It may be in our nature to distrust banks. We were certainly given plenty of reason in 2008, as the towers of finance came crashing down in the subprime mortgage scandal. But, curiously, as the dust settled, it didn’t appear that any of the nefarious activity would actually be punished. Then charges were filed against one solitary institution: a family-owned bank in New York’s Chinatown called Abacus. The Sung family seemed to be an all-American immigrant success story, but were they really up to no good? Or were they scapegoated while the real offenders walked free? Steve James, the brilliant filmmaker behind Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters, takes us inside the boardroom of Abacus, where a tight-knit family unit prepares to fight for their livelihood, though not without some surprisingly typical internecine squabbles. (DW)

Tultepec, Mexico is known for just one thing: fireworks. The city manufactures more than half of all fireworks made in Mexico, a good percentage of which will be set off at the small town’s annual festival for San Juan de Dios. With that background, you can let statistics fall by the wayside and fully immerse yourself in this spectacular, thunderous film, a true marvel of nonfiction cinema. Employing every trick in the cinematographer’s handbook (and making up a few new ones), Jakovleski keeps his camera in the midst of the action as explosions flower around him and smoke fills the scene. Paired with a symphonic score by Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Brimstone & Glory is an adrenaline-fueled kaleidoscopic thrill ride for the ages. (DW) Presented by Spirit of ’76 Fireworks

Every time he steps into the ring, Joe Carman endangers his marriage, risks losing custody of his kids, and puts his health on the line. Still, the 40-year-old pipefitter can’t stop himself. Joe works all day, trains every night until he collapses, cares for his four adoring daughters (from two marriages), and, after his ailing wife goes to sleep, sneaks away to fight in mixed martial arts matches. Why does Joe do it? Even he doesn’t quite understand. Shot over three years, Unay’s gritty drama starts along a Rocky-like arc before veering into a contemporary tale of working-class strife and toughness. Unay strips any gloss from cage fighting — the battles between these parttime warriors are brutal, not glamorous — as he introduces us to a gentle, wounded soul who searches for validation, and meaning, in no-frills gyms. (JS) Presented with the San Francisco International Film Festival

The story of this beauty pageant princess’ murder holds a lurid place in American popular culture — a recurring standby at the supermarket checkout lane. But unlike those who’ve come before her, smelling dollars in the exploitation of true crime and family loss, Kitty Green is up to something grander. Casting JonBenet may share a starting point with those other tawdry tales, but its technicolor journey is far more ambitious — an effort to engage with the very fabric of American culture. And like a series of Russian nesting dolls, Green’s story unfolds on and off the set of a fictional feature film (or maybe it’s a fictional fictional feature film?). The end product, as sumptuous as anything by David Fincher, is also as emotionally and intellectually satisfying as any film in recent memory. (DW)

A falconer, transporting his prized raptors on a private jet to compete in a tournament in Qatar, guides us through the gold-plated excess of the Arabian Peninsula. The art of falconry is 4,000 years old, but the modern Arab aristocracy live in a world full of modern wonders. T/F alum Yuri Ancarani continues his survey of human gestures in highly regimented settings, giving us a peek at luxury SUVs off-roading on sand dunes, pet cheetahs, and the most blinged-out Harley ever. Spellbinding, fantastic images abound in this meditation on rituals, which launches us into a bird’s-eye-view chase of life and death. (AS) Preceded by a provocation from Linda Tirado.

This exquisite exemplar of deep-focus nonfiction cinema testifies that observational work is alive and well. Our hero, the 14-year-old Ola, is tasked with looking after her brother, Nikodem, as he prepares for his communion. Nikodem’s autistic tics soon become just a small part of a memorable character who’s both mischievous and irreverent. First-time director Anna Zamecka demonstrates her knack for capturing subtle gestures: Ola jostling her brother as he sits uncomfortably in a pew, their mom assembling a crib in an agitated state — and the siblings are seriously good at playing themselves. A capricious, Lonergan-esque tragicomedy, Communion delivers on a great Polish tradition of character-based documentaries. It also reminds us that most teenagers are ready for any challenge. (PS) Preceded by a provocation from Destiny Watford

