettengill

The President struggles to win the Cold War. His weapon of choice is television.

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Unlocking the Cage

• Chris Hegedus
• D.A. Pennebaker

Unlocking the Cage follows attorney Steve Wise as he mounts what is perhaps the most revolutionary lawsuit for animal rights: the first lawsuits demanding legal personhood for four chimpanzees in New York State.

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Vegas Baby

• Amanda Micheli

Rolling the dice for a family.

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Weiner

• Josh Kriegman
• Elyse Steinberg

With unrestricted access to Anthony Weiner’s New York City mayoral campaign, this film reveals the human story behind the scenes of a high-profile political scandal as it unfolds, and offers an unfiltered look at how much today’s politics is driven by an appetite for spectacle. 

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When God Sleeps

• Till Schauder
• Sara Nodjoumi

When God Sleeps depicts the journey of Iranian musician Shahin Najafi who is forced into hiding after hardline clerics issue a fatwa for his death, incensed by a rap song that focuses on the oppression of women, sexism and human rights abuses.

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Wildland

• Alex Jablonski
• Kahlil Hudson

The film follows three young men – all part of a single wildland firefighting crew – as they wrestle with loyalty, fear, courage, love and defeat; all in the face of nature’s most elemental force.

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Ask the Sexpert

• Vaishali Sinha

A long time sex advice columnist gains popularity against the backdrop of a ban on comprehensive sex education in schools in several states in India.

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Cold Rush

• May Abdalla
• Elhum Shakerifar

Cold Rush is set at the front line of the fast changing Arctic. As the UN decides how to divide up state sovereignty into the High North we travel into the lives of American entrepreneurs, Danish scientists and Russian priests who are investing in the thawing ice and the young island man who is trying to stop them. A timely documentary about the race for the last frontier.

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Grit

• Cynthia Wade
• Sasha Friedlander

Mudflow chronicles a community’s response to one of the word’s largest man-made environmental disasters: a giant unstoppable mud volcano in Indonesia that has displaced 50,000 people.

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I Carry You With Me

• Heidi Ewing

An epic love story spanning decades is sparked by a chance encounter between two men in provincial Mexico. Based on a true story, ambition and societal pressure propel an aspiring chef to leave his soulmate and make the treacherous journey to New York, where life will never be the same.

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Motherland

• Ramona Diaz

Motherland takes us into the heart of the planet’s busiest maternity hospital in one of the world’s poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. It tells the story of the devastating toll on poor women as the country struggles with reproductive health policy and the politics of conservative Catholic ideology, exposing the harsh consequences of reproductive injustice.

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The Force

• Peter Nicks

This is a film about police power and restraint, unfolding deep inside the famously troubled Oakland Police Department. We observe in intimate detail the rare perspective of beleaguered officers who are often viewed as oppressors in the community they serve, even as they and their young chief struggle to rebuild trust in the face of mass protests, budget cuts, and more violent crimes per officer than any city in America.

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Trapped

• Dawn Porter
• Marilyn Ness

U.S. abortion clinics are fighting to remain open. Since 2010, hundreds of laws regulating abortion clinics have been passed by conservative state legislatures, particularly in the South.

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Bei Bei

• Rose Rosenblatt and Marion Lipschutz

State vs. Shuai, a behind the scenes documentary, weaves an intimate personal narrative with the dramatic intensity of a high stakes criminal case, raising questions about “personhood laws”, immigrants’ rights, and the criminal justice system’s treatment of the mentally ill.

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E-TEAM

• Ross Kauffman
• Katy Chevigny
• Marilyn Ness

The E-Team follows the intense and courageous work of three intrepid human rights workers on the frontlines of identifying international human rights abuses. Dramatic and crucial, Human Rights Watch’s Emergency Team work is custom-made for a compelling documentary film with a global perspective.

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Indian Point

• Ivy Meeropol
• Julie Goldman

Indian Point looks at nuclear power by going inside the core activities at an aging nuclear plant and posing the simple question: is this safe?

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Nothing Lasts Forever

• Jason Kohn

The DeBeers diamond cartel cornered the market on eternal love with “A diamond is forever,” but now a wave of undetectable synthetic diamonds has flooded global gem markets, threatening to expose the artifice that props up a multi-billion dollar industry.

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Remote Area Medical

• Jeff Reichert
• Farihah Zaman

Over one weekend in Bristol, TN, thousands of uninsured line up to receive, for free, the healthcare they desperately need.

