Women Without Shadows

While serving with the African Union, former Marine Capt. Brian Steidle documents the brutal ethnic cleansing occuring in Darfur. Determined that the Western public should know about the atrocities he is witnessing, Steidle contacts New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, who publishes some of Steidle's photographic evidence.

If your bedroom has become too small a stage for your air guitar antics, take inspiration from the competitors featured here as they battle their way from the inaugural U.S. Air Guitar Championship to the world championship in Oulu, Finland. Along the way, filmmaker Alexandra Lipsitz documents the fierce rivalries that develop as would-be rock legends vie for top honors in technical accuracy, stage presence and "airness."

In 2009, students of all walks of life at the Arts & Learning Children's Conservatory in Anaheim, CA set out to produce their own live musical parody version of Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980), as interpreted through their young talents. Follow the young actors, artists, musicians (and a few supervising adults) as they audition, rehearse and perform their take on this classic film.

Jakub presents an extensive ethnographical-sociological study of the life of the Ruthenians, filmed in the Maramuresh mountains in the north of Romania and in the former Sudetenland in Western Bohemia. The film was made over a period of five years during the time of both totalitarian regimes and was completed in 1992 after the revolution.

In the macho world of Mariachi music, very few women can hold their own. Just like the songs they play, this film is a snapshot of life, death and the things in between - seen from a bird's-eye perspective.

A "beyond the shoes" documentary on the former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos.

Documentary about Carolyn Cassady, her life and marriage to Neal Cassady, her relationship with Jack Kerouac and how she takes care of the literary legacy from both.

Documentary about red-bereted Jimmy Mirikitani, a feisty painter working and living on the street, near the World Trade Center, when 9/11 devastates the neighborhood. A nearby film editor, Linda Hattendorf, persuades elderly Jimmy to move in with her, while seeking a permanent home for him. The young woman delves into the California-born, Japan-raised artist's unique life which developed his resilient personality, and fuel his 2 main subjects, cats and internment camps. The editor films Jimmy's remarkable journey.

A documentary about a beloved South Bronx matriarch and former "First Lady" of the Savage Skulls gang struggling to remain visible in a rapidly gentrifying community she helped rebuild in the 1980s. With one foot firmly grounded in the outlaw life and the other as an activist and spiritual advisor, Lorine Padilla straddles the complexities of multiple worlds.

Reveals the history of camerawomen around the world, celebrating not only the survival of pioneer women in a male-dominated field, but a new generation of camerawomen's visions.

Teatro Amazonas is an elaborate, intriguing formalist experiment investigating the cinematic gaze and cultural exchange, and offering an unconventional ethnographic record of its Amazonian subjects engaged (and disengaged) in the act of spectatorship.