Film Year: 2019

Numerous books and articles about the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and its role in bringing down the military regime of Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza DeBayle have been published since the 1970s. Not surprisingly, that important historical subject — the Sandinistas’ popular democracy movement and subsequent run-ins with U.S.-backed Contras…

Leon Lee’s extraordinary documentary Letter From Masanjia uncovers the often-neglected connections between political persecution in authoritarian countries and the international division of labor that has sustained Western consumer culture. The film begins in Damascus, Oregon, where Julie Keith, a mother of three young children, explains how, in 2012, she found…

A deeply personal family portrait, Irene Taylor Brodsky’s latest film Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements is what the director has referred to as a “spiritual sequel” to her Peabody Award-winning Sundance hit Hear and Now (2007). Like that earlier documentary, which shares the powerful story of Brodsky’s deaf parents…

Against a rising tide of hate crimes and anti-Semitism in recent years, ever-vigilant defenders of human rights have become increasingly vocal in their efforts to ensure that past crimes against humanity are not repeated. It is in this context of heated rhetoric and sometimes life-threatening physical confrontation that Matthew Shoychet’s…

As the daughter of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Austrian activist-filmmaker Ruth Beckermann was understandably nervous when, in the mid-1980s, former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim threw his hat into the ring in the lead-up to her country’s presidential elections. The source of her consternation: The outwardly genial politician, whose…

Arguably the most pressing humanitarian issue of the twenty-first century, the refugee crisis continues to stir the consciousness of international filmmakers throughout the world. Indeed, as an indication of its enduring relevance since 2011 (when the first major wave of Syrians fled their homes due to political unrest and persecution),…

Although his output is not as voluminous as that of his contemporaries in the world of human rights cinema (having made only two feature-length documentaries after his 2002 directorial debut Gaza Strip), James Longley is nearly peerless in terms of his ability to generate compassion for the plight of people…

The eponymous main character in the CGI-animated Ian is a young boy born with cerebral palsy, whose commitment to making friends on a school playground is tested by ostracism and teasing. Running a scant nine minutes, this beautiful celebration of inclusion, written by the award-winning producer and author Gastón Gorali,…

Going to summer camp is a rite of passage for many American kids, an experience they are likely to look fondly upon years later, as adults. But “communing with nature” is not something that many children in war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq have on their minds. Recently, though, a…

Anyone who questions why human trafficking is frequently referred to as “modern-day slavery” need only to watch Bernadett Tuza-Ritter’s stirring documentary A Woman Captured to see how accurate such language is in conjuring the abject state of those who have been exploited as labor and forcibly compelled to give up…