Film Year: 2019

Documentary film theorist Betsy McLane has argued that nonfiction cinema engages people as few other art forms can. This is partly because contemporary filmmakers’ tendency to adopt “home movie” technologies has bred “an intimacy between subject and audience” that could only otherwise be achieved if the two had met in person, face-to-face. As part of […]

Although many U.S. Americans agree that their country’s health-care system compares unfavorably to those of other developed nations (in terms of affordability and equal access among the rich and the poor), few people have taken the time to learn how governments around the world are similarly failing their citizens’ right to medical assistance by shifting […]

Beyond that of life and liberty, it is difficult to think of a more basic human right than that of access to water, which is essential not only to the functioning of human and nonhuman organisms but also to the very survival of the planet. Simon Wood and François Verster gesture toward this idea in […]

An intimate conversation with retired geologist Jude Gassaway, whose collection of objects representing the American West is just one facet of her endlessly fascinating, unexpectedly revealing story. Written by David Scott Diffrient

“They came from nothing into sound and meaning.” This statement, uttered by the self-proclaimed “Priest of the Sun” John Big Bluff Tosamah in Navarre Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel House Made of Dawn (1968), suggests the way that words, like medicine, can heal broken spirits and bring into being a more centered sense of selfhood. […]

Few people outside of Colombia have heard of the Bojayá massacre, which took place on May 2, 2002. In the span of a few minutes, over 100 civilians in that small town were killed by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, a guerilla organization (popularly known as FARC) that was attempting to wrest control of […]

Divided neatly into three sections (“House,” “Homestead,” and “Community”), Crystal Kayiza’s poetic group portrait of the titular North Carolina county goes deeper that a standard journalistic account of racialized poverty to show, with the patience and sensitivity of a seasoned auteur, an African American population thriving — emotionally if not economically — in their rural […]

“Sexy” and “sensual” are not the kinds of words that are typically employed to describe human rights films, but they are more than apt in conveying the atmospheric allure of Chongqing at night in director David Verbeek’s stylistically silky Trapped in the City of a Thousand Mountains. Although surveillance cameras make it difficult for residents […]

Executive Producer Akemi Ooka’s gentle tribute to her grandfather, Mas Ooka, who recalls his time as a young boy forced into the Manzanar internment camp during the Second World War, puts contemporary debates about the rights of ethnic minorities in the United States into proper historical perspective. Now in his seventies, he is reunited with […]

Suffused with grace and sympathy for the plight of people who have been victimized by their own government, Joshua Bennett and Juliana Schatz-Preston’s Los Comandos takes its title from the name of a volunteer team of first responders in El Salvador. Comprised of teenagers and young adults who are clad in bright yellow uniforms (which […]