(Haiti, 2020) Social, Drama, Biography / 7 min / Haitian Creole w English Subtitles Rated: PG
Dir: Eléonore Coyette
Lintho’s life merges with that of his puppets. The puppet of a story he did not write but of which he was the toy. He gracefully moves his paper characters to tell the inhumanity of Haitian jails.
(Philippines, 2021) Social, Drama / 12 min / Bikolano w English Subtitles / Rated: G
Dir: Arjanmar H. Rebeta
Arjan is awakened by a mysterious voice and he finds himself alone on a small planet called Planet I. He explores the little planet for 40 days. This is a love letter to one’s little planet.
(Belize, 2021) Comedy, Drama, LGBTQ / 9 min. / English / Belize Kriole / Rated: PG-13
Dir: Lester Lewis
They wanted a night out, but instead Samantha & Mavis are in the bathroom cleaning up Ashley’s mess. As the two friends hash out long-held grudges, we come to understand just why these two women are the best relationship either of them might ever have.
(Dominican Republic, 2020) Social, Drama, Experimental / 7 min 20 sec / Spanish w English Subtitles / Rated: PG
Dir: Nicolás Cordone
Struggling against the daily routine and their emotional ups and downs, this couple try to deal with the isolation days as best they can.
(Philippines, 2020) Kids, Social, Drama / 7 min / Tagalog w English Subtitles / Rated: G
Dir: Arjanmar H. Rebeta
A father converses with his young daughter via video call one last time before his journey aboard the STAR “FOREVER 143” where he will spend the remainder of his life.
(USA, 2020) Drama /16:48 min / English / Rated: PG
Dir: Leon Lozano
CHAT- A Covid 19 Story follows Angel, a young girl who recently lost her father to Covid-19. She reconnects with him through a smart device app that somehow speaks to her, using her father’s voice. This story is a tribute to everyone that has lost a loved one to the Corona-virus pandemic, and to essential workers that bravely provide needed services for us all. Our cast and crew were sheltered in place during production.
(St.Vincent and the Grenadines, 2018) Social, Drama, Kids / 4 min 10 sec / English / Rated: PG
Dir: Akley Olton
‘Black Doll’ is an intimate picture of a young girl’s relationship with her dolls and her hair, touching on a range of issues including femininity, race, and self-presentation.
(Belize, 2021) Romance, Drama / 6 min / English / Rated: PG
Dir: Emile A. Mena
William is writing a novel, but he is having trouble figuring out how to end it. He looks up and notices a good looking girl walking by. William gazes at her and this introduces a dream sequence. The girl’s name is Elaine. William tells her about the writing problem he is having and she is interested and tells him to follow her, but where?
(Puerto Rico, 2021) Social, Environment / 54 min . Spanish & English w English Subtitles / Rated PG-13
Dir: Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi
“We Still Here” introduces the incredible youth of Comerío, Puerto Rico navigating the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, a disaster that brought an unprecedented level of devastation to the country. In the lush mountains in the center of Puerto Rico, 24-year-old Mariangelie Ortiz leads a group of young residents who never thought they would become the leaders of their community, but nonetheless find themselves traveling to Washington D.C. to protest in the halls of Congress. Follow them in this coming of age story to find their power and begin creating a sustainable future for themselves and their community.
(Guatemala, 2021) Social Historical Drama / 91 min / Spanish with English Subtitles / Rated PG
Dir: Anais Taracena
Throughout the 1970s, the journalist Elías Barahona, a.k.a. “El Topo”/”The Mole”, infiltrated the heart of one of the most repressive governments in Guatemala. In seeking to uncover the story of this secretive and unique individual, “The Silence of the Mole”, captures the moments when the revelations from the past probes the cracks in the walls of silence that surround this country’s hidden history.
(USA, 2019) Music, Ethnographic / 58 min / English / Rated: G
Dir: Chris Ballengee
Sweet Tassa: Music of the Indian Caribbean Diaspora details the history, repertoire, and socio-political significance of tassa drumming in Trinidad & Tobago. Brought by indentured laborers from India who first arrived in 1845, tassa drumming has become an important marker of Indian Trinidadian cultural identity in Trinidad and Tobago. The film explores musical and socio-political elements of tassa, focusing on the life and family of noted drummer Lenny Kumar. As the story unfolds, tassa emerges as a metaphor for Indian Caribbean culture, rooted in India while also thoroughly Caribbean.
(Netherlands, 2021) Historical / 57 min 23 sec / Dutch & English with English Subtitles / Rated G
Dir: Ida Does
What happens when the leading national museum focuses its gaze on the slavery history of the Netherlands? This is the subject of New Light, a highly topical documentary from director Ida Does about the genesis of the slavery exhibition in the Rijksmuseum. This film shows up close and personal how painful and bitter, but at the same time, healing and liberating, compiling the exhibition was. Especially due to the contributions of people with roots both in the East and in the West. In New Light we can see what it means when a museum reinvents itself.
