The Best Show In Town

Directed by Amity Hoffman

The Best Show In Town features the story of the Loveland Players a theater troupe of 50+ actors, all with different developmental challenges, who work over the course of nine months to put on one of the most honest and engaging theater performances you’ll ever see. Many of these actors originally came to the group with severe anxiety, extreme shyness, and some of them even non-verbal. As a result of their participation in theater they have gained life changing confidence that’s carried over into their daily lives leading some to seek employment in their community and many choosing to live independently of their parents or caregivers. What theater gives to these actors is transformative and what these actors give to their audience is a new perspective on what it means to live with a developmental disability.

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Saving Spiracle

Directed by David Kernodle

This documentary tells the story of three business owners as they struggle to keep their company afloat while trying to keep their personal lives intact during a worldwide pandemic.

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How It Feels To Be Free

Submitted by Yoruba Richen

How It Feels to Be Free takes an unprecedented look at the intersection of African-American women artists, politics, and entertainment and tells the story of how six trailblazing performers, Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier changed American culture through their films, fashion, their music and their politics. The film tells the stories of Lena Horne, the first Black woman signed to a major studio; Abbey Lincoln, the “Black Marilyn Monroe” turned protest singer and activist; Diahann Carroll, the first Black woman to both win a Tony Award and star in her own TV series in a role other than a maid; Nina Simone, the revolutionary musical prodigy; Pam Grier, the first female action hero; and actress Cicely Tyson, the proud race woman who use her art as a form of protest. How It Feels to Be Free explores how these women re-shaped the way Black women were represented on stage and screen and how Black female entertainers who came after them built off their success, learned from their failures, and continue working to change the industry. The documentary features archival performances and interviews with the trailblazers, new interviews with Diahann Carroll and Pam Grier, and interviews from some of the industry’s leading entertainers such as Alicia Keys, Lena Waithe, Halle Berry and Samuel Jackson. The film is based on the book How it Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement by Ruth Feldstein.

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AULCIE

Directed by DANI MENKIN

Aulcie Perry, an African American, from the violence-filled streets of Newark, NJ finds his glory in leading Israel’s Maccabi basketball team to European championship, only to fall to drugs and jail time before his redemption and search for his biological daughter.

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The Last Vance

Directed by Jarrell Hilton

In the midst of a pandemic and nation wide social unrest, players of the Vance High School football team strap on their helmets to play one last season as the formally known, 'Vance Cougars'. The Last Vance portrays what can happen when a team of highly motivated students and coaches join forces against all adversity to become North Carolinas 4AA state champions for the second year in a row.

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The Anti-Museum: an Anti-Documentary

Directed by Celine Fitzmaurice

A global pandemic shuts down business, offices, shops, theatres, museums and galleries, putting millions out of work and creating a new normal of social distance and virtual spaces.

Narrated by musician Henry Rollins, The Anti-Museum: an Anti-Documentary questions if the forced closure of museums and exhibitions means we can discover new ways to experience art.

For decades artists have grappled with the concept of closure – as statements against political power, as an act against commerciality, on the power of labour, as a means of questioning what work means and even how we define the space where art takes place.

These radical acts saw galleries shut on their day of opening in Japan while in Argentina, the imprisonment of visitors to an exhibition became a statement on the military coup d’etat. In Italy a gallery covered in striped paper challenged ideas of where art should hang while other artists mailed out their own exhibition closure in LA, Amsterdam and Turin.

This rejection of where and how art is expressed is part of an anti-art movement that began in the 1960s. The heart of 'anti-art' was about pushing back against the objectification in established art, critiquing the commerciality of pop art and abstract expressionism, and denouncing the preservation of objects as a means of extracting value. In short, anti-art rejected the capitalist take-over of art as practice by making itself unpreservable, unmarketable, unattractive and unobjectifiable.

Refusing to play the game exposes the limits of culture and becomes a revolutionary act in itself. But it also cracks open the possibility of redefining what art is, what the limits of art are and actively embraces a different concept - an anti-museum that encourages active oppositions to currently accepted norms.

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Open Field

Directed by Kathy Kuras

Winner of the Best Documentary Audience Award at the Riverside International Film Festival 2021.
They played by NFL rules in NFL stadiums. They won world championships. They’re at the top of their game. What else do they have to do to level the playing field? Meet quarterback Sami Grisafe, San Francisco 49ers coach Katie Sowers and other legends of women’s tackle football who played for the love of the game against all odds. With commentary from Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris and 49ers Head Coach Kyle Shanahan, OPEN FIELD tells the story of the women who leave everything on the field in their drive for greatness, earning recognition and respect. Katie Sowers and other legends of women’s football who played for the love of the game against all odds. With commentary from Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris and 49ers Head Coach Kyle Shanahan, Open Field tells the story of the women who left nothing on the field in their push for recognition and respect.
OPEN FIELD provides an inside look at women in tackle football and features NFL greats who have supported women in football including Kyle Shanahan, head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, and Franco Harris, Football Legend and Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer. Shot on location over the course of 6 years with full access to practice sessions, games, private team conversations in locker and off-the field activities, including three world championships with Team USA (held in Sweden, Finland, Canada).

