An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans,...
An immersive and enthralling journey through the Sonoran Desert on the U.S.-Mexico border, El Mar La Mar weaves together harrowing oral histories from the area with hand-processed 16mm images of flora, fauna and items left behind by travelers. Subjects speak of intense, mythic experiences in the...
Set in a quasi-ghost town that once thrived with oil in China's arid northwest, Yumen is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection among the town's crumbling landscape. One part "ruin porn", one part "ghost...
The first release by Little Egypt Collective stages a sound recordist reconnecting with the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts – the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of the Little Egypt region of southern Illinois.
Filmed over three years on China’s railways, The Iron Ministry traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and...
A sensory and cinematic work from the Sonoran Desert in the southern US, where a man lives in a lonely pact with a brutal nature and in the shadow of the apocalypse.
A portrayal of a hidden enclave of auto shops and junkyards fated for demolition in the shadow of a new baseball stadium in Queens. The film observes this vibrant community of immigrants – where wrecks, refuse, and recycling form a thriving commerce – as it struggles for daily survival and...
"If the old doesn't go, the new never comes" recites a teenager hanging out near a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China. In Demolition, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki deconstructs the transforming cityscape by befriending the migrant laborers on the site and...
A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, who lived and worked in Shanghai nine years earlier, uses the eclipse as a catalyst to...
In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in...
This film's three parts focus on three major events of 2008 in China: the March uprisings, the May earthquake, and the August Olympics. In Tagong, two young Tibetan girls play in the grasslands as the shouts of military drills reverberate through the town. In Qingchuan, three women burn paper...
