Film Year: 2018

Saturday, April 7 – 6:30 p.m. The Lyric Free Join ACT Programming Director Scott Diffrient in this intimate conversation with a handful of this year’s filmmakers and subjects. Diffrient will engage participants in a series of questions that explore the ethics, challenges, inspiration, and techniques involved in making, and being the focus of, documentary films that cover a range […]

The third annual ACT Human Rights Film Festival continues its special student filmmaker section, celebrating excellence in the field of socially conscious cultural production. Eight student films that examine a range of human rights issues from domestic violence, immigration, sexual assault, identity, and war will screen:   Juror’s First Place: Paris, Mauricio Jauregui In this interlaced story […]

Only recently have the long-term negative effects of the United States’ 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq come into view. Set in the aftermath of widespread infrastructural collapse, political insurgency, and bloody civil war, director Zaradasht Ahmed’s explosive documentary Nowhere to Hide chronicles the unrelenting hardships of internally displaced refugees, who have been forced […]

Following its premiere at the 2016 Karlovy Vary Film Festival, director Alfoz Tanjour’s A Memory in Khaki has garnered international acclaim for its lyrical treatment of the decades-long oppression faced by Syrians, millions of whom have been forced to flee their country and its authoritarian government because of their political beliefs. What distinguishes this gripping […]

Verdant, arable farmlands in Africa, especially in biodiverse but poverty-stricken countries like Ethiopia, have been called “green gold.” This is because of their exploitable, exportable resources and the relative ease with which local bureaucrats are able to evict indigenous people from their homes, thus clearing the way for foreign investors and land grabbers to step […]

Bearing a title that was inspired by a quote from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who once warned his readers of the deleterious effects of unrestrained capitalism and economic individualism (writing, “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep”), director Rupert Russell’s feature-length debut should be required viewing for anyone who doubts the […]

Having burst onto the filmmaking scene with Cinema Komunisto (2010), her feature-length exposé of the ties between the movie industry of the former Yugoslavia and that country’s authoritarian regime prior to President Tito’s death in 1980, director Mila Turajlic returns with a more intimate — but no less-sweeping — look at her own family’s entrenchment […]

Trained as a visual anthropologist, photographer Matthieu Rytz makes his stunning debut as a filmmaker with Anote’s Ark, a thought-provoking documentary about the plight of the roughly 100,000 people living on — and now regretfully leaving — Kiribati, a remote Pacific Island nation that is on the frontline of a global environmental crisis. As rising […]