More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” is a film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives.

This epistolary short film invites us into the unsettling life of a young Ghanaian man struggling to reconcile his love for his mother with his love for same-sex desire amid the increased tensions incited by same-sex politics in Ghana. Focused on a letter that is ultimately filled with hesitation and uncertainty, “Reluctantly Queer” both disrobes and questions what it means to be queer for this man in this time and space.

Created for the Japenese American National Museum’s exhibition, “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience,” this critically acclaimed, award-winning film features haunting compilation of rarely-seen home movies of the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.

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?

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.

“Southern Comfort” tells the story of Robert Eads, a 52-year-old trans man who lives in the back hills of Georgia. “A hillbilly and proud of it,” he says, tobacco pipe in hand. But Robert was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and turned away by more than two dozen doctors for treatment. As his health declines, Robert falls in love with Lola, a trans-woman, and the film becomes a tale of love in the face of transphobia as it unfolds before the camera.