Tapestry: Spiritual Music of A Mill Village

Directed by Gauri Singh

This film showcases a spiritual musical journey through a Mill Village of North Carolina where Brian Millers ancestors worked in the Mill and attended the churches in Gastonia, North Carolina

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Chapters: The Legacy of John Swofford

Directed by Scott McBurney

Chapters: The Legacy of John Swofford documents the 50-year career in college athletics of former Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner John Swofford. The program traces his root growing up in the small southern town of North Wilkesboro, NC to playing football at the University of North Carolina to serving as Athletics Director at UNC for 17 years to leading one of the premier college conferences for nearly a quarter of a century as its commissioner.

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Theirs is the Kingdom

Directed by Christopher Zaluski

A film examining the intersection of poverty and portraiture, "Theirs is the Kingdom" follows the rare creation of a contemporary fresco mural inside the sanctuary of a small church in Asheville, NC.

This is a painting not of the rich and powerful, but of people battling homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. From first sketch to final unveiling, the viewer witnesses the difficulties of this ancient artistic technique while also meeting an ensemble cast of complex characters.

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Farmer Cee

Directed by Clark Ivers

This film introduces us to Farmer Cee, a single Black woman building a family farm in the south. Focused on growing medicinal plants, including hemp, with an ecological conscious and an unwavering social justice commitment, Farmer Cee is a story of resiliency and perseverance in an agricultural industry that has yet to reckon with its systemic oppression, in a nation that is in racial turmoil.

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She Carries On

Directed by Isaac Fowler, Tim Morris

Among the Cherokee people in North Carolina, the cultural tradition of stickball exemplifies “more than a game”. Cherokee women played the game at the turn of the 21st century for several years and reflect on their time playing and what the game means to the past, present, and future of Cherokee people.

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A Letter to A'ma

Directed by Hui-Ling CHEN

An art teacher returns to her childhood home to mourn the passing of her grandmother. As she pieces together the fragmented memories of her youth she finds herself coming face-to-face with the problematic issue of her country’s fractured history.
An island on the edge of Asia, Taiwan has experienced four hundred years of colonization followed by a recent half century of dictatorship. Yet today it is becoming the front of a potential war between world powers.
Through an artistic duty that this teacher gives to students, a performance art process that has lasted for more than 10 years, a representational portrait of the island’s collective memory begins to emerge; and in so doing, these young artists have initiated a process by which Taiwan, an island forgotten by the world and in the midst of forgetting itself, can now remember itself and construct a new postcolonial identity through art.

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Shepherd's Song

Directed by Abby Fuller

Growing up in San Francisco, Jenya saw the world around her changing and after the death of both her parents, she became desperate to find a sense of belonging and connection. The film explores her journey as she embarks on a new path restoring ecosystems with the help of her flock of sheep. Through her journey, the film invites us to think about our ability to participate meaningfully and intentionally with the natural world, and to see that by healing land there an opportunity to heal ourselves.

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Built lands

Directed by Arturo Dueñas Herrero

In the late 60s a group of artists decides to settle in a village in the ‘darkest-deepest’ Spain. Today only Felix Cuadrado Lomas still remains there, determined to reflect the landscape which surrounds him: the lands built by those who work on them.

Stateless

Directed Michèle Stephenson

Director Michèle Stephenson’s new documentary follows families of those affected by the 2013 legislation stripping citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent, uncovering the complex history and present-day politics of Haiti and the Dominican Republic through the grassroots electoral campaign of a young attorney named Rosa Iris.

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“SINCE THAT DAY…”

Submitted by Slavica Šnur

The loss of a child is the most painful type of loss.

A child gives the parent an almost super-human strength. When a child dies, that strength disappears forever. From that day onward, the parents of those children are no longer the same. The purpose of this film is to show: Who those children were and what were their dreams. It is a pity that only the parents remember the faces of those children.

Is it possible to forgive? If not, is it possible to live the rest of your life in peace?

Let’s show everyone that children who died as a result of the stupidity of us “grown ups” will not be forgotten and let’s try to warn future generations about the killer that is war.

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Vinyl Nation

Directed by Kevin Smokler, Christopher Boone

A deep dig into the crates of the vinyl record resurgence to discover what an old technology says about our relationship to music and each other in a divided time in America.

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Between the Lines: Liz at Large

Directed by Abi Cole

Liz Montague first emailed The New Yorker’s cartoon editor out of frustration that all of the illustrations featured white subjects. She began contributing to the magazine in 2019 and became the first Black, female cartoonist in The New Yorker’s near century run. Montague’s cartoons push the publication’s boundaries through focussing on the intersection of self and social awareness in an accessible style with clean lines and representative subjects. Montague sketches a world in which Black women are the main characters.

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Comic Book Hero

Directed by Justin Meckes 

This mini-documentary explores the work of Lee Stutts, an amateur comic book writer finishing the first draft of a new comic book while battling procrastination.        

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Rock Castle Home

Directed by Charlie Thompson

Rock Castle Home delves deep into the history of a 1930s Virginia mountain community displaced by the Blue Ridge Parkway. Told through the words of community members working to preserve their history and identity, Rock Castle Home tells a universal story about the human fight to preserve our stories despite the political, economic, and natural forces that seek to subsume them.