It is estimated that more than one million Mexicans can trace some of their ancestry back to the African slaves brought to North America by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th and 17th centuries. This documentary short by Tiffany Walton and Lizz Mullis focuses on a community in the Los Angeles area of Afro-Mexican heritage.
Among the many heroes of the civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer stands out as a burst of spirit and power in the face of unthinkable forces. Robin N. Hamilton’s documentary short offers a brief yet effective portrait of a woman who rose from the poverty of Mississippi sharecropping to challenging the Democratic Party’s embrace of racist politics.
Andrew Leavold, a cult video store owner, goes on the search for a mysterious movie star from the Philippines, the 2’9” action star Weng Weng who did less than a dozen films but left a huge mark on his fans. Leavold through his documentary shows the star’s childhood, rise, and fall until his untimely death. Written by Andrew Leavold and Daniel Palisa (as Daniel Haig) and directed by Leavold, it follows its director’s journey from Australia to the Weng Weng’s native Philippines where he finds footage of the star he had never seen, movies he had never heard about, and plenty of people ready to talk about the star.
Christo Roppolo is a former filmmaker who now sees UFOs. Through interviews with him and people around him and videos he took of what he claims to be UFOs, this documentary explores his history of UFO sightings, how it has affected his life, how he almost preaches about them, and how he is seen as he basically obsesses over these sightings and what they may mean. Roppolo reached out to director Justin Gear by sending him hours and hours of video from his sightings and investigations of them. Gear takes this footage and mixes it with interviews of Roppolo and his neighbors, friends, and people of his town to show what he sees or claims to see with experiences from others and feelings directly from the source.
Dutch filmmakers Joey Boink and Sander Wirken helmed this documentary on the efforts of Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz to bring justice to her country during her 2010-2014 term. Some of the problems that she faced were cultural – Guatemalan prosecutors were traditionally unenthusiastic about challenging narco-crime gangs, the nation’s notorious human rights abuses and even domestic violence cases – and other were the result of plain stupidity, most notably the proliferation of misspellings in the national crime database.
Filmed thirty two years ago, Diego Echeverria’s documentary “Los Sures” is a striking and mesmerizing look at living in poverty in Brooklyn New York in 1984. Finally restored and given a long overdue theatrical release in 2016 to a wide release, “Los Sures” is a still very relevant look at impoverished and how those without opportunities are frozen in place in a neighborhood becoming more and more foreign to them. Diego Echeverria offers almost no narration and absolutely no soundtrack, instead painting the film with the sounds and sights of Williamsburg Brooklyn. The neighborhood dominated with a heavy Puerto Rican and Dominican population, Echeverria offers up a brief look in to the lives of four subjects, all of whom have no exit from their environment.
One of the many aspects that I love about Ray Comfort’s mercifully short documentary about challenging the views of atheists is that Comfort just eventually gives up. Mid-way through his hour long masturbatory self-promotion fest that doubles as an ego shining for Comfort, he just outright gives up trying to convince his interview subjects and spends about five minutes badgering them in to submission. He relentlessly bugs them in to admitting begrudgingly that they believe in a God, and that they are simply in denial. Ray Comfort is beyond the capacity of accepting that atheists exist, and spends at least a good stretch of the final half of the film insisting: “Come on, you know God exists. Admit it. Admit it. You know it in your heart. You just like to sin, that’s it. Admit it. Do it. Do it!”