Synopsis

This bold, original Chicago drama, newly restored for its 25th anniversary, follows two love stories set in the city’s Black community. Although they’re set nearly a century apart, they also echo each other in salient ways. Both star deaf actress Michelle A. Banks and Exhibiting Forgiveness star John Earl Jelks, and each tracks a unique couple as they confront the specter of parallel pandemics—tuberculosis in the first story; AIDS in the second—and a complex set of intersecting challenges involving issues of race, gender, class, education, and ability.

Innovatively crafted and shot in luminous black-and-white, the film blends archival footage of early 20th century Black Chicago with silent movie techniques like ornate title cards and a ragtime score. Inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem of the same title, Zeinabu irene Davis’s debut feature is a time capsule of two eras and a graceful and universal tale of love, tragedy, and Black American life.

Synopsis

Conclave follows one of the world’s most secretive and ancient events – selecting the new Pope. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is tasked with running this covert process after the unexpected death of the beloved Pope. Once the Catholic Church’s most powerful leaders have gathered from around the world and are locked together in the Vatican halls, Lawrence uncovers a trail of deep secrets left in the dead Pope’s wake, secrets which could shake the foundations of the Church.

Synopsis

Ahmad is an aging trans man who has long suppressed his desire for other men, fearing stigma and questioning if his gender identity and sexuality are at odds. He turns to an LGBTQ archive for answers, digging through oral histories and interviews from trans men past and present. He immerses himself so deeply in the archive that he begins to time travel through it, living among stories and activism that crack open binary notions around gender identity and sexual desire. Aided by these stories — and by a young trans archivist — Ahmad begins to unravel his own complicated identity. In Desire Lines, narrative and documentary intertwine to relate a dizzying quest towards personal and collective trans liberation.

Synopsis

It’s late October at Soldiers Field, and two scruffy adult baseball teams in New England are ready to play one last game on their beloved turf before it’s demolished. But Eephus, like the unexpectedly slow curveball it’s named for, is far from straightforward. You might recognize the quaint setting, the “final big game” framework, or characters like Ed, an ornery old pitcher, and Graham, the forthright Riverdogs coach. But director Carson Lund is pitching something different here. The two teams remain neck and neck, daylight turns to dusk, team members have to leave to go home to their families, and yet the game goes on. Eephus is less about baseball and more of a leisurely look at suburban life, the foibles of middle-age masculinity, and the passing of time. Smartly written, occasionally very funny, and entirely unique, it’s a delightful and nostalgic portrait of a fading America.

Synopsis

Where does a democracy end and a theocracy begin? Oscar-nominated filmmaker Petra Costa (The Edge of Democracy) investigates the increasingly powerful grip that evangelicals hold over politics in Brazil, home to one of the largest and swiftest religious shifts in human history. As Costa tells us in her haunting and insightful voiceover, evangelicals have risen from some 5% to 30% of the Brazilian population in just 40 years.

With extraordinary access to the country’s top leaders, including President Lulu da Silva, former President Jair Bolsonaro, and Bolsonaro’s right-hand man, popular Pentecostal televangelist Silas Malafaia, Costa offers a lucid, poetic, and chilling look at the ways in which fear, poverty, and apocalyptic theology can be exploited to consolidate power. It’s a brilliant and gripping case study about the precarity of contemporary democracies with clear resonances in the U.S. today.