‘We Are Here’ Documentary Short Reflects On The Meaning Of Citizenship – Sundance

Sex and the City revival And Just Like That... is set to air this Thursday, but that doesn't mean we're done with the series just yet.

And Just Like That… fans are about to get exclusive secrets from the making of the show. It's getting an HBO Max documentary.And Just Like That… The Documentary is set to premiere on Feb.

Directed by Paula Eislet and Tonya Lewis Lee (Spike Lee’s producer and partner), the documentary “Aftershock” chronicles the dismal maternal mortality rate that women of color face in the United States medical system. The statistics are shameful, pointing to a systemic racist indifference, and the documentary chronicles the staggering number of times that expectant mothers entering into hospitals simply do not come out alive due to a lack of care and sensitivity.

In 1973, at the age of 23, Korean immigrant Chol Soo Lee was arrested. An outsider within San Francisco’s Chinatown, Lee was charged with first-degree murder after being accused of shooting a Chinese gang member in the back at point-blank range.

A dreamlike exploration of toxic masculinity, new motherhood, and sexual awakening, Quebecois actor-director Monia Chokri debuted her second feature, “Babysitter,” at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. While it’s unclear what “Babysitter” is actually trying to say — or even what its characters learn over the course of its plot — the film is so thoroughly sardonic that it gleefully resists any deeper meaning.

“My Old School,” a documentary by Jono McLeod, opens with an enticing montage. Interviewees speak ominously about a mysterious character who’s done something strange — a man who may even be unhinged enough to have changed his identity through facial reconstruction.

If you’ve never been to Sundance before, you can expect a lot of fresh features from oft-marginalized directors and — at least these days — films shot with square aspect ratios. “Girl Picture,” a delightful, Finnish coming-of-age tale by the director Alli Haapasalo, fulfills both criteria.

said upon introducing the awards ceremony. “This year’s festival expressed a powerful convergence; we were present, together, as a community connected through the work. And it is work that has already changed those who experienced it,” festival director Tabitha Jackson added.

Filmmaker Jamie Dack is no stranger to film festivals. Her short film about teenage malaise in suburban Southern California “Palm Trees and Power Lines” premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival as a Cinéfondatio selection.

“We grew up in Atlanta and in the church. Like in the height of Southern Baptist megachurches.

If two people who lack a common language want to communicate, they’ll find a way to communicate. The characters in “blood,” the first new film from Bradley Rust Gray in a decade, don’t exactly lack a common language, but coltish English and crummy Japanese necessitate auxiliary tools for communication, such as food, dance, music, flowers, and art.

Oscar-nominated RBG directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen are to tell the extraordinary story of U.S. congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ remarkable perseverance following an assassination attempt.

“Have you ever felt vertigo looking into the sky?” Nadeem Shahzad asks over voiceover roughly fifteen minutes into “All That Breathes.” The accompanying shot looks straight up into a sunny yet smog-streaked sky as a swirl of black kites swoops and careens overhead. The birds are numerous, too many to count, but their movements are mesmerizing.

In May 1948, after the controversial approval of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, war broke out between Arab and Jewish factions in the region. The conflict began due to claims over the same land.

Addie Morfoot ContributorThis year at the Sundance Film Festival, three feature documentaries — Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” Reid Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” and Isabel Castro’s “Mija” — share in common a $10,000 grant provided by the Points North Institute and CNN Films’ American Stories Documentary Fund.Launched in 2020, the fund underwritten by CNN has dispensed a total of $100,000 in grants to emerging U.S. filmmakers working on 10 documentary projects that highlight pivotal moments in America. Eiselt and Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” and Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” are two of nine films in the Sundance U.S.

NEW YORK -- Can a music scene still develop the way grunge did in 1990's Seattle or hip-hop did in the Bronx in the 1970s? Or has the digital makeover of music made such geographical-based explosions obsolete?It's a question that hovers over the Sundance Film Festival documentary “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” a vivid and shambolic time capsule of early 2000s New York when bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, the Strokes, Interpol and LCD Soundsystem made the city — and Brooklyn in particular — one the last easily identifiable hotbeds of rock music.The film, which debuted Sunday at Sundance, is directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, and adapted from Lizzy Goodman’s book, “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011." Focusing mainly on the first handful of those years, the documentary is an ode to an already far-gone era when a wave of bands revitalized New York's music scene, capturing the gritty romance of the city. Brief interludes of news footage hint at a broader digital narrative forming largely outside the scene's bubble: Y2K fears, the onset of Napster, the introduction of the iPod.“One of the things we kept asking is: Is it even possible for a scene to emerge in one place with such intensity?” Southern, who with Lovelace made the 2012 LCD Soundsystem documentary “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” said in a recent interview.

Bookended by a near-identical juxtaposition of sound and fury, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” starts and ends like a messy, wannabe Jules Dassin cityscape film seen through a grunge filter. “Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus, Manhattan faces, and eyes, forever for me,” our narrator reads as we see riotous anger take to the streets.

“I’d rather have one person dance in my car than have 100 people with the song on in the background” late-night radio DJ, Naz (Naz Kawakami), tells his friend. The young man hosts a show called “Night Drive,” on 90.1 FM Honolulu, “the show that makes you feel cool when you’re driving at night, the show where you actually are as you speed down the freeway going about your misdeeds.” Beginning production in November 2020 as a sort of documentary/fiction hybrid, native Hawaiian filmmaker Alika Tengan’s “Every Day In Kaimukī,” is an admirable and well-intended debut, though it’s far more successful in its vibe than it is in establishing an artistic voice with command over narrative.

As you’ve hopefully heard by now, and read our review, the Sundance film, “Something In The Dirt” is a big hit. From filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who I like to describe as DIY versions of Christopher Nolan—that is to say ambitious, cerebral, complex sci-fi, horror, and genre films, but done on a lo-fi scale—“Something In The Dirt” is a swirl of all their previous heady, high-concept ideas, but with a big dose of humor and a deep look at the world of phenomenon, conspiracy theories and even pareidolia or apophenia (essentially the phenomenon of seeing patterns, consistencies and correlations of things that just aren’t there).

Opening on a slide show in an empty classroom, a storm thundering away outside, black and white frontier images flicker. They feature carriages, trains, and indigenous persons communicating with settlers; miners, hunters, and cavalry troops: a romantic portrait of Manifest Destiny.