Natacha Ikoli

Date palms imported and cultivated decades ago flourish in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. A cacophony of voices from across generations reflect on the shifting landscape of the region; some remember the first few acres that were planted, while others enjoy the luxuries of new golf courses. Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensorially vibrant 16mm experience that takes us on a journey of past, present, and future. Director Terra Long hand-processed the footage utilizing leftover dates and native plants intertwining the environment into the fabric of the film. Through complex and nuanced scenes, non-sync interviews blossom into a wonderfully gentle but memorable portrait of a community in flux.

As a visibly disabled person, filmmaker Reid Davenport is often either the subject of an unwanted gaze — gawked at by strangers — or paradoxically rendered invisible, ignored or dismissed by society. The arrival of a circus tent just outside his apartment prompts him to consider the history and legacy of the freak show, in which individuals who were deemed atypical were put on display for the amusement and shock of a paying public. Contemplating how this relates to his own filmmaking practice, which explicitly foregrounds disability, Davenport sets out to make a film about how he sees the world from his wheelchair without having to be seen himself.

A short film meditating on the realities of justice for black lives in America.

The intimate moments between a Chinese nail tech and her Black client in a Brooklyn nail salon.

This film is documents the struggles of Mr. Jean-Lucien Bussa, an idealistic member of the National Assembly, who routinely confronts his own conflicting incentives of service to others and service to his own needs. When does patronage end and corruption begin?

In the shadow of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano, a young girl, Manu, and her mother lovingly breed a colony of bees. Meanwhile, as Manu’s activist father protests the construction of a giant telescope on the mountain’s sacred ground, a group of scientists study the landscape in preparation for our inevitable relocation to Mars. Ambitiously linking the earthbound and the cosmic, the intimate and the expansive, director Sarah J. Christman tracks these existentially fraught narratives with an acute attention to time, scale, and historical consequence. As her monumental images gather force, Swarm Season takes on a potent allegorical dimension.

An aging widow finds new hope in her long-lost ambition to be a jazz singer.