In this genre-defying, centuries-spanning work by renowned video artist Kahlil Joseph – director of Beyoncé’s Lemonade – Black history blends provocatively with Afro-futurism. Sundance, Berlinale 2025. Known for his collaborations with the likes of Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar, Joseph in his latest piece takes inspiration from the Encyclopedia Africana, a sprawling compendium of African history, art and culture. In an alternate future, a host of characters board the transatlantic liner The Nautica, a biennial at sea, where they’ll experience the star attraction, The Resonant Field. This sonic installation echoes the Black collective memory from the seabed below, memorialising lives lost to the Atlantic slave trade. Structured like a mixtape, Joseph’s episodic film layers archival material with social media and YouTube samples, weaving personal and political history. The bold vision of BLKNWS is cerebral, transgressive and even playful.

Les Blank creates a vivid portrait of bluesman Lightin’ Hopkins through a vital collection of musical performances and oral histories. Hot Pepper is a thrilling musical portrait of Zydeco King Clifton Chenier, who combines the pulsating rhythms of Cajun dance music, African overtones, and bluesy R&B into an irresistible mélange mixed up in the sweaty juke joints of South Louisiana.

Based on a true story, the 1977 kidnapping of a prominent banker grips the nation and turns the abductor into an outlaw folk hero. As the media frenzy peaks, the standoff becomes a spectacle of desperation, defiance and blurred justice, which resonates even today.

Generation Growth tells the story of Green Bronx Machine and its founder, Stephen Ritz, as they grow high performing public schools, happy & healthy children, empowered teachers, and equitable, resilient communities across the nation.

Enter the world of undisturbed birth as 11 couples share their intimate personal journeys, facing their fears and moving through pain into the ecstasy of birth. Orgasmic Birth poses the ultimate challenge to our cultural myths.

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag ball scene. Made over seven years, Paris Is Burning offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion “houses,” from fierce contests for trophies, to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia and transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty. Featuring legendary voguers, drag queens, and trans women—including Willi Ninja, Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Venus Xtravaganza—Paris Is Burning brings it, celebrating the joy of movement, the force of eloquence, and the draw of community.

A high school A/V assignment goes full-on activist when English teacher Fred Isseks sends students, armed with video recorders, on an investigative assignment to suss out the brown muck surfacing at the local dump in their upstate New York town. The toxicity they discover lives not only in the landfill, but in political corruption and environmental injustice in their community. Archival footage of their 1996 class project, “Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed,” outtakes, diaries, and interviews with Fred and several students 30 years later weave a sobering yet buoyant story both timely and for the ages, about fighting the good fight as its own life-changing triumph.

The Beaches of Agnès is a movie starring Agnès Varda, André Lubrano, and Blaise Fournier. Agnès Varda explores her memories, mostly chronologically, with photographs, film clips, interviews, reenactments, and droll, playful contemporary scenes of her narrating her story.

Brought up in an environment torn apart by violence and alcohol, Lidia Yuknavitch seemed destined for self-destruction and failure until words offered her unexpected freedom in the form of literature. The Chronology of Water, adapted from Yuknavitch’s autobiographical bestseller, follows Lidia’s journey to find her own voice in an exploration of how trauma can be transformed into art through re-possessing our own bloody histories, particularly those uniquely experienced by the bodies of women and girls.

Cantankerous, charismatic and passionately committed, this river keeper — John Lipscomb — reflects on his 25 years patrolling the Hudson, traveling more than 80,000 miles, by wooden boat, helping defend America’s First River. (dir. Jon Bowermaster, U.S.) Jon Bowermaster is an oceans expert, journalist, writer, filmmaker, adventurer and six-time grantee of the National Geographic Expeditions Council. One of the Society's 'Ocean Heroes,' his first assignment for National Geographic Magazine was documenting a 3,741 mile crossing of Antarctica by dogsled. He is the founder of Oceans 8 Films and the One Ocean Media Foundation, making films about climate at home in the Hudson Valley and around the world. His podcast, "The Green Radio Hour with Jon Bowermaster” on Radio Kingston has recorded over 150 episodes with environmental activists, community leaders and friends from his vast rolodex of travels.