“Trust me when I tell you that this isn’t another white savior story. This is a white nightmare story,” Travis Wilkerson warns in his sonorous radio voice. Live and in the flesh, Wilkerson leads us on a multimedia trek into the dark basements of family history. In 1946, S.E. Branch — Wilkerson’s great-grandfather — murdered Bill Spann, a black man, in Dothan, Alabama. Buried under years of silence, Wilkerson must play gumshoe detective as he slowly pieces together the historical record. And as he goes deeper, poking at events that nobody seems to want to remember, the historical threats begin to manifest themselves on the lonely highways of present-day Alabama. It’s impossible to go on this journey and not arrive at the conclusion angry, afraid, but also inspired by Wilkerson’s soul-searching. (DW)

Meet Dina. She gets her nails done, she rides the bus, and, once again, she has fallen in love. Despite a “smorgasbord of issues” (her mom’s words), Dina shines, engaged with both the world and her soon-to-be second husband, Scott. The couple’s idiosyncrasies are captured by an empathetic camera as she prepares for her wedding. Yet something lurks in Dina’s heart: a frightening past that she can’t shake. The carefully quirky visuals of an indie rom-com pair with Michael Cera’s bubbly pop-tastic soundtrack to capture the plastic surfaces of a distinctly American landscape. But the heart of the film is a truly unique love story, and Dina herself is a contagious smile, warming her TV-lit bedroom. (DK)

This haunted reverie drops us inside an Istanbul retirement home, where the battle-scarred residents bask in the camera’s attention. A creaky-voiced woman confides her personal account of the Armenian genocide. A sweetly deluded pianist performs a composition before confessing his love. A blind photographer fiddles with his flash as he points his own camera back at us. Shevaun Mizrahi’s playful, immaculately controlled film finds hypnotizing rhythms in the residents’ limbo-like state. Meanwhile, outside this strange and secluded space, ominous construction equipment transforms the landscape. (CB) A T/F Work-In-Progress Screening

Manolo, 73 years old and living a simple life in Spain, holds onto a dream of walking the Trail of Tears with his longtime companion, the donkey Gorrión. But problems start piling up before Manolo can get his pilgrimage off the ground: He has a weak heart, his children worry about him, he doesn’t speak English, and, most devastatingly, he doesn’t have the money to ship Gorrión across the Atlantic. Manolo, though, isn’t one to let minor problems distract him from his quest. He rambles across Andalusia with Gorrión to find some solutions, although the pair might have to confront Gorrión’s fear of water first. With the warmest humor and grace, director Chico Pereira beautifully captures his uncle’s indefatigable spirit as he sets off into the modern world. (AS)

True/False vet Pete Nicks embedded himself in the Oakland Police Department the year its world turned upside down. The Force, the second in a planned trilogy that began with the emergency room drama The Waiting Room, finds the OPD 13 years into a federally mandated reform program. Police chief Sean Whent seemingly has a firm handle on how to turn it around. Nicks follows the well-meaning chief, the department’s beleaguered communications director, and a mayor who races to corral runaway events. So much happens in the gut-punching final act that it could have easily spilled into a miniseries. Beautifully shot and recorded, with extraordinarily expressive editing, The Force is comfortable playing in murky territory and evoking questions left and right. The biggest one being — can any institution be truly reformed? (PS)

La Fémis is France’s most prestigious film school. Currently presided over by Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro), it is the alma mater of many luminaries, including Alain Resnais and Claire Denis. Our True Vision recipient, Claire Simon, resigned from her instructor position in order to create The Graduation, a doggedly observed study of the rigorous yet inevitably subjective mechanisms through which the school selects its class of 40 students. She gains unguarded access to heated behind-the-scenes debates and captures them with characteristically nimble camerawork. Intense, fascinating and often hilarious, her eye-opening film transcends its specific milieu to explore much bigger questions about how we perceive strangers as well as generational and cultural divides. (CB) Presented by Restoration Eye Care

