A collection of innovative nonfiction filmmaking
Nonfiction filmmaking once again proves itself every bit as wildly inventive as its narrative brethren in Spectrum selections that unleash barrages of recontextualized film clips, witness nostalgia trips metamorphosize into heist films, and send unlikely friends on an odyssey through a typhoon-ravaged landscape. Aesthetic daring assumes many forms here, with more reflective films leaving us privy to intimate conversations or immersing us in sensory experiences defined by sound and its absence.
Asog
Jaya, a teacher and comedian, travels across the typhoon-ravaged Philippines in a bid to win a beauty pageant. En route, they pick up an unlikely companion. Comic, sorrowful, and political, Asog examines the climate crisis through a kaleidoscopic lens.
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Between Revolutions
In a hybrid film comprised entirely of archival footage, two fictional women are torn from each other by the tides of repressive political and patriarchal systems. A haunting, lyrical tale of longing for freedom amongst connection.
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Hello Dankness
In the finest tradition of MAD Magazine, found footage from classic US film and television is combined to create a fictitious American neighborhood, reflecting modern American life from 2016 - 2021 in a wildly unconventional and absurdist satire.
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Kim's Video
New York institution Kim’s Video closed its doors in 2008. Fifteen years later, filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin set out to find out what happened to the 55,000 film collection and uncover a story of corruption, deception, and intrigue.
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Lonely Oaks
In 2018, when a police raid evicted tree-house dwelling activists in Hambach Forest, student and journalist Steffen Meyn fell to his death. His classmates compiled the two years of footage he'd shot, asking whether a cause is ever worth dying for.
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Mighty Afrin: In the Time of Floods
From the floodplains of Brahmaputra River to Bangladesh’s capital city, this stunning hybrid-documentary captures the catastrophic effects of climate change upon the country’s people and landscape. Told through an orphan's personal odyssey.
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The Mother of All Lies
As her parents and grandmother prepare to leave the Casablanca home they have lived in for decades, Asmae El Moudir takes the opportunity to probe the past, unraveling repressed truths buried within her own family and Moroccan political history.
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Orlando, My Political Biography
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the transgressive novel is used as a framework to investigate the very real contemporary struggles of trans and non-binary people. Winner of the Teddy Award and Encounters Jury Prize at Berlin Film Festival.
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Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Within the confines of a smoke sauna deep in an Estonian forest, groups of women gather to cleanse themselves in both body and soul, sharing in traditional sauna-based rituals, while also revealing their hurts and longings, joys and pains.
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The Tuba Thieves
Drawing on her experience as a d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing person, director Alison O’Daniel transcends assumptions of sound, silence, and language in this groundbreaking hybrid doc framed around a string of unsolved tuba thefts in L.A.
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