Screening the works of emerging talents alongside contemporary masters—and orbiting issues ranging from religious transformation to extremism, early cinema to capitalism, marginalization to the embrace of intimacy—Docs in Focus showcases some of the most innovative filmmakers working nonfiction today, including works from Palestine, Syria, Iran, Romania, Israel, and the United States.
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G. Davidi and E. Burnat • 2011 • Palestine-Israel • A portrait of life in the occupied West Bank.
A personal portrait of life in the occupied West Bank––a Palestinian farmer turned filmmaker documents life in his West Bank village as Israeli settlements grow closer and closer.
A ...
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David Mueller and Lynn Salt • USA • 2010 • The rise and fall of the American Indian Movement.
At the age of 5, Dennis Banks was taken from his grandparents and relocated to a federal boarding school, where the prime objective was to rid American Indian children of their culture,...
Parvez Sharma • USA • 2015
Parvez Sharma is a middle-aged man, Muslim and gay. His whole life he has aspired to complete the Hajj, Islam's great pilgramage to Saudi Arabia. Not only is homosexuality forbidden in Mecca: so is filming. With a hidden camera, Sharma embarks on a stunning journey ...
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Alex Mar • USA• 2010 • Three young Americans have chosen the fringes of alternative religion
Chuck lives in the South Dakota badlands. While he and his wife struggle to make ends meet, they find meaning in their Lakota Sioux heritage, making great effort to preserve their rituals...
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Canada • Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier & Edward Burtynsky • 2018
Humanity's damage to ecological systems becomes poignantly clear.
In 2016, a group of scientists known as the Anthropocene Working Group declared the end of the Holocene—a geological epoch that had charact...
Mads and Daniel are Danish soldiers, stationed amidst NATO forces at Camp Armadillo in Afghanistan’s Hemland Province. With Taliban fighters a stone’s throw away, these young men live a rarified existence–sharing moments of camaraderie with their platoon within the relative safety of the militar...
Gianfranco Rosi • Italy • 2008 • A portrait of California flatland squatters
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Roughly 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles, in the wild desert of Southern California, is an ad hoc town without electricity or running water. Some denizens are just passing through, others are here to stay. While ...
Gianfranco Rosi • Italy • 1993
The Ganges River is one of India’s most sacred waterways, providing drinking water to the nation’s populace and irrigating fields of grain and vegetables. A source of renewal, it is also the final resting place for many, whose remains are burned on funeral pyres ...
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Tania Cypriano • USA • 2020 • Inside the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery
New York's Mount Sinai Hospital houses the groundbreaking Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, a mecca for quality gender-affirming care. Here Dr. Jess Ting works with transg...
The entire fabric of contemporary society is underpinned by the phenomenon of capital. Wealth equals power, and power determines social relations. Or so Thomas Piketty would have you think. The rock-star French economist’s scathing history of modern capital begins in the 1700s–when the average...
Göran Hugo Olsson • 2016 • Finland
Narrated by Lauryn Hill, Concerning Violence boldly interrogates legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and racism in arguments against the African liberation movement, while dismantling facile dichotomies regarding Fanon's political thought.
Göran Hugo Olsson'...
Bill Morrison • 2016 • USA
The intersection of cinema with the peak of the Canadian Gold Rush.
Bill Morrison's documentary transports us to a landscape where early cinema intersected with the peak of the Canadian Gold Rush.
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Ursula Liang • USA • 2020 • Two communities caught in the divisive politics of police violence.
In November 2014, Chinese-American police officer Peter Liang was dispatched to a Brooklyn community housing building. Performing a vertical patrol in a darkened stairwell, he acciden...
Hubert Sauper • France, Austria • 2020 • An interrogation of time, imperialism, and cinema itself.
In 1898, the U.S.S. Maine sank in Havana Harbor, triggering the Spanish-American war. Cuba has since experienced imperialism in many forms, shaping the fabric of its society. Young Prophets populat...
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Gianfranco Rosi • 2016 • Italy
A small fishing town emerges as the nexus of the refugee crisis.
Halfway between Sicily and the coast of Tunisia lies a tiny island with a dwindling full-time population of several thousand. As the island denizens go about their business, distress...
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Brian Perkins • Myanmar-USA • 2015 • Four orphans living in a Myanmar monastery come of age.
Four orphans live in a Buddhist monastery in northeast Myanmar. Surrounded by verdant hills and distant mountains, their lives are idyllic until the departure of the head monk on a long j...
Abbas Fahdel • Iraq-France • 2015 • Everyday Iraqis caught in a conflict not of their own making.
Filmmaker Abbas Fahdel traveled home from France two weeks before the 2002 American invasion of Iraq. Interviewing friends, family members, and neighbors, he encountered a populace bracing for war,...
Filmmaker Abbas Fahdel traveled home from France two weeks before the 2002 American invasion of Iraq. Interviewing friends, family members, and neighbors, he encountered a populace bracing for war, encountering shortages of food, water, and basic goods even before the soldiers arrived. A year l...
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Jerry Rothwell • Canada • 2015 Filmmaker • Jerry Rothwell examines the early days of Greenpeace.
A wily gang of artists, scientists, and draft-dodgers set their sights on halting a series of atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska. With the whale-hunting industry as their next targ...
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Yann Arthus-Bertrand • France • 2016 • An immersion to the core of what it means to be human.
Humans dwell in nearly every corner of our planet. Despite their language, ethnicity, age, or gender, each knows moments of beauty as well of struggle and devastation. Over the course of ...
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M. Bühler & M. Mariani • Brazil • 2014 • A riveting true crime story set in a a prison in São Paulo
A prison in São Paulo, Brazil. Researching criminals for a documentary, two Brazilian directors happen upon Christopher Kirk, an unassuming American with a secret to tell. As they d...
Six believers enter a Catholic Church seeking an encounter with the divine. Ranging in age, both men and women lay themselves bare before Jesus in an act of private prayer. Their deeply personal questions, struggles, and fears resound throughout the cavernous church as they worship and give gra...
Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s life has followed a peculiar trajectory–from the top of Russian society, to a Siberian prison. His meteoric rise tracked alongside that of Putin and his sycophants amidst the cowboy capitalism characterizing post-Soviet Russia, first as the proprietor of the nation’s first...
Kabwita Kasongo is 28 years old, living in the Congo with his wife and young daughters. His dream is to somehow earn enough money to buy a plot of land where he can build his family a home. Having felled an enormous hardwood tree, he bakes the wood in an earthen oven and harvests charcoal (maka...
