Playlist
<p>After a terminal diagnosis, Sarah clones herself. When she survives, a court mandates a duel to the death between her and the clone.</p>
<p>Three women face racism at an elite New England university, each trying to survive as supernatural elements manifest around them.</p>
<p>In her first feature film, Chloe Okuno takes Alfred Hitchcok’s Rear Window and moves it to Bucharest, where a young New Yorker and her husband, Francis, go to live. For him it’s a homecoming, for her it’s a new world. Not knowing the language or even how to ocupy her days, Julia begins to feel the weight of her isolation, but also something else: the constant and oppressive gaze of a neighbour. But no one seems to give credit to her fears.</p>
<p>Two bereaved fathers become activists after the preventable childbirth deaths of their partners, spotlighting the U.S. maternal health crisis.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Reid Davenport, a past honoree of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 showcase, creates a diaristic portrait of his life, at times from his wheelchair. Candid and unsentimental, Davenport captures quotidian moments of human connection and frustration on the streets of Oakland. When a circus tent goes up outside of his apartment, his reflections turn to the legacy of the freak show and PT Barnum. Davenport’s viewpoint is one we rarely see on screen.</p>
<p>In the years before 1973 when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States, a group of Chicago activists formed the Jane Collective to help women end unwanted pregnancies. The Janes uncovers this hidden history by interviewing many participants in the movement who worked under constant threat of arrest. Their defiance and dedication resonate deeply today as the guarantees of Roe v. Wade are being rolled back across the country.</p>
<p>Follows former Al-Qaida detainees transferred from Guantanamo to a rehabilitation center, exploring their reformation.</p>
<p>What does it mean to be a digital native? TikTok, Boom. dissects the platform along myriad cross-sections—algorithmic, socio-political, economic, and cultural—to explore the impact of the history-making app. Balancing a genuine interest in the community and its innovative mechanics with a healthy skepticism, delve into the security issues, global political challenges, and racial biases behind the platform. Featuring Gen Z influencers like Feroza Aziz, Spencer X, Deja Foxx, and Merrick Hanna.</p>
<p>A heartwarming mockumentary about a lonely man who builds a cabbage-eating 7-foot-tall robot and finds friendship, love, and letting go.</p>
<p>Edina, a bodybuilder, trains for the world championship while exploring her complex relationship with her trainer and her own identity.</p>
<p>The story of a Ukrainian family living on the border of Russia and Ukraine during the start of the war. Irka refuses to leave her house even as the village gets captured by armed forces. Shortly after they find themselves at the center of an international air crash catastrophe on July 17, 2014.</p>
<p>Fiction and reality blur when Leonor, a retired filmmaker, falls into a coma after a television lands on her head, compelling her to become the action hero of her unfinished screenplay.</p>
<p>A working-class Black family in Brazil clings to hope and unity during political uncertainty following the election of a far-right president.</p>
<p>In the Bolivian highlands, an elderly Quechua couple has been living the same daily routine for years. When an uncommonly long drought threatens their entire way of life, Virginio and Sisa face the dilemma of resisting or being defeated by the passage of time.</p> <p>With the arrival of their grandson Clever, the three of them will face, each in their own way, the environment, the necessity for change, and the meaning of life itself.</p>
<p>In 19th-century Macedonia, a girl transformed into a witch explores life and humanity by inhabiting different human bodies.</p>
<p>Brothers Saud and Nadeem were raised looking at a sky speckled with black kites, watching as relatives tossed meat up to these birds of prey. Muslim belief held that feeding the kites would expel troubles. Now, birds are falling from the polluted, opaque skies of New Delhi and the two brothers have made it their life’s work to care for the injured black kites. Shaunak Sen’s intricately layered portrait reveals an evolving city and a fraternal relationship bonded by purpose. The film’s patient, roaming camera skillfully uses scale and perspective to draw attention to the interconnectedness of an ecosystem — one that humans are a part of, not apart from. The social unrest that begins to materialize in the streets is seen through the perspectives of the brothers and their family, as well as the insects and animals that share the urban landscape. There is both cruelty and tenderness in nature, and Sen elegantly captures how they coexist, while emphasizing the ways in which all living beings must evolve to survive.</p>
<p>Young LDS missionaries leave home for their missions, revealing emotional and spiritual challenges.</p>
<p>Sinead O’Connor. The name conjures up an image of a girl with a shaved head, or a girl tearing up a photograph of the then Pope, John Paul II, or a singer who has been pushed out of the spotlight of pop music for her uncompromising personality. Through a contemporary feminist lens, this documentary looks at a five-year period, linking the singer’s career to the complex and eventful past of Ireland, where she was born.</p>
