Cruel and Unusual

The shocking story of Richard Leopold and Nathan Loeb, two wealthy college students who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924 to prove they were smart enough to get away with it.

The histories of queer people of color, especially from the SWANA (Southwest Asia/North Africa) region, remains generally unwritten. The lack of this critical representation has served as a guiding axis of Charachchi, a multimedia project created by queer Armenians. "Stories Untold: Meet Queer SWANA Sex Workers and Drag Performers" highlights the stories of queer SWANA sex workers and drag performers, bringing visibility to voices that have remained hidden within mainstream media, history, and cultural spaces.

In this film, Laerte conjugates the body in the feminine, and scrutinizes concepts and prejudices. Not in search of an identity, but in search of un-identities. Laerte creates and sends creatures to face reality in the fictional world of comic strips as a vanguard of the self. And, on the streets, the one who becomes the fiction of a real character. Laerte, of all the bodies, and of none, complicates all binaries. In following Laerte, this documentary chooses to clothe the nudity beyond the skin we inhabit.

Soon after New York state passed a 2015 law that health insurance should cover transgender-related care and services, director Tania Cypriano and producer Michelle Hayashi began bringing their cameras behind the scenes at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where this remarkable documentary captures the emotional and physical journey of surgical transitioning. Lending equal narrative weight to the experiences of the center’s groundbreaking surgeon Dr. Jess Ting and those of his diverse group of patients, BORN TO BE perfectly balances compassionate personal storytelling and fly-on-the-wall vérité. It’s a film of astonishing access—most importantly into the lives, joys, and fears of the people at its center.

A documentary that explores the conflicts between the fear of family repression and the desire for social change by telling the story of the director who, at the age of 18, creates an LGBTQUIA+ struggle movement without his parents knowing.

A portrait of Samuel R. Delany, an award-winning African-American gay author whose credits include everything from science fiction to several issues of the Wonder Woman comic book. Using a range of experimental techniques and borrowed footage from Delany's home movies, Taylor captures his subject's thoughts on racism, violence, and his struggles with sexual identity.

Two actresses take us through a series of 'raps' and sketches about what it means to be beautiful and black.

In 1970, an eccentric young stripper named Shelly Baumann loses her leg in a freak parade canon accident, then uses her settlement money to open 'Shelly's Leg' disco - one of the nation's first and most consequential openly gay spaces.

Private Diary documents photographer Pedro Usabiaga working with a variety of amateur models. The audience sees how the relationships between the photographer and the subjects changes during their time together, as well as how the individual photographs begin to take shape. Pedro Usabiaga is a well-established Basque photographer whose chief concerns are figurative photography and whose passion in photographing the Spanish male. In this hour long conversation with the artist we are given entry into that process of selecting models (none of the models he uses for this book to be titled 'Private Diary' are professional, but instead are randomly chosen as Usabiaga observes athletes in action) and then allowed to follow Usabiaga and his crew as they photograph these men in natural settings and natural light.

Documentary on Sakine Cansız (Sara), the Kurdish revolutionary and PKK co-founder killed in Paris in January 2013 by Turkish agents.

Two men undertake a thought-provoking journey to parenthood. Not by adoption or surrogacy, but by Frankie, a trans man, carrying their baby. Made with support from NZ on Air.

Sixteen year olds Palani and Karthik want to become "ladyboys." They're bullied in school and beaten by their families. Their parents would like to see them grow up as normal boys, but they're falling deeper and deeper into the world of the "Aravanis." Loved as dance performers but hated as homosexuals, their stories emblazon the inner conflicts of India's gender culture today.

The 1920s saw a revolution in technology, the advent of the recording industry, that created the first class of African-American women to sing their way to fame and fortune. Blues divas such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Alberta Hunter created and promoted a working-class vision of blues life that provided an alternative to the Victorian gentility of middle-class manners. In their lives and music, blues women presented themselves as strong, independent women who lived hard lives and were unapologetic about their unconventional choices in clothes, recreational activities, and bed partners. Blues singers disseminated a Black feminism that celebrated emotional resilience and sexual pleasure, no matter the source.

When Sarah accidentally proposes to her girlfriend in Provincetown, the mixup turns their loving relationship into a minefield of marital exploration.

A collage of interviews analyzing the internet, political polarization, incel culture, the far-right, and the process by which young people can evolve towards extremism.

The documentary, " Death and the Judge", revolves around Iran's most famous criminal judge, Azizmohammadi. He served as a criminal judge for 45 years and issued about 4500 death sentences; a record in not only Iran, but also the world. This documentary looks into his personal and professional life as he is followed within his home with his family, in the court of law, and in his retirement days. The ultimate purpose of the documentary is to deduce the role of death in the judge's life as he either takes life away from criminals or death comes to his loved ones. During his retirement, he is once again given the choice between the life and death of a person, despite no longer being a judge.

Mar Bel, a 55-year-old transgender woman, is a sensitive artist, singer and actress who found in creativity her resistance and in music her refuge. Beginning her transition into adulthood, on her birthday she decided to be reborn at the same time of her birth. Her story is a journey of transformation where change becomes a fundamental pillar of her existence, even in the face of death.

Croire

An organic farmer in Maine sets out to transform the prison food system. Seeds of Change captures the intersecting stories of life-long farmer Mark McBrine and several incarcerated men as they harvest their own meals from a five-acre prison garden unlike any other.

Footage from and interviews with attendees of a public function in Griffith Park, Los Angeles sponsored by the Gay Liberation Front.