WORLD PREMIERE Chelly Wilson was a Christmas-celebrating Jewish grandma, a lesbian who married men, and a proud owner of porn theaters in 1970s NYC. Through audio recordings, Chelly recounts her pre-war escape from Greece up through her unlikely motherhood and rise to wealth as a shrewd businesswoman on “The Deuce,” aka New York’s infamous 42nd […]
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE Vince Anderson made his way to New York to enter the seminary, but his true calling, music, changed his life forever. With his band, The Love Choir, Vince’s now-legendary weekly show became an institution in the Brooklyn music scene. Through powerful revival-style performance and social activism, Vince’s intimate journey of faith and […]
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE Using the only known photo of his grandfather, filmmaker Sherman De Jesus illuminates the legacy of prolific photographer James Van Der Zee. Van Der Zee took historic and elegant portraits of the Black community during the Harlem Renaissance when images of Black joy were still rare. De Jesus’s single photograph unspools several proud […]
WORLD PREMIERE The style. The fashion. The moves. Saturday Night Fever left an indelible stamp on our cultural memory of the 1970s—and there was one man behind it all. Robert Stigwood, a producer impresario, best known for managing the Bee Gees, took the swagger of a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn disco, and brought it to the […]
US PREMIERE An experimental portrait of Ilhan Mimaroglu, the legendary Turkish pioneer of electronic music who passed away in 2012. Through a multilayered structure that mirrors Ilhan Mimaroglu’s music, the film also tells the story of his vibrant wife Güngör, who migrated to the USA from Turkey in the early 1960s and became an activist […]
US PREMIERE In 1973, four young Black Muslims held up a sporting goods store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The bungled robbery triggered a response of deadly force by a then mostly-white police force and the longest hostage siege in NYPD history. Director Stefan Forbes, producer Fab Five Freddy and their team reconstruct what took place through […]
WORLD PREMIERE Director Emmett Adler explores the role of the MTA in New York City and the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic had on the vital service it provides: transporting New York’s essential workers. The film acknowledges the decline of the subway infrastructure as a political issue and captures a tumultuous time that impacted every […]
NYC PREMIERE A cinéma vérité glimpse into the lives of an eccentric New York family, Charm Circle follows filmmaker Nira Burstein as she attempts to bridge the fractured relationships between herself, her two sisters, and her parents. Emotional and accomplished, especially in the way it weaves together decades-old home videos and contemporary footage, the film […]
2020 METROPOLIS GRAND JURY PRIZE After making the dangerous journey from his native Guatemala to New York City, 15-year-old Luis struggles to balance attending school and finding work to support his family back home. Meanwhile, Judy, a Cuban-American ICE agent, faces her own internal conflict with the shifting enforcement priorities of her longtime career, from […]
2020 VIEWFINDERS SPECIAL JURY RECOGNITION FOR BEST USE OF ARCHIVAL MATERIAL WORLD PREMERE | Emerging as a distinctive voice in the East Village art scene of the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz combined a variety of disciplines, from painting and photography to music and writing, in his artistic practice. Fiercely and unapologetically embracing his queer identity, he rebelled against […]