“Spit on the Broom” is a surrealist documentary that explores the margins of the history of the African American women’s group the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization of black women organized in the 1840s during the height of the Underground Railroad. The film uses excerpts from the public record, newspaper articles related to the Tents from over the course of 100 years, and a visual tapestry of fable and myth as a way to introduce a history that remains secret.

A pioneering, ahead-of-its-time work in the development of the autobiographical documentary, Jonathan Caouette’s cathartic film diary swirls together Super 8 and VHS home movies, answering machine messages, family photographs, and other records of a lifetime. It tells the story of Caouette’s tumultuous childhood, his coming out as gay, and his complex relationship with his schizophrenic mother, a former beauty queen whose life was derailed by the electroshock treatments she received in her youth.

In “Tonsler Park,” Kevin Jerome Everson trains his black-and-white 16 mm camera on the activity around voting precincts in Charlottesville, Virginia (future site of the infamous white supremacist Unite the Right rally), on Election Day, November 8, 2016—a day that would prove pivotal in the course of American democracy. Capturing, in detail, the vital work of mostly Black civil servants and citizens engaging in the democratic process, Everson pointedly centers their participation in a system that has long sought to disenfranchise them.

With unprecedented access, filmmakers Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson enter the closed corridors of the INS to reveal the dramatic real-life stage where human rights and American ideals collide with the nearly impossible task of trying to know the truth. The law says asylum can be offered if someone has a well-founded fear of persecution. Three times a day, the job is to decide the applicants’ fates. Political asylum—who deserves it? Who gets it? Who decides?