Blog

Brett Story and Stephen T. Maing’s 2024 documentary Union details the story and struggle of members at Amazon’s JFK8 facility in their historic attempt to form a labor union. The documentary seems to be primarily interested in giving viewers a front row seat to the action as the movement develops, revolving specifically around Chris Smalls, the charismatic and ultimately divisive founder of the...

We’re told from the beginning that assimilation is the golden ticket. Learn the language, pick up the customs, and voilà; you’re in. You belong. Except, as Arjun Talwar shows in his documentary Letters from Wolf Street (2025), it’s not that simple. No matter how polished your assimilation act is, you’ll always be seen, and treated, as an outsider. I wanted to explore the strange paradox of...

Vibeke Løkkeberg’s The Long Road to the Director’s Chair intertwines the female body and political agency by revealing how European women in the 1970s film industry negotiated their professional lives and bodily autonomy within the patriarchal structure. While interviewing these women about their experiences, many of them mention unstable jobs and income, the lack of assertiveness or...

     Ewan Waddell’s documentary The Longer You Bleed not only captures the physical destruction of war; it also explores another, less visible front—the battlefield of the mind. The film illustrates how individuals cope with the psychological strain of conflict, where simply maintaining daily life and refusing to give in becomes a form of resistance. Instead of portraying civilians...

At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking (2024) directed by Maja Novaković, follows the isolated life of an elderly man in the cutting landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Each movement, set against the boundless line of the snowy horizon, is transformed into a series of dreamlike symbols. Feelings of loneliness and seclusion somehow sit alongside intimacy and peaceful imagination,...

High heels on snow. Across a white horizon, a frail figure, all corset and ruff, moves forward. The ice crunches beneath her feet. In a single shot, Agniia Galdanova captures the heart of her film: Jenna Marvin's poetry of contrasts and the Russian queer artist’s struggle to live in a hostile environment.

What happens to a people’s spirit when they are displaced and uprooted from their land over and over again? Their children grow up to become activists. This is the premise of No Other Land, a documentary about the resistance and resilience of the inhabitants of Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian hamlets in the occupied West Bank. The official reason for demolishing the region was to make...

The 2024 Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival showcased three debut films by young Armenian filmmakers, each offering a poignant exploration of the human toll of the violence, ethnic cleansing, and mass displacement caused by the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Set against the backdrop of the 2020 Second Karabakh War and the brutal 2023 attacks by Azerbaijan, these films...

Land for as far as the eyes can see. From the window of the car carrying Vrej and his family, it’s hard to identify borders. And yet, for the breakaway republic of Artsakh, repeatedly under attack from Azerbaijan, it’s what matters most. With My Sweet Land, Sareen Hairabedian documents war and exile through the keen eyes of a child.