Festival Year: 2018


12th and Clairmount
Brian Kaufman

Contemporary interviews bring to life scenes from home movies, newsreels, and photographs of one of the most violent civil disturbances in U.S. history, the 1967 Detroit riot, when police brutality against African American citizens ignited a five-day standoff.

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2018 Garrett Scott Grant
Lucas Habte, Débora Souza Silva

The 2018 Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant has been award to Lucas Habte for Shadow of His Wings and Débora Souza Silva for Black Mothers. The recipients will present excerpts from their works-in-progress prior to the screening of Minding the Gap, directed by 2017 grant recipient Bing Liu.

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306 Hollywood
Elan Bogarín, Jonathan Bogarín

When a brother and sister undertake an archaeological excavation of their late grandmother’s house, they embark on a magical-realist journey in search of what life remains in the objects that are left behind.

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América
Erick Stoll, Chase Whiteside

When their father is unexpectedly arrested, three brothers come together to care for their aging grandmother, América. This sensitive portrait delicately captures the frustrations and connections that evolve as they navigate her physical decline and their expectations of one another.

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America to Me
Steve James

A year-long immersion into one of Chicago’s most progressive and diverse public schools, located in suburban Oak Park. Both intimate and epic, this limited series explores America’s charged state of race, culture and education today with unprecedented depth and scope.

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The Area
David Schalliol

Charismatic activist Deborah Payne tirelessly battles developers of a new multibillion-dollar freight yard that threatens to destroy Englewood, her neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. World Premiere

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The Bastard
Floris-Jan van Luyn

The Hoeks are united in name but severed by history: Ethiopian-born Daniel and his estranged Dutch father, Joop, each tell their story, but who can be trusted in this tangled tale of regret and misdeed?

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Bending Lines: The Sculpture of Robert Wiggs
Peter DeHart, Allison Bohl DeHart

Inspired by the geometry of nature—from the cracks in dried mud to the structure of pine cones to the scales on armadillos—Wiggs’s artistic process reveals the intriguing interplay between mathematics and art. World Premiere

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Bisbee ’17
Robert Greene

In 1917, a strike in an Arizona mining town culminated in the exile of over a thousand immigrant workers. One hundred years later, a large-scale reenactment of the shocking events serves as a catalyst for remembrance and reflection.

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The Blessing
Hunter Robert Baker, Jordan Fein

In this stunningly and candidly shot film, Lawrence, a Navajo coal miner, wrestles with his relationship to land to which he is spiritually bound but employed to destroy, while his daughter, Caitlin, forms her own identity amid cultural pressures. World Premiere

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Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Sara Driver

This portrait of the pop culture icon revisits the years before he took the art world by storm. Archival footage and intimate stories from a circle of friends, lovers, and neighbors recall both a singular talent and the New York City scene that influenced his career.

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Brother’s Keeper
Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky

A murder trial ignites the small farming community of Munnsville, New York, when Delbert Ward, an eccentric and uneducated man, confesses to suffocating his brother in the isolated home they shared with two other brothers. Was the killing an act of mercy? Was Delbert’s confession coerced? In Brother’s Keeper, a surprisingly complicated story emerges.

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Capturing The Flag
Anne de Mare

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, three friends travel to North Carolina to do voter protection work at the polls. This on-the-ground look at their efforts to help potential voters navigate the new laws and requirements that may prevent their vote reveals shocking accounts of voter suppression in play. World Premiere

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Cielo
Alison McAlpine

Enter a wondrous exploration of the meeting of heaven and Earth in this dynamic exchange between humans and the starry skies of Chile’s Atacama Desert.

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The Cleaners
Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

In the Philippines, a team of “cleaners” specialize in identifying and eliminating obscene content from the internet. Their personal accounts of the pressures and personal judgements inherent in their work give way to a broader examination of the global impact of manipulating content on social media.

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Control Room
Jehane Noujaim

It’s 2003, and the United States is on the brink of war with Iraq. Control Room follows journalists of the Al Jazeera satellite channel—broadcasting news to some 40 million Arab viewers—as they try to cut through American rhetoric and awaken the viewers to the realities on the ground.

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Crime + Punishment
Stephen Maing

This powerful film follows twelve brave whistleblowers who speak out against illegal policing quotas in the NYPD and the retaliation they experience after refusing to make arrests targeting minority populations.

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Dark Money
Kimberly Reed

This modern-day political thriller follows investigative reporter John Adams into Montana’s fight against corrupt campaign financing, a struggle that could alter the devastating effects of unlimited anonymous funding on elections nationwide.

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