America ReFramed

Fannie Lou Hamer's America is a portrait of a civil rights activist and the injustices in America that made her work essential. Through public speeches, personal interviews, and powerful songs of the fearless Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist, Fannie Lou Hamer's America explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest leaders.

In 2016 the mayor of Rutland, Vermont, a predominantly white town struggling with income inequality, the opioid epidemic and political polarization, devised a plan to bring one hundred Syrian refugees to invigorate his community. What followed was a deluge of deeply partisan rancor that threatened to split the small New England town in two. Despite a lifetime of feeling invalidated and shamed for her poverty and addiction, long-time Rutland resident, Stacie, emerges from the sidelines as an unexpected and resilient leader. With nuance and compassion, FOR THE LOVE OF RUTLAND creates an intimate portrait of the challenges facing rural America today and delves into complex lives of the community members valiantly taking a stand to heal their hometowns. The film offers a sustained look into the normalization of “white rage” across the US, while also uncovering the stories of ordinary people who become extraordinary in their desire to challenge their deeply held beliefs and mend their divi

On Sapelo island, two young brothers, JerMarkest and Jonathan, are coming of age in the last remaining enclave of the Saltwater Geechee. As Sapelo’s storyteller and elder matriarch, their adoptive mother, Cornelia Walker Bailey, works to preserve what remains of her African-American community in the face of encroachment by property developers.

Kendra, a Native adoptee, grew up assimilated in a loving, white family with little connection to her heritage. Now, as an adult with a family of her own, Kendra embarks on a seven year journey to find her biological mother, April, and return to her Lummi homeland. Together, Kendra and April, also a Native adoptee, navigate what it means to be Native and to belong to a tribe from the outside.

GEOGRAPHIES OF KINSHIP weaves together the complex personal histories of four adult adoptees born in South Korea with the rise of the country’s global adoption program. Raised in foreign families, each adoptee sets out on a journey to reconnect with their roots, mapping the geographies of kinship that bind them to a homeland they never knew.

Weaving together never-before-seen archival footage and photographs, CHINATOWN RISING reveals a deeply personal portrait of a San Francisco neighborhood in transition. Chinatown activists of the 1960s reflect on their years as young residents waging battles for bilingual education, tenants’ rights and ethnic studies curriculum that would shape their community and nation.

Filmmaker Margaret Byrne follows three formerly incarcerated Chicagoans as they manage their respective mental illnesses while searching for stability in their families, friendships, jobs and housing. While documenting the challenges that are faced at the intersections of a punitive carceral system, poverty and substance use, Byrne reckons with her own history of mental illness.

On May 5th, 1991, people took to the streets of Washington D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood to protest the police shooting of a young Salvadoran man, Daniel Gomez. Through testimony, song, poetry, and street theater, LA MANPLESA: An Uprising Remembered weaves together the collective memory of one of D.C.’s first barrios and dives into the roots of the '91 rebellion.

A viral joke video catapults Hayden Pedigo – a 24-year-old artist and musician in Amarillo, TX – into the spotlight and prompts him to make a surprise bid for city council. With his goal of upending the status quo and ousting corrupt incumbent politicians, KID CANDIDATE follows Pedigo’s unorthodox campaign while unpacking issues of race, income inequality and gentrification in small-town America.