Emily Packer

An actress, three months post-partum, reads through fragments of the archive of Suzanne Césaire as she prepares to perform excerpts of the writer's work.

Michael was a ballet prodigy with a stellar career ahead of him. He transformed into a Russian ballet instructor named Madame Olga as a way to both embrace himself as an artist and reconcile with the trauma from his past.

An omnibus film featuring nine works by emerging filmmakers of color, Who Will Start Another Fire is the inaugural project of Dedza Films, a distribution initiative focused on showcasing underrepresented communities and the next wave of international storytellers.

A short film adaptation of the titular poem by Melissa Lozada-Oliva.

Since 1990, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has collected 600 business cards—from a hairdresser, a therapist, a textile artist. Together they form an archive of encounters.

This impressionist hybrid documentary traces the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world's oyster capital. Now their specter haunts the city through queer characters embodying ancient myth, discovering the overlooked history and biology of the bivalve that built the city. As environmentalists restore them to the harbor, Holding Back the Tide looks to the oyster as a queer icon, entangled with nature, with much to teach about our continued survival.

What happens when you lose something on the subway in New York? Chances are you’ll run into the wise, gentle, and unofficial ambassador of the Transit Authority, Sonny Drayton. Through his humor and intimate personal knowledge of the subway, Sonny invites us to consider what it means to lose and be lost underground, often the last stop for those who’ve fallen through the social safety net and have nowhere else to go. “Last Stop for Lost Property” questions how we value the artifacts of our lives: big and small, cherished and dismissed, tangible and existential.

After years of neglect by the City of New York and the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the coastal community of Canarsie, Brooklyn wants more. Using a variety of formats, this experimental series of vignettes explores Canarsie’s unique relationship to the water and the community’s vision for the future.

On August 18, 1971, First Lady Pat Nixon declared a stretch of land along the US-Mexico border a “Friendship Park,” willing two countries toward a common future. Decades later, this spirited inauguration hangs above the meeting place like a specter, charged by the border’s harsh realities. Vibrant digitized color film from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library along with stirring musical and oral performances from the inaugural event clash against the present, as TOO LONG HERE ponders the implications of an empty promise.