Rough Cut Retreat

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Commuted

• Nailah Jefferson

In 1993, Danielle Metz was sentenced to triple life plus twenty years for nonviolent offenses associated with her abusive husband’s New Orleans drug organization. She was 26 with two small children - a 7-year-old Carl and 3-year-old Gleneisha. Danielle’s family would become one of thousands caught up in the US War on Drugs—a casualty of the system, another mother excessively sentenced for ‘boyfriend crimes,’ or offenses associated with their male partners.

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Concrete Land

• Asmahan Bkerat

The Al-Najars are a Bedouin family of three generations living in makeshift tents in one of Amman’s suburbs on a land they don’t own, they lived as Bedouins with their different animals on that land for the past 21 years.

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La Bonga

• Sebastian Pinzon Silva
• Co-director

Catapult Grantee

Twenty years ago, the village of La Bonga received a death threat that triggered the entire community to flee. Most haven’t returned since and over time their homes have disintegrated into the jungle. La Bonga now lives solely through stories. Only Maria de los Santos has tried to rebuild a life there, making the 3 hour walk back and forth on her own. Her deepest fears are that she will die away from La Bonga and that her children will never truly know where they’re from.

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The Territory

• Alex Pritz
• Carlos Rojas Felice

Catapult Grantee

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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Tuba Thieves

• Alison O’Daniel
• Zack Khalil (Ojibway)

From 2011-2013 there was a rash of tuba thefts that occurred from high schools across southern california. Reporters focused on who the thieves were and wondered why they did this. Alison is hard of hearing, so she was more interested in the ways the thefts changed the sounds of the bands and impacted the students. She decided she would make a film called The Tuba Thieves, but this is not a mystery that focuses on the thieves and there aren’t many tubas in the film. Instead The Tuba Thieves asks what it means to listen.

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Ascension

• Jessica Kingdon

This multi-faceted portrait takes us inside the growing behemoth that is the nominally communist yet hyper-capitalist People’s Republic of China – and questions what it actually means to live the so-called “Chinese Dream.

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Bitterbrush

• Emelie Mahdavian
• Su Kim

Catapult grantee

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

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North By Current

• Angelo Madsen Minax

A deep personal history of the complex relationships shared between mothers and their children, this film creatively reframes narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

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Razing Liberty Square

• Katja Esson
• Ann Bennett
• Hector David Rosales

Catapult grantee

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 In Between

• Robie Flores

This interwoven coming-of-age story chronicles the ordinary and extraordinary moments of growing up on the U.S./Mexico border.

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Feels Good Man

• Arthur Jones

Feels Good Man explores the current cultural moment and political climate through the lens of the Internet’s dankest meme.

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Mayor

• David Osit

Catapult grantee

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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Socks on Fire

Socks on Fire is a transgenerational docudrama couched in the familial battle between a homophobic aunt and drag-queen uncle over an Alabama grandmother’s estate.

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Unapologetic

• Ashley O'Shay

During the height of the Movement for Black Lives in Chicago, Unapologetic captures a community of millennial organizers confronting an administration complicit in state violence against its Black residents, through the intimate stories of two Black queer women, Janaé and Bella.

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What We Leave Behind

• Iliana Sosa

What We Leave Behind follows the director’s 89-year-old grandfather on his monthly 17-hour bus ride from Primo de Verdad (a rural town in northern Mexico) to El Paso, Texas and Albuquerque, New Mexico to reunite with family separated by borders.

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Anbessa

• Mo Scarpelli

Catapult grantee

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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Queen of the Battling Butterfly Brigade

• Daniel Hymanson

*Queen of the Battling Butterfly Brigade *is a film about aging, ecstasy, and finding the infinite in the infinitesimal.

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Scars

• Agnieszka Zwiefka

Catapult grantee

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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Stray

• Elizabeth Lo

Straysees the world through the eyes of three street dogs in Turkey, a nation in a profound state of flux. The film finds dignity in both the dogs and the marginalized people around them.

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Truth or Consequences

• Hannah Jayanti

Truth or Consequences is about the eponymous, small desert town in New Mexico banking on the world’s first commercial spaceport. This dusty no man’s land and its longtime residents are both eager for and weary of big changes.

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Amal

• Mohammed Siam

Catapult grantee

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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América

• Chase Whiteside & Erick Stoll

Américais about a dreamer who reunites with his brothers to take care of their ninety-three year old grandmother, América in southwest Mexico.

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Pigeon Kings

Pigeon Kingstracks a peculiar subculture of pigeon competitions in So. Central LA presided over by the godfather Keith London.

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Ringside

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

Catapult grantee

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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Voices of the Sea

• Kim Hopkins

Voices of the Seatakes us into the heart of a high- stakes family drama playing out in a remote Cuban fishing village.

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Ask the Sexpert

• Vaishali Sinha

Catapult grantee

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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Distant Constellation

• Shevaun Mizrahi

Premiere: True/False 2017

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For Ahkeem

• Jeffrey Levine & Landon Van Soest

Premiere: Berlinale 2017

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Quest

• Jonathan Olshefski

Premiere: Sundance 2017

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When God Sleeps

• Till Schauder
• Sara Nodjoumi

Catapult grantee

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.