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Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison

• Kristi Jacobson

Solitary is a daring exploration of the lives of inmates and corrections officers in one of America’s most notorious supermax prisons, built to hold inmates in 8x10 cells, 23-hours-a-day, for months, years and sometimes decades.

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The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52

• Joshua Zeman
• Adrian Grenier
• Lucy Sumner

An emotional quest to find the elusive 52-Hertz Whale. Scientists believe this whale has spent its life in complete solitude, calling out at 52 Hz – a frequency that no other whale can hear – and never once receiving a response.

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The Overnighters

• Jesse Moss

Desperate, broken men chase their dreams and run from their demons in the North Dakota oil fields. A local Pastor risks everything to help them.

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Tig

• Ashley York
• Kristina Goolsby

Comedian Tig Notaro announced her cancer diagnosis at what became a legendary stand-up set in 2012. Follow her search for humor amid devastating news.

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Anita: Speaking Truth to Power

• Freida Mock

The story is about a game changer who Spoke Truth to Power. This film is about the life and times of Anita Hill whose graphic, sensational testimony about sexual harassment in the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Supreme Court confirmation Hearings altered the trajectory of her life and our country’s policies on sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, on college campuses and the military.

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Art and Craft

• Jennifer Grausman
• Sam Cullman
• Mark Becker

When one of the most prolific art forgers in US history is finally exposed, he must confront the legacy of his 30-year con.

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One Bullet Afghanistan

• Carol Dysinger

Part two of Dysinger’s Nation Building trilogy, One Bullet, Afghanistan concerns the rule of law in a time of war.

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The Ballad of Fred Hersch

• Charlotte Lagarde
• Carrie Lozano

The Ballad of Fred Hersch is an intimate portrait of one of today’s foremost jazz pianists and his unlikely musical journey as an AIDS and coma survivor.

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The Kill Team

• Dan Krauss

When a young soldier attempts to alert the military to war crimes his fellow soldiers have committed, his pleas go unheeded. Weeks later, he makes a decision that will change his life forever.

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The Last Season

• Sara Dosa

Told through the personal stories of two former soldiers turned wild mushroom hunters, The Last Season is a journey into the woods, into the memory of war and survival, telling a story of family from an unexpected place.

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The Path

• Senain Kheshgi

The former barber to Prime Minister of Pakistan singlehandedly aids women and children who have escaped from sexual trafficking, slavery and threats of “honor killing.”

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The Silence of Others

• Almudena Carracedo
• Robert Bahar

For the first time in history, in a groundbreaking international lawsuit, survivors of crimes of Spain’s 40-year dictatorship seek justice and attempt to prosecute perpetrators.

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Always in Season

• Jacqueline Olive
• Jessica Devaney

When 17-year-old Lennon Lacy is found hanging from a swing set in rural North Carolina in 2014, his mother’s search for justice and reconciliation begins while the trauma of more than a century of lynching African Americans bleeds into the present.

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Call Me Kuchu

• Malika Zouhali-Worrall

In Uganda, a new bill threatens to make homosexuality punishable by death. David Kato, Uganda’s first openly gay man, and retired Anglican Bishop Christopher Senyonjo work against the clock to defeat state-sanctioned homophobia while combatting vicious persecution in their daily lives. But no one is prepared for the brutal murder that shakes their movement to its core and sends shock waves around the world.

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Mosquito

• Hannah Rosenzweig
• Jesse Erica Epstein

A trio of Hungarian astrophysicists, who normally search the universe for black holes, try to stop the world’s most dangerous animal – with lasers. Mosquito follows these and other quirky, passionate mosquito warriors trying to win an age-old battle against man’s deadliest foe.

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Rabbi

• Sandi DuBowski

Rabbi follows 13 years in the dramatic life of Amichai Lau-Lavie, a 21st century rabbi who has achieved renown in reaching today’s skeptical, secular, digital generation, reimagining the role of spirituality in our lives, and showing how religion, when radically reinvented for the modern world, can be a powerful force for human rights and global tolerance. 

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The Americans

• Carl Deal
• Tia Lessin

The Americans tells the stories of families and communities caught in the immigrant detention and deportation dragnet – collateral damage in a political battle where politicians and media pundits exploit the worst fears and racism of voters.

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The Genius of Marian

• Banker White
• Anna Fitch

The Genius of Marian follows Pam White in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease as her son, the filmmaker, documents her struggles to retain a sense of self.