Deshilando Luz

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations

Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty

Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.

Mama Micra

The mother of animation director Rebecca Blöcher didn’t want to live an ordinary life. She wanted “something more,” she explains in this stop-motion film. The people around her didn’t understand—in a letter written in 1968, a girlfriend criticizes her for going out on her own and making men jealous, while advising her to dress in a more “feminine” way and to join a cooking course. Blöcher’s mother brushed aside the advice. Years later still, she divorced her husband and stepped into the big wide world.

Scar Tissue

Scar Tissue by Su Friedrich is a filmic version of a white canvas or a silent music piece.The fact that Friedrich never really shows the whole body, but rather plays off of body parts could be read as a desire to show less of the people on the screen, so that the viewer's reading can be generalized. If the "characters" existed as people, the images would inevitably read to be telling a story about these people. The legs and torsos do not signify people; it is the experience of these body parts and the rhythm with which they are portrayed that constitute the work.

The Pimp and His Trophies

From Victoria Street to Ang Mo Kio

This work documents a segment of Singapore’s education history –– the survival of the nation’s first Catholic missionary Chinese girls’ school through adversities during her formative years. It is a tribute to the arduous efforts and contributions of a generation of admirable educators who persevered in delivering the education of love with resilience and steadfastness.

Basin of Souls

Rua de Santa Catarina, a street that was formerly home to dozens of local businesses and hundreds of Porto residents, now sees a crowd of tourists attracted by the cheap, disposable amenities that are popping up everywhere at once. Gentrification has decontextualized Portuguese culture, rendering the landscape uncanny. The Basin Woman, a symbol of the female workers of the historic Bolhão Market, is chased down by seagulls in the midst of this transcendent chaos.

The Devil's Tuning

The Story of the Weeping Camel

When a Mongolian nomadic family's newest camel colt is rejected by its mother, a musician is needed for a ritual to change her mind.

The Good Son

The unbelievable story of 22 year old Or, who secretly finances his sex change operation in Thailand by lying to his conservative parents and then returns home as a woman to face her new life, her family and the cost of living her dream

Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray

Called "an elegant documentary" by Sundance and "eloquent and deeply moving" by the LA Times, Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray is a penetrating portrait of this photographer's search for truth and beauty in a world of impermanence. Los Angeles' Little Tokyo's foremost studio photographer, Miyatake smuggled a lens and film holder into the U.S. WWII camp he was incarcerated in and captured life behind barbed wire with a makeshift camera made of scrap wood. Yet it was his little-known artistic pursuits before the war that honed his discerning eye.

Witness

Experimental short film by Barbara Sykes

Monstruo Obscura

Seoul, 1996. Wastewater from developed film reels is dumped into the sewers. From this toxic discharge, a monster awakens, carrying the memories of countless movies imprinted on the film reels. Burdened by a vanished past, the monster wanders the city.

o céu diante dos meus olhos nunca é cinza

Amazona

This is the story of Val and Clare: a mother and a daughter. After the tragic death of her eldest daughter, Val left her kids and family behind and escaped into the Colombian jungle in order to search for her identity. Clare was only 11 years old when her mother left and couldn't understand what she was looking for. A son who became an addict, three break-ups and a fractured family remained behind. Now Clare is pregnant and decides to confront her mother, heal the wounds of the past and try to define motherhood on her own terms. Together they go on an intimate journey exploring the boundaries between responsibility and freedom, the power of love and the meaning of family.

Wrinkles the Clown

In Florida, parents can hire Wrinkles the Clown to scare their misbehaving children.

Kurosawa's Way

Eleven major film makers from Europe, America and Asia talk about Akira Kurosawa and discover surprising influences on their own work.

Warrior of Light

A feature-length documentary on Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, award-winning artist and human-rights activist who has gained international recognition for her work with street children in Rio. The film recounts how a woman turned her back on a wealthy lifestyle, driven into action by the execution of 8 streetkids by military police in 1993. In subsequent years Yvonne's struggle to better the lives of endangered and abandoned children has led her to found "Projeto Uere" ("Children of Light") a radical project committed to protection and education of kids who live in the streets and slums of Rio which has brought her into conflict with Brazil's wealthy elite.

Angano... Angano... Tales from Madagascar

Venerable storytellers recount for the camera and their listeners the founding myths of Malagasy culture.

A Portrait of Us

A short documentary that follows Korean grandparents as they share their modern-day reckoning of their immigration story and grandparenthood.