Anita, Andrés, Ricardo, and Rita, who all have Down syndrome, have been attending school for almost 40 years. Although their teachers stress the importance of developing independent life skills, they’re forced into a cloistered existence by the zealous staff, overbearing parents, and the restrictive laws that govern their actions. In the meantime, Anita makes pastries in the school’s bakery and embarks on a relationship with Andrés. T/F alum Maite Alberdi (Tea Time) observes their romance with a candy-colored lens and an astute eye for the ugly limbo that traps all the students. With joyous set pieces and an infectious score, The Grown-Ups valorizes
their struggle for love and autonomy. (AS) Sponsored by Fresh Ideas, Presented with the Miami Film Festival

As a young woman, Gulîstan left Montreal years ago to join the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which fights for Kurdish independence in the face of Daesh. Following in search of her mentor, director Zaynê Akyol brings us a liberating and powerful vision of women risking their lives for their people. These female warriors train in guerrilla tactics and find camaraderie while the film inches closer to, but never quite reaches, a violent confrontation. Patient and self-aware, Akyol elicits mesmerizing interviews about the motivations and fears of the soldiers as the subtle cloak of terror encroaches. What is the cost of our freedom? These brave, beautiful women articulate with passion and clarity reasons we can all admire. (AS) Presented by the Consulate General of Canada

Adam Curtis’ phantasmagoric feats of montage have been bending minds for decades, but never before has he made a film as timely — or as terrifyingly entertaining — as this transcendently menacing essay-poem. Released in the U.K. weeks before Donald Trump was elected, HyperNormalisation unearths improbable connections between the despotic manipulators in post-Soviet Russia, the transformation of Bay Area hippies into Tech Bro utopianists, and the steady turning inward of the Western bourgeoisie. As sprawling as it is plausible, Curtis’ film endeavors to explain how we got here, with the world turned upside down and the stability of knowledge itself called into question. He pulls back the veneer of “proper” political debate, linking Jane Fonda workout tapes to Trump’s fake news and revealing that, in the 21st century, we are all indeed connected — but not in the ways that we think. (DN) The runtime includes a 20-minute intermission.

A gay black man exiled to France at an early age, James Baldwin became the greatest American essayist of the 20th century. Director Raoul Peck celebrates Baldwin’s rich legacy by immersing us in his impactful, soaring words (voiced here by Samuel L. Jackson). Framed as a letter to a publisher, pitching his (never-completed) book about fallen leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, the writer’s eloquent meditations on race and class remain painfully, powerfully relevant in this era of Black Lives Matter. Baldwin also proves to be a scholar of cinema, unpacking the petty prejudices that fueled the Dream Machine. To see Baldwin on The Dick Cavett Show is to confront the inability of white America to come to terms with its brutal history and troubled present. This Oscar-nominated film is a revelatory prophesy, underscoring the unfulfilled promise of our American Dream. (PS)

Twenty years ago, Lindy Lou served on a jury that sentenced Bobby Wilcher to death. In 2006, when Bobby was executed by the state of Mississippi, Lindy Lou was his only visitor. Haunted by Bobby’s death and armed with her Southern charm, Lindy Lou sets off across her home state to track down her fellow jurors and ask them what they remember about the trial. Each of their answers uncovers startlingly different recollections and coping mechanisms. Florent Vassault’s unconventional road trip crisscrosses the backroads and strip malls of the South in a determined consideration of the value of a life. As Lindy Lou reveals the consequences of her friendship with Bobby, this quiet study morphs into a paean to understanding. Vassault offers up a film, suffused with fortitude, that questions our ability to forget and forgive. (AS)

True Vision 2014 recipient Amir Bar-Lev spent 15 years chasing down his bucket-list project: an era-spanning portrait of the iconic counterculture band the Grateful Dead. Unearthing rare film footage, audio recordings, photos and live tracks, Long Strange Trip makes a mind-expanding case for the band as a utopian, cosmic phenomenon. We are plunged deep into the band’s acid-test experiments as leader Jerry Garcia emerges as a humble but driven shaman raised on Beat poetry and Frankenstein movies and transformed by psychedelics. The band’s ambitions are visually expressed in the outlandish Wall of Sound, a concert rig that took nearly all day for its rogue pirate crew to assemble. Over the course of 240 glorious minutes, plus a short intermission, Bar-Lev delivers a miracle to make even nonbelievers grateful. (PS) The runtime includes a 20-minute intermission.

