Death of Two Sons, 2006

The coincidental, near parallel deaths of unarmed Guinean immigrant (and innocent victim), Amadou Diallo in the hallway of his apartment building at the hands of over-aggressive police officers in 1999, and American Peace Corps volunteer Jesse Thyne on the treacherous rural roads of Guinea en route back to Diallo’s ancestral village, serve as a potent […]

Occupation Dreamland, 2005

During the spring of 2004, as the Iraqi city of Falluja slowly metamorphosed from secondary, wartime infrastructure target to the emerging epicenter of an escalating (and increasingly emboldened) Iraqi insurgency, soldiers from a squadron of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division stationed in the volatile city struggle to adjust to their amorphous, undefined, and intrinsically […]

Mariya, 1988

Aleksandr Sokurov creates a visually poetic, elegant, and unforgettable synthesis of art and life in Mariya. The lush and textural initial sequence, shot using color film, presents the austere life of the titular Mariya – a robust, genial, and hard-working middle-aged collective farmer with an engaging smile – during an arduous flax harvest season in […]

A South African Love Story – Walter and Albertine Sisulu, 2004

In an interview conducted near the conclusion of the film, A South African Love Story – Walter and Albertine Sisulu, a journalist describes Walter Sisulu’s deliberately low-key, but profoundly influential role in the struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid and successfully lay the groundwork for multi-racial elections in the country as that “not of […]

Living Rights, 2004

A compendium of self-contained multicultural stories featuring ethnically, economically, and existentially diverse children, each at the cusp of a pivotal turning point in their young lives, Living Rights examines the contemporary relevance – and often divergence – between the humanitarian statement crafted by 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child that sought […]

Torero, 1956

Refining the theme of documented reality and reconstructed history introduced in his earlier film, Moroccan Romance, Carlos Velo’s reflective and ecstatic Torero is equally an autobiography on charismatic Mexican bullfighter, Luis Procuna, and an unvarnished examination of bullfighting culture. Presented as an extended interior monologue as an anxious Procuna prepares to return to the ring […]