<p>Tantura was one of hundreds of villages occupied by Israelis in 1948. In Israel, this period is referred to as a war of independence, while Palestinians call it “Al Nakba”: the catastrophe. <em>Tantura</em> investigates an unacknowledged war crime through the stories of people who were involved. This poignant documentary premiered at Sundance and is now having its Dutch premiere at InScience.</p>
<p>A young indigenous leader and his environmental team fight against farmers involved in the wholescale destruction of vast swathes of the Amazonian rainforest.</p> <p>Alex Pritz’s film focuses on the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Surveillance Team as they set about challenging the way landowners are destroying environmentally rich areas for profit. It draws on intimate access to both the Indigenous community and the opposing farmers network, to track the enormous changes that have taken place in Amazon region over the last three years. The escalation of activity by the farmers forces Bitate and Neidinha, a young Indigenous leader and his mentor, to find new ways to protect the rainforest from a rapacious industry whose support reaches all the way to Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro.</p>
<p>A VR-native documentary that captures community, connection, and love within the metaverse during the pandemic.</p>
<p>In her lecture “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression,” filmmaker Nina Menkes dissects the use of the visual idiom of film as an instrument of the heterosexual male gaze. The sections of this startling lecture that form the framework for this documentary are illustrated with about 175 clips, as well as interviews with filmmakers such as Catherine Hardwicke and Julie Dash, and film theoretician Laura Mulvey, whose famous essay on the male gaze is at the heart of Menkes’s analysis.</p> <p>Drawing on scenes from classics such as <em>Raging Bull</em> and <em>Lost in Translation</em>, as well as cult films including <em>Superfly</em>, Menkes shows how women are systematically filmed differently than men—an example being how framing and lighting are repeatedly used to position women as passive objects of lust. Menkes argues that this persistent approach to representing women in fiction is far from harmless. By connecting the dots between gender discrimination on the work floor and sexual and other forms of violence against women, she reveals the all-too real impact of that ubiquitous portrayal.</p>
<p>A 1968 housewife joins an underground collective that helps women obtain safe abortions during a time when it was illegal.</p>
<p>A zombie movie remake turns chaotic when the film crew gets attacked by real zombies.</p>
<p>In 1952 London, a civil servant faces a terminal illness and sets out to find meaning in life before it's too late.</p>
<p>A sequel to 2019’s Knock Down the House, To the End follows the intersecting stories of four high profile environmental leaders who are fighting for a Green New Deal—a bold and ambitious plan to stop the climate crisis and address economic and racial justice in the process. The film’s protagonists—Varshini Prakash (Sunrise Movement), Alexandra Rojas (Justice Democrats), Rhiana Gunn-Wright (Roosevelt Institute), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—are all visionary young women of color who are grappling with new challenges of leadership and power. Over three volatile years of crisis and upheaval, from street protests to the halls of Congress, the film tracks a historic shift in climate politics in the U.S. as these young leaders work together to defend their generation’s right to a future. A coming-of-age story for a movement, To The End gives audiences an unflinching look at how power works in today’s America, and a front seat view of history in the making.</p>
<p>When his young daughter's beloved companion — an android named Yang — malfunctions, Jake (Colin Farrell) searches for a way to repair him. In the process, Jake discovers the life that has been passing in front of him, reconnecting with his wife (Jodie Turner-Smith) and daughter across a distance he didn't know was there.</p>
<p>In 1963 France, a bright student must risk everything to get an abortion when an unplanned pregnancy threatens her future.</p>
<p>Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.</p>
<p>Explores three minutes of pre-Holocaust footage of a Polish Jewish community, revealing profound stories from rare archival film.</p>
<p>Agnes, the pioneering, pseudonymized, transgender woman who participated in Harold Garfinkel’s gender health research at UCLA in the 1960s, has long stood as a figurehead of trans history.</p> <p>In this rigorous cinematic exercise that blends fiction and nonfiction, director Chase Joynt explores where and how her platform has become a pigeonhole. Framing Agnes endeavors to widen the frame through which trans history is viewed — one that has remained too narrow to capture the multiplicity of experiences eclipsed by Agnes’.</p> <p>Through a collaborative practice of reimagination, an impressive lineup of trans stars take on vividly rendered, impeccably vintage reenactments, bringing to life groundbreaking artifacts of trans healthcare. </p> <p>Joynt’s signature form-rupturing style radically reenvisions the imposition of the frame on the cultural memory of transness through his brilliantly crafted, communally-driven excavation. This reclamation tears away with remarkable precision the myth of isolation as the mode of existence of transgender history-makers, breathing new life into a lineage of collaborators and conspirators who have been forgotten for far too long.</p>
