For Geraldine Santoro and so many women like her, the barriers to obtaining a safe, legal abortion were insurmountable and in 1964 the legal and the social system did not protect her. The film LEONA’S SISTER GERRI tells the story of Gerri Santoro, a working-class mother of two and the “real person” in the now famous police photograph of an anonymous woman on a motel floor. She is face down on the …

In the final months of his mother Elaine’s late-stage dementia, as a pandemic rages across the globe, filmmaker Kyle Henry time travels via his family archive and his own memories to heal past wounds. Theirs is a large Texan family, but as one of Elaine's primary caregivers, the gay son shares a unique and complicated bond with his mother. Charting his mother’s early life and dashed desires through …

In this vibrant seriocomic re-imagining of Flaubert’s literary classic Madame Bovary, life imitates art in uncanny ways when earthy British beauty Gemma Bovery (Gemma Arterton) and her furniture restorer husband Charles (Jason Flemyng) move to a charming ramshackle old farmhouse in the very same Norman village where the novel was written a century earlier. Their welcoming neighbor, local baker and …

A first voice testimony celebrating the resiliency of the Garifuna people and their traditions. Shot entirely in Belize, the filmmakers worked closely with Garifuna tradition bearers, anthropologists and cultural activists during the research, scripting, production and editing phases of this project. The documentary resulting from this "outsider and insider" collaboration is the first of its kind, …

Scratch band music, or Quelbe, is the grass-roots folk music from the U.S. Virgin Islands. The lyrics are a form of oral history relaying the day-to-day trials and tribulations of living on a small Caribbean island. Playing with some homemade instruments made from tin cans and gourds, the music has a crudeness to it that is intoxicating and rhythmic speaking to both the beauty and the hardship of …

YURUMEIN (your-o-main) is an important untold story of Carib/Garifuna resistance against slavery that deserves its place in the annals of the African Diaspora. The film recounts the painful past of the Caribs on St Vincent and the extermination of scores of their ancestors at the hands of the British, while building an intimate portrait of Garifuna culture in-transition today. We are given firsthand …

Gone and nearly forgotten in extinction, the Labrador Duck, the Great Auk, the Heath Hen, the Carolina Parakeet, and the Passenger Pigeon leave holes not just in the North American landscape but in our collective memories. Moved by their stories, sculptor Todd McGrain set out to create memorials to the lost birds—to bring their vanished forms back into the world. The Lost Bird Project follows the …

Painter Viviane Silvera uses art to explore memory and PTSD, animating 30,000 images to provide a visualization of the brain’s process of forming, altering and storing memories. The art is combined with narration based on breakthroughs in neuroscience research by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel and other scientists to show how we can bridge the conscious and the unconscious brain and heal trauma.

TRACING ROOTS is a portrait of an artist and a mystery. The film follows master weaver and Haida elder Delores Churchill on a journey to understand the origins of a spruce root hat found with Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchi, the Long Ago Person Found, a 300-year-old traveler discovered in Northern Canada in a retreating glacier. Delores's quest crosses cultures and borders, involving artists, scholars and scientists, …

Twenty-five history students from St. Mary’s University take a 2,000 mile bus trip from the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas to Springfield, Illinois to build a Day of the Dead altar honoring Abraham Lincoln’s support of Mexico, and then to ask the Illinois State Military Museum to return General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s prosthetic leg to Mexico. With humor, humility, and a few animated history lessons, …

A gritty portrait of a group of outcasts in a fading Chinese city circa 2004. With his father requiring costly and continual hospital treatment, the aimless Dongzi (Li Jiuxiao) works as a debt collector for the local mafia. Further complicating things, he's in love with the boss’s wife (Huang Miyi), a troubled tattoo parlor owner who dreams of divorcing her husband and escaping her dead-end life.More

With a Stroke of the Chaveta takes viewers into the legendary cigar factories of Cuba to witness the survival of the collective reading of literature while tabaqueros roll cigars. We learn how through la lectura de tabaquería cigar workers have been entertained, educated, and maintained a sense of class solidarity.

Who Am I To Stop It is a documentary about the traumatic brain injury community made by a filmmaker with disabilities from brain injury. It follows three artists as they navigate social isolation, stigma, and rebuilding their identities. They practice the arts to reconnect to their own sense of self-pride and to their larger communities. Rather than emphasize the injuries themselves or highlight medical … More

Transcending the grim realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, Adamu Chan's powerful documentary, What These Walls Won't Hold, paints a poignant portrait of resilience and hope blossoming within the confines of San Quentin State Prison. Chan, formerly incarcerated himself, offers a unique insider's view as he weaves a tapestry of the many threads of relationships that bind together his community. The film … More

What happens when the lives of children are reset by adoption, sent to grow up in new countries and families of a different race, language, and culture? To find out, the Side by Side project spent 10 years filming 100 Korean adoptees, now living in 7 countries around the world—an unprecedented effort to deeply understand 65+ years of inter-country adoption out of South Korea. This short film presents … More

As the American involvement in the war-torn region winds down, these abandoned allies are faced with an impossible choice – wait for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) they’ve been promised in return for their loyal service, which may never come, or attempt a hazardous exit route to Europe on the refugee trail. With the threat of bloody retribution against them from the likes of ISIS and the Taliban, … More

Nestled in a lush Swiss valley in the summer of 1900, 17-year-old Elisabeth is preparing to take her vows at a nunnery when her fate is abruptly altered as she is summoned home following the death of her elder sister. At home the maddening silence surrounding her sister's mysterious death pushes Elisabeth to seek answers from three childhood friends — now young men with their own desires.

Sin País (Without Country) attempts to get beyond the partisan politics and mainstream media’s ‘talking point’ approach to immigration issues by exploring one family’s complex and emotional journey involving deportation.

My First Calling explores the little-known story of global music giant Silvio Rodriguez, who intimately recounts coming of age on the youth brigades of the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign, where at only 14-years of age he taught a rural campesino family how to read and write. Edited together with newly digitized 16mm film footage from the Latin American Newsreels produced and directed by Santiago Alvarez … More

Rollout is a journey alongside residents of a tight-knit Kenyan community, as they face mounting pressure from a government they don’t trust, to get a Covid-19 vaccine they fear may cause more harm than good. The movie is a journey alongside residents of a Kibera, Nairobi - including Laureen, a mother and immunization nurse. Through Rollout, we seek to show a vivid picture of the powerful and complex … More