Immigration

A Mexican-American teenage farmworker dreams of graduating high school, when ICE raids in her community threaten to separate her family and force her to become her family's breadwinner. Fruits of Labor is a lyrical, coming-of-age documentary feature about adolescence, nature and how ancestors paved the way. Director Emily Cohen Ibáñez documents life guided by the spirit world through her hardships and joys in modern America.

An incisive documentary exploring life and democracy in America's first Muslim majority city. The film follows Kamal Rahman, a Bangladeshi candidate for Mayor, Fadel al-Marsoumi, a 23 year old Iraqi immigrant for City Council, and the current mayor, Karen Majewski, Hamtramck’s first female mayor. Through the exploration of the city's rich history and this heated election, Hamtramck, USA wrestles with identity politics, power dynamics, and the immigrant experience in America.

Sundog lives out in the Sonora Desert on the Mexican border. He is an elderly gentleman, who lives off anything that the brutal nature gives him, be it a wild boar or the psychedelic poison of a toad. With the desert as the ultimate existential (and cinematic) setting, A Shape of Things to Come from directors Lisa Marie Malloy and J.P. Sniadecki shows the relationship between humanity and nature at a critical time, when civil disobedience is the provocative answer to the most pressing questions.

Winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Film and Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival, Vitalina Varela is the masterful new film from acclaimed director Pedro Costa. A work of deeply concentrated beauty, it stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in a remarkable performance (based on her life), as a Cape Verdean woman who hopes to reunite with her husband after decades of separation due to economic circumstance, only to arrive in a strange land mere days after his funeral.

Named the best film of the year by The New York Times, Robert Greene’s extraordinary Bisbee ‘17 radically combines collaborative documentary, western, and musical elements to recreate a mass deportation of striking miners (mostly Mexican and Eastern European immigrants) that occurred in 1917. Greene confronts issues of immigration, unionization and environmental damage while linking a tragic moment in American history to our own turbulent times.

Forced to flee his country after filming politically sensitive events such as the Saffron Revolution, a Myanmar filmmaker finds himself a refugee amongst refugees in Thailand, where he discovers the plight of fellow migrants working under slavery-like conditions.

From Alison Klayman, director of The Brink and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the remarkable story of Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, a pioneering abstract painter in the '40s and '50s who only found recognition as she approached her 100th birthday.

The struggles of a girls soccer team in a mostly hispanic, inner city neighborhood reveals the obstacles that low-income students face in their quest for higher education.

The rich and essential history of Latino immigrants in the military, specifically during the Vietnam War.