A Flickering Truth

In Nigeria, the young art-collective The Critics, armed with makeshift gear, conjures homemade sci-fi spectacles, chronicling their reality while blasting into wild imagined worlds.

BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD charts the journey of 19 year old Tecca Zendik, a contestant in the Miss Net World contest, Libya's first every beauty competition. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi hosts this competition and the film includes extraordinary footage of the Colonel. Tecca's story reveals an incredible conclusion no-one could have guessed when private jests transported the beauties to the country feared by the West in the 1980's.

Celebrated Chinese couturier Guo Pei is perhaps best known for designing the brilliant gold gown Rihanna wore to the Met Ball in 2015. But Guo’s quest to be recognized by the gatekeepers of Paris haute couture goes beyond the red carpet and taps into global power dynamics and the perpetual tension between art and commerce.

“He’s precious, and gifted, a Matakite – a wiseman… but really he’s just a child.” A coming-of-age film profiling future leader Ngaa Rauuira, railing against his people’s statistics of uneducated youth, 40% of prisoners, and alarming suicide rates. Ngaa’s story reveals a family of eight on a modest income, committing to a US$35,000 Yale bill; a weighty tribal expectation that he will be the voice of his people AND bring success in war dance competitions; laughing and crying with best friends, approaching adulthood and diverging pathways. What if we could turn back the clock and watch the minds forming of those who would create political zeitgeist shifts in the future?

In 1990, a famed Balinese sculptor Nyoman Nuarta promised to build for Bali what would have been the largest copper and brass statue on Earth. He ended up dragging his family along into a 28-year journey ridden with crisis and sacrifice.