Synopsis

Emmy Award-winning Chicago Restaurateur Billy Dec adventures through his mother’s native 7,641 Islands of the Philippines to learn recipes from his last living elders, confronting culinary and cultural treasures and family secrets.

Food Roots gives viewers the opportunity to accompany Dec by plane, boat, motorcycle, jeepney, and foot, as he searches through bustling metropolitan cities, tiny remote islands, and hidden cloud-scraping mountain villages to find his family members. He climbs a mountain to meet with a 103-year-old tribal tattoo master, where she blesses him with a tattoo related to his ancestral connection. Through the ups and downs of the trip, Dec gains a deeper understanding of his family history, along with an elevated appreciation for how food has shaped their view of the world.

Synopsis

When Vera was young, she gave her infant son up for adoption. Years later, she begins a seemingly futile search to find him. When Cora was young, she adopted a young boy, Egoz, after she was told she could not have children of her own. Now the two women’s lives, each a mirror of the other, unite as Egoz is about to turn 18 and their paths finally cross.

A road trip crossing northern Spain, a caper heist, and the discovery of a new family merge into a striking and stylized contemporary noir. Foremost by Night is a masterfully choreographed and ever-surprising examination of the nature of motherhood, and the threads that connect those who search for each other across time and space.

Synopsis

A searing drama about mothers and daughters. An artistic tour-de-force that discovers powerful emotional truths in the tension between reality and fiction. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Documentary Prize, Four Daughters introduces us to Tunisian matriarch Olfa Hamrouni, a steely, wounded parent of four beautiful young women. Her two eldest daughters, as Olfa tells us early in the story, were “devoured by the wolf.”

Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania explores the family tragedy that continues to haunt Olfa and her family through staged reenactments and intimate scenes between Olfa, the actors playing her and her two eldest daughters, and her younger daughters as themselves. The result is a provocative and cathartic look at their complex relationships, their sisterhood of laughter, love, and rebellion, and the social, religious, and family conflicts that led to their devastation.

Synopsis

Haunted by guilt over her role in the death of a Southern man and his young son, a former singer from the North of Sudan seeks redemption by hiring the dead man’s widow as her maid — all while concealing her true identity. Their intricate connection develops amidst the turmoil of Sudan’s final days as a unified country, against a backdrop of violence and systemic racism. In this gripping feature debut — Sudan’s first feature film to be officially showcased at the Cannes Film Festival — director Mohamed Kordofani offers viewers a haunting and deeply layered exploration of guilt, redemption, and the enduring power of human bonds.

Synopsis

Urgent, clear-eyed, and helmed with incredible conviction, Green Border finds master filmmaker Agnieszka Holland training her camera on a real-life geopolitical crisis. Set on the border of Poland and Belarus, the film offers a glimpse into the lives of refugees fleeing to the European Union and the humanitarian activists working to help them reach safety.

When a family of Syrian asylum seekers is left stranded in the forest, a group of Belarusian border guards shepherds them into Poland. When they encounter the Polish military, they’re forced back over into Belarus. Julia, a psychologist who lives alone near the border, witnesses this cyclical, inhumane back-and-forth and joins up with a group of activists working to rectify the situation.