A collection of innovative nonfiction filmmaking
Nonfiction takes a wild turn in Spectrum, where strange forms open portals to new ways of seeing and believing. Desktop cinema, absurdism, satire, and daring anti-tributes turn the familiar inside out.
Mushrooms become guides. Indigenous communities fight to bring their ancestors home. Queer Mexican cowboys carve out space, Iranian siblings take an unlikely road trip, and young Nigerian filmmakers turn cinephilia into unruly invention. Rooted in the earth yet reaching across borders, these films conjure global solidarity from the unexpected.
Into the Jaws of the Ogre
Having fled Iran for France, filmmaker Mahsa Karampour now reunites with her musician brother in America. Mixing the structure of a road movie with the brashness of a punk anthem, this intimate documentary is humanist filmmaking of the highest order.
An Incomplete Calendar
A forgotten vinyl record from Venezuela becomes Sanaz Sohrabi's guide through interlocking histories of oil, Iran, music, and political memory in An Incomplete Calendar.
Last Movies
What would film history look like reorganized around the last movies various cultural figures watched before they died? Last Movies embraces this simple concept to offer a deliberately skewed and mordantly funny love letter to cinema.
Aanikoobijigan [Ancestor/Great-Grandparent/Great-Grandchild]
In Aanikoobijigan, Indigenous repatriation specialists work to bring the remains and funerary objects of Ancestors home from institutional collections. This is a film shaped by memory, dignity, and a duty of care.
Let Them Be Seen
Let Them Be Seen is an absurdist portrait of the town of Tapoleng in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, moving through churches, spaza shops, and a Jam Alley re-enactment to document a village reshaping faith and community in post-apartheid life.
Daughters of the Forest
An immersive sci-fi documentary, Daughters of the Forest follows two Indigenous mycologists who are bridging modern science and visual storytelling to preserve Mexico’s fungi and forests.
Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird)
Winner of the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at this year's Berlinale, Anna Fitch and Banker White’s exuberant documentary combines vérité interviews with a playful mix of puppetry, collage, and insect actors to memorialize a friend.
Image: © Mirabel Pictures
Afterlives
An immersive, essayistic documentary, Afterlives examines the effects of violent spectacle via propaganda, refusing reductive answers or cliched responses to questions about extremism, justice, and art.