Three bewitching fables of young lovers weave together a poignant exploration of the challenges and persistence of love. Director Alma Har’el is known for her genre-bending, visionary storytelling, including her debut feature Bombay Beach and music videos for Sigur Rós. Here, she mixes tender observational scenes with artful, lush psychodramas, spinning them all together with an ethereal score by Flying Lotus. Blake, a tender-hearted stripper in Alaska, falls for a king of the nerds. Will, a Hawaiian surfer who married young, transforms himself in the face of parenthood. And Victory, a New York City gospel singer, struggles to hold her family together. Using her fluid camera and uncanny ability to construct intimate moments, Har’el both celebrates the power of love and reveals its sometimes harsh reality. (AS)

With both a wink and a clenched fist, Manifesto signals strange and singular things. The incomparable Cate Blanchett shape-shifts across 13 personas, from hobo to scientist — and reinvigorates audacious declarations from the ages. Ideas, unruly and inciting, spill forth from artists and thinkers — from Sol LeWitt to F.T. Marinetti, Karl Marx to Yvonne Rainer, Werner Herzog to Fluxus — each embodied in another clever Blanchett guise. First presented as a site-specific art piece, the new film has a cockeyed, contagious charm that thrusts you onto the barricades while snickering at the absurdity of the effort. Delivering the film’s credo, schoolteacher Blanchett invokes director Jim Jarmusch, admonishing her young charges, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.” (PS)

True Vision recipient Claire Simon films her friend Mimi Chiola with a comfortable camaraderie as the pair stroll through the streets of Mimi’s hometown of Nice and the mountain village of Saorge. Encounters with strangers and friends offer surprising discussions of trains, a rap performance, and casual serenades. These chance meetings frame Mimi’s recollections of her childhood, full of serendipitous and strange occurrences, and her enchanting life. Holding fast to an ease that mimics the rhythms of daily life, Simon resists any urge to simplify Mimi’s life into a linear narrative, allowing her on-screen persona to manifest into something beguiling in her charisma and striking in complexity. This masterpiece is bighearted, star-making portraiture of the highest order. (AS)

Shot entirely from a kid’s-eye perspective, this charming, tender film is like a nature documentary, with a Dutch elementary school as savannah and students as the wild things. The directors focus on three children — the domineering yet sensitive Haya; Jorj, an exuberant boy who struggles with his studies; and the soulful, surprisingly fierce Leanne. All three are refugees from the Syrian civil war, and the film celebrates as they learn their ABCs, discover a few things about the inscrutable machinery of society, and, at times, demonstrate wisdom of their own. The lanky Miss Kiet only occasionally bends into frame, but her voice, heard off-screen, reveals an everyday hero: patient, firm, creative, adoring. By the end of the school year, she has steered her flock through troubled territory toward confidence, knowledge, and, yes, love. (JS)

Epic in scope but finely etched in its details, Quest introduces an American family unique in cinema history. First-time director Jonathan Olshefski spent a decade following Christopher “Quest” Rainey and Christine’a, aka “Ma Quest,” who run a basement recording studio in their tight-knit North Philadelphia neighborhood. Olshefski originally set out to capture this unusual community project but was present as the Raineys’ endearing daughter, PJ, gradually came of age. Breathtakingly intimate, tenderly assembled, and rich with the drama of life, Quest sets a new bar for the labor-of-love film. Framed by presidential elections, it also serves as a bittersweet elegy for the Obama era in all its frustrated promise. (PS) Presented by The Crossing

Shot over eight years on every active line of the Thai railway system, Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s transfixing debut seamlessly collapses its footage to simulate a two-day, two-night journey through the country. Gently and gracefully, the camera eavesdrops on its subjects, cherishing the small and sublime: an exhausted body leaning against a rattling compartment; young children hunched over homework assignments; a passenger stunned by the landscape, wind blowing through his hair, light streaming on his face. The richly textured sound design is equally transporting. As Railway Sleepers miraculously shifts our sense of time, it presents a class-conscious survey of the nation. (CB)

Rats, the most under-loved rodents on the planet, live in the shadows, mostly confined to cages, sewers, and trash cans. What does the ghettoization of rats tell us about our own species? In his feature-film debut, director Theo Anthony creates a sweeping map of Baltimore through this denigrated animal. An eerie, futuristic narrator guides you on your journey through the streets of the city, stopping in an alley where rats are baited with peanut-butter-wrapped lunch meat and inside a 3D simulation of the life of a caged pet. Each sharp scene coalesces into a precise, poetic portrait: a dystopian underworld of rats intersecting with a human environment determined to control these furry varmints, affecting every other living being within the city limits. (DK) Preceded by a provocation from Sarah Jeong.

