Folk Frontera

Four Mexican-American middle school boys in a Texas border town have developed an unusual obsession: Joseph Stalin. When their teacher tells them about the Texas State History Fair, they write a play about the Soviet dictator and his efforts to destroy all who opposed him. With cardboard props and fur hats purchased on the internet, the boys enter the competition as underdogs and leave home for the very first time.

When she returns to rural West Texas to document the effects of the boom-and-bust nature of the oil industry on her hometown, filmmaker Alejandra Vasquez unexpectedly captures the political transformation that takes place in her family over five years and two election cycles. An intimate portrait of place, of family and memory, of politics and economy, “When It’s Good, It’s Good,” centers around life in an oil-town called Denver City, Texas.

For seven years, award-winning Chinese-American filmmaker Nanfu Wang follows Rosa María Payá, daughter of the five time Nobel Peace Prize nominated activist, Oswaldo Payá, in Rosa's fight for democratic change in Cuba. Rosa's narrative is interwoven with Wang's poignant reflections on her Chinese upbringing and her observations of eroding democratic norms in the U.S., revealing unsettling similarities to the authoritarian system she left behind.

A hidden grassroots organization doggedly fights to expand access to abortion pills across the United States keeping hope alive during a global pandemic and the fall of Roe v. Wade.

When the activist painter Judy Baca conceived The Great Wall of Los Angeles in 1975 as a monument to the history of indigenous peoples in California, she didn't realize that she was embarking on a 50-year journey that would employ 400 youth painters and amount to one of the largest murals on the planet.

A year in the life of an underdog competitive high school mariachi band in the Texas borderlands.