Something Real

Black Latina DJ Estela journeys through her late grandmother's legacy of fighting for justice -- and realizes she's part of it.

Boys On Film comes of age with uplifting and powerful tales recounting the lives of everyday heroes striving for their own identities and fighting for the right for us all to be ourselves. Volume 18: Heroes includes ten complete films: Dean Loxton's "Dániel" starring Csémy Balázs, Hilda Péter, and Henry Garrett… Niels Bourgonje's "Buddy" starring Daniel Cornelissen and Tobias Nierop… Tamara Shogaolu's animated "Half A Life"… Victor Lindgren's "Undress Me" starring Jana Bringlöv Ekspong and Björn Elgerd… Sam Ashby's "The Colour Of His Hair" starring Sean Hart and Josh O'Connor… Hope Dickson Leach's "Silly Girl" starring Ciara Baxendale, Mollie Lambert, and Jason Barker… Søren Green's "An Evening" starring Jacob Ottensten and Ulrik Windfeldt-Schmidt… Alejandro Medina's documentary "AIDS: Doctors And Nurses Tell Their Stories"… Kai Stänicke's "It's Consuming Me" with Volkmar Leif Gilbert… and Mikael Bundsen's "Mother Knows Best" starring Alexander Gustavsson and Hanna Ullerstam.

After a traumatic encounter, a young gay Egyptian joins the LGBT rights movement. When his safety is jeopardized, he must choose whether to stay in the country he loves or seek asylum elsewhere as a refugee. "Half a Life" is a timely story of activism and hope, set in the increasingly dangerous, oppressive, and unstable social climate of Egypt today.

Another Dream, a hybrid animated documentary and VR game, brings the gripping, true love story of an Egyptian lesbian couple to life. Faced with a post-revolution backlash against the LGBTQ community, they escape Cairo to seek asylum and acceptance in the Netherlands. An accompanying installation allows audiences to reflect on what they have seen, heard, and felt in VR. Another Dream is the second installment of Queer In A Time Of Forced Migration, an animated transmedia series that follows the stories of LGBTQ refugees from Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, and from the 2011 revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa region.

How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from?

This experimental animated documentary interrogates the colonial legacies embedded in archives through the lens of Black land stewards. Combining live-action footage, archival material, and animation, Oryza: Healing Ground reimagines archives as dynamic, living systems. A custom-built Artificial Intelligence system centered on Black histories, creates evolving digital motifs on Afrocentric perspectives, challenging the exclusion of Black voices from AI and algorithmic technologies.

Roman Ducksworth Jr., Peter Francis, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Alberta O. Jones. Four names, four cases reopened under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, implemented in 2008 to re-examine racist violent crimes from the days of the civil rights movement.

What does space sound like? In fact, like nothing at all—sound waves can’t travel through the interplanetary void.