A camera glides, barely noticed, across a French playground. Young boys and girls, aged 4 to 6, shout and run and play with abandon. As the camera settles in on their actions, we see an unassailable truth: Kids are vicious. There is pushing and hair grabbing, kicking and punching, theft for theft’s sake and tempestuous storms that disappear as quickly as they appear. But amidst the everyday cruelty, there are also moments of wild creative joy, teamwork, and true altruism. Simon, the silent master of pointed observation, knows exactly where to point her camera and for how long. This masterclass reminds us how small a documentary subject can be and how the great filmmakers can take a scene that we might overlook and, through careful observation, capture something transcendent. (DW)

Russian drivers depend on dashboard cameras to provide video proof when filing insurance claims and police reports. Composed entirely of dash-cam videos pulled from YouTube, this road trip takes us on a raucous, expletive-laden and very occasionally hopeful tour of the Russian countryside. Out of this wreckage, director Dmitrii Kalashnikov deftly crafts a nightmare of epic proportions, full of eye-popping sights and morbid beauty, such as an endless burning forest, a runaway wedding guest, and countless rounds of car crashes. Masterful editing and a keen sense of poetic justice add up to a dire warning of the future. Just try not to laugh as we all go down in flames. (AS) Preceded by a provocation from Stacy Kranitz.

Austrian master Ulrich Seidl turns his steely gaze on a hunters’ lodge in Namibia, where he finds his countrymen participating in a pathetic colonialist fantasy. With the aid of skilled guides, a family of pale-faced, khaki-donning Europeans hunts majestic animals. Impalas, zebras, and more meet their end in this carefully rigged sport, their carcasses then polished and proudly placed in the family home. To his great credit, Seidl doesn’t allow us to smugly judge this spectacle from a distance. Rather, with skin-crawling intensity (and the occasional jolt of pitch-black humor), he forces us to viscerally wrestle with the system in which the hunters operate. Plays with “Describe What You Heard,” an ingenious provocation about our country’s gun violence epidemic from Jason Tippet (Only the Young) and Joe Callander (“Tina Delivers a Goat”). (CB)

A fierce and fiery document of our time, Secret Screening Argon embeds us with a band of not-so-merry pranksters. They seek independence from all that has transpired before. Political bands dissolve, separation is impelled, and questions rage like signal fires in the night. What is autonomy? Where are the limits of freedom? Do we have to like our neighbors? (PS)

Deftly structured and doggedly directed, Secret Screening Xenon scrutinizes the slippery nature of images as we accompany an outlandish figure crossing an ethical Rubicon. Proud and ruthless, they set in motion a series of events that quickly swirls out of control. (PS)

“Antonio, Dashing Antonio” (dir. Ana Maria Gomes, 42 min.), a cultural divide story, begins in a Portuguese village where a caustic clan holds court on a long-disappeared black sheep. Who will extradite the mysterious Antonio from swinging Brazil? “Edith+Eddie” (dir. Laura Checkoway, 30 min.) introduces us to the oldest interracial newlyweds in the U.S. While hobbling and a little spacey, the couple is clearly in love. Then a snake enters their Garden in the form of Edith’s daughter, leading to a jaw-dropping conclusion. A lovingly told story done right, “Edith+Eddie” is a ride on the best kind of emotional rollercoaster. (PS)

