Women's Voices: The Gender Gap

'9-Man' is an independent feature documentary about an isolated and exceptionally athletic Chinese-American sport that's much more than a pastime. Since the 1930s, young men have played this gritty streetball game competitively in the alleys and parking lots of Chinatown. At a time when anti-Chinese sentiment and laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act forced Chinese restaurant workers and laundrymen to socialize exclusively amongst themselves, nine-man offered both escape and fraternity for men who were separated from their families in China and facing extreme discrimination and distrust. Pivoting between oil-spotted Chinatown parking lots and jellyfish-filled banquet scenes, the film captures the spirit of nine-man as players not only battle for a championship but fight to preserve a sport that holds so much history.

Raised in the small all-Black Florida town of Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston studied at Howard University before arriving in New York in 1925. She would soon become a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, best remembered for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. But even as she gained renown in the Harlem literary circles, Hurston was also discovering anthropology at Barnard College with the renowned Franz Boas. She would make several trips to the American South and the Caribbean, documenting the lives of rural Black people and collecting their stories. She studied her own people, an unusual practice at the time, and during her lifetime became known as the foremost authority on Black folklore.

The story of a group of Cubans who arrived in Miami during the Mariel Boatlift and were housed in an improvised camp in the heart of the city. Everyone lived together —men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, separated only by cloth curtains that hung from ropes suspended between the beds, like floating walls.

Documentary on the events that took place in Alsasua during the Civil War, with specific reflections on the figure of the parish priest Marino Ayerra, interviews with the people of Alsasua, and general historical comments by the historian Tuñón de Lara.

Extranjeras

Citoyennes !

An acting ensemble rehearses for an upcoming theater festival. They rig up stage scenery and practice dialogue and set pieces in the middle of a residential area. But this is no ordinary theater setting, as evidenced by the armed guards at the entrance. Festival 4 Chemins is taking place in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Gangs are active in the city; you can hear machine-gun fire in the distance.

BDW Politiek Beest

Marlene's journey is one of rediscovery. Once she saw darkness as the truest reflection of her soul—a place of comfort and identity. But life's trials reshaped her understanding, transforming that darkness into a wellspring of resilience, insight, and unexpected strength.

Documentary that portrays the life of the Navarrese composer Emiliana de Zubeldia, a woman ahead of her time.

Un tout petit pays

Afghan documentary maker Najiba Noori offers not only a loving and intimate portrait of her mother Hawa, but also shows in detail how the arduous improvement of the position of women is undone by geopolitical violence. The film follows the fortunes of Noori’s family, who belong to the Hazaras, an ethnic group that has suffered greatly from discrimination and persecution.

Frustrated by watching Black patients suffer due to end-of-life healthcare inequities, two determined allies – a chaplain and a doctor – work to transform a broken medical system, one patient at a time.

Chatting with another recent graduate, a former student activist learns about the controversial origin of a now-beloved campus group. she embarks on a journey through the recent past, weaving conversations with a vast ensemble of young organizers into a tapestry of disruption and determination. political, personal and bursting with youthful exuberance, peace love (unicorns) and communism is a homegrown chronicle of a decade of movements at McMaster University. as past struggles echo in the present, the film poses an urgent question to today's rising generation: do you believe that we will win?

Tracking missing socks in the European Union.

The untold true story of how Dave Tomkins, originally a safe-cracker from London, rose from small-time criminal to international mercenary and arms dealer, enabling death and destruction around the world.

While searching for her grandmother, the director comes across the story of three brothers who are torn between the fronts of political ideologies in the Third Reich and divided Germany: "the third brother" is the filmmaker's grandfather, who, in confronting her father, tries to overcome decades of speechlessness and, in the process, to understand where in the past her father's sense of family fell by the wayside.

This investigation into the layers of mass incarceration and its shaping of the modern black American family is seen through the eyes of a single mother in New Orleans, Louisiana.

British documentary filmmaker Chloe Ruthven’s grandparents were aid workers in Palestine. Growing up, she had avoided getting too involved in the subject, recalling how mention of the country made all the adults in her life angry. In her forties, after revisiting her grandmother’s book on the subject, she starts to research a documentary on the effects of foreign aid in the area and is shocked at the continued reliance on it there. Along the way she meets Lubna, a Palestinian woman who acts as her driver and fixer, and who is fiercely critical of Western aid efforts in her country. What begins as a quest to better understand her family history turns into a deeply emotional account of two women trying to understand one another. Ruthven’s determination to focus her film on deeply subjective analysis results in a unique joining of the acutely personal and complexly political. (Source: LFF programme)

A 65-year-old cleaning woman for a professional dancers' exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voiceover about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. A challenge to mainstream media's ongoing stereotypes of women of color who earn their living as domestic workers, this seemingly simple documentary achieves a quiet revolution: the expressive portrait of a fully realized individual.