Directing
This film is a record of the first Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. It reflects the various ways the festival was given shape by nascent global changes embodied by Perestroika, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and many other contemporaneous events.
Two women fight to hold the manufacturers accountable for the Agent Orange catastrophe. Incriminating documents disappear. Activists are threatened. A helicopter technician secretly films the contamination exposing a massive cover-up.
The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.
How the novel that is widely considered the greatest work of modern fiction was created and the toll it took on James Joyce's family.
For more than 50 years, renowned installation artist Donna Dennis builds under-scaled houses to metaphorically honor lost friends. Rich with quotations from hundreds of journals going back to the early 1970s, the film reveals the voice of a poet, searching for meaning and metaphor, questioning what happens to a person when they die and documenting the journey the work takes her on.