Borders are drawn, inspected and crossed in this shorts program; beware of turbulence. We open on an optimistic note with “Deer Squad: The Movie” (dirs. Pipus Larsen, Kenneth Gug, Scott J. Ross, 5, min), in which Kelvin Peña amasses a following of deer friends in his Pennsylvania backyard, then travel to rural Turkey, where a mismatched film crew guns for international acclaim in “If Only There Were Peace” (dirs. Deniz Tortum, Carmine Grimaldi, 30 min.). We stick with director Grimaldi, who introduces us to “The Beast” as he takes us on an unsettling tour of our nation’s foreclosed homes in, take a deep breath, “Servicing Guide: Fannie Mae Single Family, Subpart A4-2.1-02, Property Inspection Vendor Management and Oversight (11/12/2014)” (dir. Carmine Grimaldi, 13 min.). Keep sifting through the refuge with “The Diver” (dir. Esteban Arrangoiz, 16 min.) about a dedicated worker who regularly submerges himself in a sea of waste to maintain Mexico City’s sewer system. Finally, “Best of Luck with the Wall” (dir. Josh Begley, 8 min.) is a dazzling, dizzying tour of the long border separating Mexico from its paranoid neighbor.

Family is constantly being redefined: these three inspired works go post-nuclear. In “one of the roughs, a kosmos” (dir. Carmine Grimaldi, 21 min.), Grimaldi turns his kinetic camera on the enigmatic world of an imaginative girl who tends sheep. Next, Ron and Maria Domont met at an AA meeting, fell in love and started a family of four. Decades later, the family remains happily intact, but there’s a surprising new addition. In the droll and tender “All Good Things” (dir. Chloe Domont, 26 min.), daughter Chloe stakes out fresh territory in the personal documentary canon. The surprisingly sweet “Happy Happy Baby” (dir. Jan Soldat, 22 min.) introduces us to the strange world of adult babies.

Even in dark times, it pays to look on the bright side of life. In “The Hollow Coin” (dir. Frank Heath, 12 min.), a man attempts to rescue a special nickel from a NYC phone booth. “Polonaise” (dir. Agnieszka Elbanowska, 16 min.) transports us to a quirky Polish village, home of a “patriotism contest.” Another misbegotten exercise in civic pride unfolds in the dark comedy “Balloonfest” (dir. Nathan Truesdell, 6 min.). “Commodity City” (dir. Jessica Kingdon, 10 min.) peers into the stalls of China’s Yiwu Market, where thousands of vendors hawk toys, trinkets and other tiny goods. Full of delightful tangents, “A Brief History of Princess X” (dir. Gabriel Abrantes, 7 min.) revisits the legacy of Brâncusi bronze of Maria Bonaparte. “Fish Story” (dir. Charlie Lyne, 14 min.) is a witty work of reportage investigating the fishiness of memory. In the chilling “Project X” (dirs. Laura Poitras, Henrik Moltke, 11 min.), we return to the windowless Manhattan skyscraper from “The Hollow Coin” and discover its creepy backstory.

Youth is not wasted on the young in these four tactile portraits. A masterful, alluring work, “The Rabbit Hunt” (dir. Patrick Bresnan, 12 min.) takes us to a sugar farm in rural Florida, where a high school senior deploys his troops with tactical precision. We cross the Atlantic for “My Daughter Nora” (dir. Jasna Krajinovic, 16 min.), a riveting close-up portrait of a brave mother in the aftermath of her daughter’s sudden decision to join the fight in Syria. We next land in Tunisia, where young boys break dance, hop trains, and contemplate escape in the slice-of-life “Fares” (dir. Thora Lorentzen, 21 min.). Finally, with “Koropa” (dir. Laura Henno, 19 min.), we find ourselves in the dark Indian Ocean, where a young orphan is learning how to covertly pilot speedboats full of migrants.

Blessin, Tayla, and Cori were only 12 when they first met, all newly enrolled at a Baltimore charter school. That first year, they formed a dance team, channeling their enthusiasm, frustrations, hopes, and fears into the precise rhythmic dance form known as “step.” That same year, Amanda Lipitz showed up with her camera, hoping to tell their stories. Six years later, they are seniors, each still working to attend college but also wrestling with real life along the way. And, though their step team has matured into a powerhouse, they’ve never won the prestigious Bowie State competition. Director Lipitz displays expert storytelling chops in her feature debut,
delivering a deeply satisfying dance narrative while finding ways to surprise at every turn, especially as we meet each girl’s mother. Step is a joyous film, full of moments that will make you grin, make you cry, and 100 percent make you want to dance. (DW) Presented by Veterans United Home Loans