<p>Come back in TS+FF favourite dreamweavers Benson and Moorhead’s most personal film. A fusion of DIY science fiction, extreme character drama, dark comedy, pre-apocalyptic vibes and overwhelming paranoia, the visionary pair stars as neighbours John and Levi who witness supernatural events in their Los Angeles apartment building. Realizing documenting the paranormal could inject some fame and fortune into their wasted lives, they open up an ever deeper, pitch-black rabbit hole, as their friendship frays uncovering the dangers of the phenomena, the City of Angels and each other.</p>
<p>Modern dating turns horrifying as a woman uncovers her new partner’s gruesome appetites.</p>
<p>This documentary, based on the book of the same name by Lizzy Goodman, brings to the cinema the rebirth of rock’n’roll in the first decade of the 2000s, after 9/11, with the explosion of bands such as The Strokes, LCD SoundSystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio or Interpol. These bands and the alchemy of music they made in those years transformed New York and influenced a generation globally. For those who remember Napster, Vice and hipsters.</p>
<p>A Danish family visits Dutch acquaintances for a holiday that spirals into discomfort and dread in a psychological unraveling of politeness.</p>
<p>A trans woman heads to Spain for surgery and deals with old friends, new connections, and romantic confusion.</p>
<p>A queer Baltimore rapper must outwit his boss to avoid getting fired after accidentally eating an edible.</p>
<p>Two siblings use social media for emotional challenges during a bus ride.</p>
<p>A grieving flamenco dancer experiences five stages of grief triggered by female ancestors.</p>
<p>A mid-aged biker visits a lesbian party and connects with the younger queer generation in a tribute to women before her.</p>
<p>In an underwater Stockholm of 2121, Nikki’s last wish is to reunite with her ex before the city is crushed by rising water pressure.</p>
<p>This subtle yet engaging documentary features Dorothy Oliver as she organizes to keep her rural Alabama town safe from COVID-19 by vaccinating everyone. </p> <p>The Panola Project highlights the heroic efforts of Dorothy Oliver to keep her small town of Panola, AL safe during the pandemic. Dorothy runs a makeshift Covid vaccine coordination center from the convenience store she runs out of a mobile home. Today, nearly 99% of adults in her town have received the shot in a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. The Panola Project illuminates how an often-overlooked rural Black community comes together in creative ways to survive.</p>
<p>An animated documentary about a devoted caretaker, her chronically ill husband, and the power of undying love.</p>
<p>Chronicles the lives of three transgender sex workers in South Africa during the pandemic.</p>
<p>Visitors and residents of New Mexico's Tularosa Basin, site of the first detonation of an atomic bomb, contribute to the production of public memory as they offer reckonings and advice about making "the journey of the dead."</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">$75,000 highlights the biological aspect of albinism, which is a genetic and hereditary abnormality that affects not only pigmentation, bu also and above all the physical and moral conditions of people with albinism. These people are victims of discrimination, mutilation and ritual crimes in Africa. </p>
<p>A gifted girl uses a mysterious healing method that creates conflict with her controlling father.</p>
<p>A fashion designer's inner anxieties physically manifest into something monstrous.</p>
<p>A Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revision of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, featuring talking animals and bourgeois queens.</p>
<p>A woman arrives at a remote house and is drawn into eerie secrets hidden by a mysterious couple.</p>
<p>Female inmates compete in a beauty pageant inside a prison.</p>
<p>Smita faces housing discrimination in Mumbai for being a single woman.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1992, Dujung, an elementary student, goes to a farm in the suburbs with his parents. While his parents believe the expensive and rare specialty from the farm will strengthen their son’s body, Dujung suffers side effects.</p>
<p>A surgeon must operate under pressure in a crime-ridden hospital in 1980s Hong Kong.</p>
<p>A candid look at dating for a queer Black woman in 1990s New York.</p>
<p>A kinetic journey across Indigenous lands, blending nature and urban rhythm.</p>
<p>A boy and girl roam the city at 3 a.m. looking for a hospital, but time is running out.</p>
<p>A girl discovers the modern world through a geography book and dreams of life beyond the Navajo reservation.</p>
<p>Upon hitting puberty, a high-school boy realizes he is homosexual and faces prejudice from his parents and friends.</p>
<p>A woman burdened by her own pessimism gets trapped in a full-body girdle.</p>
<p>After losing his mother to illness and his best friend to an unexpected move, a young boy discovers a crashed spaceship and makes a new friend with awesome powers (although she does need a little help with her earthly social skills). Together, they embark on a zany, fun-filled adventure while taking on the bad guys and helping Maika find her way home.</p>