The Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi is seen as a paradise of leisure and pristine natural beauty, but these escapist fantasies obscure the colonial displacement, hyper-exploitation of workers, and destructive environmental extraction that have actually shaped life on the island for the last 250 years. ​Cane Fire​​ critically examines the island’s history—and the various strategies by which Hollywood has represented it—through four generations of director Anthony Banua-Simon’s family, who first immigrated to Kauaʻi from the Phillipines to work on the sugar plantations. Assembled from a diverse array of sources—from Banua-Simon’s observational footage, to amateur YouTube travelogues, to epic Hollywood dance sequences—​Cane Fire offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast indigenous and working-class residents as “extras” in their own story.

100 years of Hawai‘i in film and TV.

Everyday that juxtapose with scenes of resistance from different indigenous communities during a protest in São Paulo. Featuring the narration of Leila Rocha Guarani Nhandeva (indigenous leadership of Yvy Katu/Porto Lindo; Guarani-Kaiowás- Mato Grosso do Sul).

Using found footage with selected images and text from The Marshall Collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A New England Document reconstructs the impulse of two ethnographers’ photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the reparative perspective of its formerly silenced stories.

Using footage from mainstream British and Hollywood films, and excerpts from a poem by Shani Mootoo, this video explores the impact of cultural imperialism and the erasure of language—residual tools of oppression on members of post-colonial societies. Courtesy of Video Data Bank.

Drawing upon a rich repository of images – from digital renderings of Kashmir’s mountains to the textured materiality of 16mm hand-processing and direct animations techniques – 'Letter From Your Far-off Country' maps a hidden vein of shared political commitment and diasporic creative expression, linking a poem by the Kashmiri American writer Agha Shahid Ali with interviews with the filmmaker’s father and a letter addressed to Communist Party leader Prabhakar Sanzgiri, who is also the filmmaker’s distant relative.

A bold aesthetic fueled by music, emotional cutting, and a panoply of visual references poses the question: What does it mean to come from somewhere?

When the fireworks inflame the memory of a war survival.

A new 2K digitization of Harris's archival masterpiece. The film uses clips from Blaxploitation movies, newspapers, and Hollywood films to explore the violence embodied by the white gaze and that projected onto the black. Thanks to Canyon Cinema, Colorlab, Mark Toscano, and the Academy Film Archive.

Despite New York’s status as a sanctuary city, ICE facilities ring and infiltrate the boroughs while its agents continue to make hundreds of arrests every month. Sanctuary highlights this troubling disjunction, and the millions of people threatened by it, through a pointed act of looking at the architectural apparatuses of detention and deportation. As long as ICE persists, there is no true sanctuary.

A quarantine meditation that questions the nostalgia for a land of settlement, where families are divided by policed borders, as told through family roots in Los Angeles.

A middle-aged mother of two reflects on her emotional decision to immigrate to the United States some 30 years earlier, in this reflective documentary short that borrows its title from a uniquely powerful poem by the legendary exiled Cuban writer Lourdes Casal.

Drills is a film about the choreography of preparing for the future. A hybrid documentary and experimental dance film reimagining the form of the Cold War-era, US government-produced social guidance film, Drills asks what futures we are preparing for through the exercises embodying present anxieties. Weaving in between multiple forms of choreography and documentation, Drills restages lockdown and active shooter drills, frames corporate and tech start-up office meditation, and reperforms Boy Scout drills from the 1917 Boy Scout manual.

On the evening of November 16, 2019, they were accidentally trapped in a black wave of demonstrators around central Paris. In Korea in 2020, they rewrote the memory and rearranged the movements and sounds to organize other forms of protest. People begin to gather, and smoke rises.

On August 18, 1971, First Lady Pat Nixon declared a stretch of land along the US-Mexico border a “Friendship Park,” willing two countries toward a common future. As the 50th anniversary of this event approaches, the spirited inauguration hangs above the meeting place like a specter, charged by the border’s harsh realities.

Nearly four years after befriending someone on Facebook with the exact same name as him, filmmaker Lorenzo Benitez ventures to South America to meet the friend he had come to know online.

In 1952, the mayor of San Juan, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, partnered with Eastern Airlines to transport two tons of snow from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico. The snow was a gift, meant to enchant Puerto Ricans with a white, American Christmas. As the spectacle unfolds, an unequal transaction is revealed: planes returning to the U.S. filled with the Puerto Rican cheap labor that would populate el barrio.

The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. “A Demonstration” picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.

Never Rest/Unrest is a hand-held short film by Tiffany Sia about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist's practice of scaling oral history, of showing political crisis in Hong Kong as ephemeral stories on Instagram for the past year. Never Rest/Unrest takes up the provocation of Julio Garcia Espinosa's "Imperfect Cinema" on the potential for anti-colonial filmmaking, aiming towards an urgent, process-driven cinema while resisting dominant narratives of crisis pushed by news journalism. Instead, crisis poses ambiguous, anachronistic and often banal time. Subtitles are intentionally omitted as a means of interrogating the cultural proximity or distance of the viewer from Hong Kong.

On April 6, 1980, the Canadian Farmworkers Union came into existence. This film documents the conditions among Chinese and East Indian immigrant workers in British Columbia that provoked the formation of the union, and the response of growers and labor contractors to the threat of unionization. Made over a period of two years, the film is eloquent testimony to the progress of the workers’ movement from the first stirrings of militancy to the energetic canvassing of union members.