Yu Xiuhua was raised to hope for little from her life in the rural Chinese province of Hubei. At 19, Xiuhua’s mother encouraged her to marry a man nearly twice her age, fearful no one else would accept a wife with Xiuhua’s condition — cerebral palsy. But as her 20th anniversary approaches, Xiuhua’s poetry goes viral, and she becomes the voice of a rising feminist movement throughout China. Director Fan Jian’s deeply affecting portrait traces an empowered woman coming to terms with the complications of finding her own identity in the midst of becoming a celebrity. As she balances those in her family, including her husband, who expected too little of her with the pressures of newly found allies expecting too much, Xiuhua learns to define herself in her own words. (NB)

On the island of Sicily, a man stands at the front of a classroom. He is the textbook illustration of a European: tall and handsome, blond-haired and blue-eyed. There’s a seductive twinkle in his eye, and when he speaks, it’s difficult to discern if he’s genuine. He is staring at a room full of undocumented refugees. Over the next spellbinding hour, he convincingly takes on a monumental role — the entire continent of Europe — as he looks them in the eyes and addresses their plight. His persuasively argued solutions needle both the isolationist and the humanitarian — a true devil’s advocate. Channeling the sly, ferocious energy of early Peter Watkins, director Guido Hendrikx brilliantly dismantles every viewer’s understanding of our world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis. (CB) Preceded by a provocation from Sarah Kendzior. Presented with CPH:DOX

The best documentary mysteries are rarely about the “who” and more often about the “why.” Strong Island, the debut film from former T/F swami Yance Ford, mines his intense personal history of growing up on Long Island in the ’80s, with a focus on the murder of his brother and the shockwaves it sent through their entire family. A detailed and somber story of race and racism, Strong Island also explores the delicacy of family webs and how even the strongest of strands can be torn. Ford’s filmmaking is precise and artful, pairing minimalist but exquisite camerawork with one of the most effective scores of the year (by Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir and Scottish composer Craig Sutherland). Strong Island pulls emotions to the surface from deep within, and their emergence is all the most radical and unforgettable for it. (DW)

Frustrated, confused and isolated by their own sexual experiences, the filmmakers Mette Carla Albrechtsen and Lea Glob host a casting call, inviting young women in Copenhagen to talk about their sexual history. One hundred women showed up, and their performances, testimonies full of vulnerability and bravery, evolve into an expectation-defying, wholly authentic experience. They express their fears, doubts, desires, and triumphs in ways that strike a universal chord, particularly in a courageous and tender final act. The film and the women impart a fearless survey that confronts the 100-year history of cinema’s male gaze. Even as we expect women to be more liberated than ever before, the stories of Venus offer a complex, nuanced, and often inspiring perspective. (AS)

Syrian radio DJ Obaidah Zytoon and her friends are caught up in the revolutionary energy of the Arab Spring, taking to the streets to protest the government and road tripping to where the action is. Along the way, they fall in love, adopt a dog, make a pilgrimage to the ocean, and learn how much they are willing to sacrifice for a new Syria. But as the hopeful bloom of the revolution fades, Zytoon’s camera continues to bravely document their lives — including the bittersweetness of exile for those lucky enough to escape. The destruction, both psychic and physical, is immense but never quite manages to extinguish the spark of life that these young people hold tight. The War Show reminds us of the dangerous necessities of keeping the cameras running and celebrates the persistence of its subjects. (AV)

In 2014, protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, filled the streets after the shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson. While the national news focused on footage of teens looting a QuikTrip, a more dramatic and intense story was unfolding: a community coming to terms with years of grief and rage. Folayan and Davis’s clear-eyed, impassioned, and forceful documentary drops us into a community broken by the stark realities of racism and police brutality. But more than a mere exposé, Whose Streets? suggests a way forward, celebrating the emergence of a strong collective of inspiring, tireless community activists including David, a father who monitors police with his video camera, and Brittany, a registered nurse who combines the patience of Gandhi with the fierceness of Malcolm X. With nothing to gain except justice, these young civil rights leaders risk their bodies to fight, with galvanizing success, for equal access to the American Dream. This is what heroism looks like. (JS)