(USA, Jamaica 2021) Historical, Biography /85 min / English / Rated G
Dir: Roy T. Anderson
The ‘Negro Moses’ arrived on the scene on August 17, 1887 in the tiny seaside town of St. Ann’s Bay on the northern coast of Jamaica, fifty-three years after slavery was abolished in that country. In his short life Marcus Mosiah Garvey, would go on to become the world’s foremost Pan-Africanist and, in some eyes, the greatest mass leader of the twentieth century.
Award-winning director Roy T. Anderson peels back all the layers in his presentation of this oft-
misunderstood and controversial figure in African Redemption: The Life and Legacy of Marcus Garvey, an 85-minute feature-length documentary-film. Multiple Emmy award-winning actor Keith David (Greenleaf, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Crash) lends his voice as narrator on the film.
(Mexico, 2019) Social, Drama / 74 min / Spanish and Yoreme w English Subtitles / Rated G
Dir: Ana Laura Calderon
This is the story of Lucia, an indigenous Yoreme girl in Mexico who fights for her dream to play the harp, which is traditionally only played by men in her culture. Lucia has lost her mother and lives with her father Fidel and her grandparents. Fidel is a harpist. Musicians are very important because they are considered the guardians of traditions. Lucia wants to play but Fidel won’t allow it because the harp symbolizes a woman, and for them a woman can´t touch another woman. In spite of all this, the grandfather teaches her secretly. The Mayor’s community celebration is near and Fidel is seriously injured. The grandfather has to go to work. The town is very worried, there is no one else who can play the harp …
(Austria, Luxembourg, 2021) Historical, Thriller / 98 min / German w English Subtitles / Rated: 16+
Dir: Stefan Ruzowitzky
When an ex-prisoner of the Great War returns home and finds his comrades brutally murdered, he decides to bring the serial-killer to justice.
Vienna, 1920. The Austro-Hungarian Empire has collapsed. Peter Perg returns home from the Great War, after years of captivity. But the Vienna he comes home to is nothing like the place he once knew. The new Austrian Republic thrives on social and artistic freedom, but anti-democratic movements and unemployment loom overhead. A stranger in his hometown, his life takes a turn for the worse when one of his former comrades is murdered. Suddenly the mysterious killings of veterans are mounting. Personally connected to the victims, Perg decides to bring the killer to justice. He finds an ally in the cool-headed forensic doctor Theresa Körner, with whom he has a deeper, shared history. Their investigation leads them into the darkest corners of the city, as they confront a brutal and systematic killer and intrigues from within the police force. But when the killer’s net closes around Perg himself, he faces the moral dilemma of his life.
(Canada, Trinidad & Tobago, 2019) Historical, Drama, Biography / 110 min / English / Rated PG-13
Dir: Frances–Anne Solomon
HERO is the story of Ulric Cross, who in 1941, left his small island home in Trinidad to seek his fortune, and became the RAF’s most decorated West Indian airman of WWII. His life took a dramatically different course when he followed the call of history and joined the independence movements sweeping Africa in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
(Cuba, 2019) Drama / 77 min / Spanish w English Subtitles / Rated 16+
Dir: Emmanuel Martín
Santiago de Cuba, 1966-2018. Three stories about chess. Raul is a chess teacher, jazz musician, street player and gambler who maintains a tense relationship with his ex-wife, Rachel, and Fernando, the stepfather of his son Mateo. Osdalgia Vidaux is a female chess GrandMaster, devout christian and a mother playing in the National Championship. She must win if she wants to participate in the World Cup for Cuba. Pedro and Pablo are 11 years old boys whose friendship begins over the game during the chess frenzy that overtook the country during the 1966 Chess Olympics in Havana. Fifty-two years later, the game continues for these two old men, diabetics and disabled.
(USA, 2021) Comedy, Drama, Historical / 89 min / English / Rated PG-13
Dir: Dan Mirvish
In 1974, Connie is a White House stenographer who obtains the infamous 18½-minute gap in President Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes. She wants to leak the tape to reporter Paul, which could bring down the Nixon Presidency. They meet up at a secluded Chesapeake town, and their search for a working reel-to-reel player leads them to a bossanova-loving couple, a troupe of paranoid longhairs, a mysterious fisherman and one-eyed Jack, the proprietor of a bayside motel. Once the tape starts playing, it’s clear that nefarious forces are also out to get it. In a mix of carefully researched facts and outrageous historical fiction, it’s sometimes hard to know which is stranger.
(Cuba, Costa Rica, France, 2019) Drama / 85 min / Spanish with English Subtitles
Dir: Armando Capó
Amidst the greatest crisis in Cuban history, a boy’s life will change forever.
At the end of the Cold War, Cuba experienced one of its worst socio-economic periods. Euphemistically called “Special Period in Time of Peace”, this era was marked by economic scarcity and a massive migration wave to the United States known as the balseros (rafters) crisis. This occurred in August 1994, the few weeks depicted in Armando Capó’s debut film, August, a sensitive coming-of-age movie that follows Carlos, a teenager living with his parents and senile grandmother in the rural coastal town of Gibara. Under the blazing summer sun, he spends time with friends and explores his sexual curiosity all while enduring precarious living conditions with the support of his loved ones. As he witnesses illegal immigrants heading north in frail boats, he never imagines that, one day, his family will be affected by this diaspora. His life takes an unexpected turn defined by the rapidly shifting landscape of international politics.
