Rough Cut Retreat

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Chain of Rocks

• Damon Davis

“Chain of Rocks” is a first-of-its-kind fully stop-motion animation documentary feature film, generated with the help of AI initiatives and tools. It is an intimate story about the friendship between filmmaker Damon Davis and death row inmate Reginald Clemons, that questions topics of doubt, guilt, accountability, masculinity, and ultimately the complexity of the human experience.

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Good Kids

• Daniel Yonathan
• Ike Rofé

GOOD KIDS is a coming-of-age documentary set in Helena, Montana that follows the mayhem of a group of high school seniors. Jake, a seventeen-year-old shifty entrepreneur, opens a brick-and-mortar skate shop which becomes a haven as the kids face financial pressure, broken homes, and fast-approaching adulthood.

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Sarkash

• Sophie Schrago
• Isidore Bethel

The first woman to found an Islamic-law court in Mumbai, Judge Khatoon welcomes couples in crisis, counsels them, and sometimes guides their separation.

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TheyDream

• William D. Caballero
• Erin Ploss-Campoamor

After an unexpected death in the family, a Puerto Rican-American filmmaker teams up with his grieving mother, collaborating alongside her to tell stories of familial love and loss, in this project that combines innovative forms of animation and miniature sets.

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This is Me Loving You

• Julia Hunter
• Troy Lewis

Sydney, a charismatic heroin user, moves into a Chicago recovery home and befriends Julia, an alcoholic filmmaker. When Sydney gets pregnant and returns home to a chaotic relationship, both women re-enter a world of trauma and addiction where they must choose between protecting those they love and saving themselves.

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Natchez

• Suzannah Herbert
• Pablo Proenza

The haunting Natchez is a potent choral portrait of a town reliant on its antebellum past to survive, and how its idiosyncratic citizens navigate — and reflect on — their town’s history and memory. With an observant lens, Herbert foregrounds a dynamic array of distinctive residents — from the outspoken and thoughtful “Rev”, a preacher who provides comprehensive tours of the town and is the self-ascribed “best tour guide in America”, to the charming hoopskirt-wearing Southern belle Tracy. With palpable intimacy, Herbert’s film reveals a looming reckoning that asks the question: who gets to tell America’s story? —Jose Rodriguez, Tribeca

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Seeds

• Brittany Shyne
• Malika Zouhali-Worrall

SEEDS is a portrait of centennial farmers in the geographical south. Using lyrical black-and-white imagery, this meditative film examines the decline of generational black farmers and the significance of owning land.

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The Inventory

• ilana coleman
• Ivonne Villalón

The Inventory is a feature film that juxtaposes the nonfiction testimonials of mothers searching for their sons who were disappeared in Mexico against a bureaucratic committee of linguists searching for a missing word.

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The Last Nomads

• Biljana Tutorov
• Petar Glomazić

In the pristine mountains of Montenegro, a semi-nomadic mother and daughter defend their herding tradition and their land from becoming a NATO military training ground. A gripping family and environmental drama unfolds, as the story of violence against women echoes that of violence against nature.

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The Nile Splits

• Zuff Shoya
• Khaleel Lee

In the months leading to a civil conflict, a filmmaker reunites with his family in Sudan after 15 years apart. As he uncovers his connection to an ancient tribe that has lived on the Nile for millennia, he probes for answers to a whimsical question: does the Nile split, or does it meet?

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Agent of Happiness

• Arun Bhattarai
• Dorottya Zurbó

A lyrical road movie of Amber, one of the many happiness agents who is working for the Center of Gross National Happiness in Bhutan. He travels door to door measuring people’s happiness levels while searching for his own among the remote Himalayan mountains.

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How To Build a Library

• Christopher King
• Michael Onyiego

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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Mai American

• Kevin Truong

A 70-year-old Vietnamese American refugee living in Oregon writes down her life story, indelibly shaped by the War in Vietnam. As she shares what she has written with her filmmaker son, they begin separate but parallel journeys confronting the traumas of their past and the emotional divide in their present.

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Sugarcane

• Julian Brave NoiseCat
• Emily Kassie

An investigation of unmarked graves at an Indian residential school ignites a reckoning in the lives of survivors and their descendants, including the film’s co-director whose father was born—and nearly buried—at the school.

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There Was, There Was Not

• Emily Mkrtichian

The first line of every Armenian fairy tale, There Was, There Was Not tells the collective myth of a homeland nearly lost to war — and four women’s resistance to that loss.

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Break the Game

• Jane Wagner
• Stephanie Andreou

Alone in her studio apartment, Narcissa Wright live streams every minute of her quest to be the world’s fastest Legend of Zelda player. But when her isolated digital existence begins to crack, Narcissa must decide her fate: will she embrace love and adventure in the real world, or will she be seduced again by the glow of the computer screen?

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Homegrown

• Michael Premo

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Hummingbirds

• Estefanía Contreras
• Silvia Castaños

In this late-night summer self portrait, Silvia Castaños and Estefanía Contreras make magic of everyday moments coming of age on the Texas-Mexico border.

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Joonam

• Sierra Urich

Joonam follows Sierra, an artist and filmmaker, searching for her family’s unreachable past in Iran. While excavating the formative memories of her mother and grandmother, Sierra unearths the forces behind her fractured Iranian identity and a new quest to define her own version of her heritage.

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The Noble Half

• Khaula Malik
• Hena Ashraf

The Noble Half follows the daily lives of three trans women—Bubbli, Eshaa, and Sharmeeli—in Pakistan, where they are known as khwaja-seras. Creating a mosaic from moments in these women’s lives, the film explores how they must constantly negotiate who they are based on where they are, revealing the tangled nature of gender, wealth, and colonialism. The Noble Half is a prismatic image of Pakistan and the khwaja-sera community few audiences have seen before.

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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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The 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.