American Film Festival online

An immersive portrait of dance pioneer Alvin Ailey, told through his own words and a new dance inspired by his life.

Structured as a labyrinth-like game and inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Aleph is a travelogue of experience, a dreamer's journey through the lives, experiences, stories and musings of protagonists spanning ten countries and five continents.

A far-ranging look at the biases in how we see things, focusing on the use of police body cameras.

Two brothers attempt to drive a trunk full of opioids from Florida to Alaska to cash in big in the Land of Gold. A split-second act of violence somewhere in the California desert derails their trip and sets them on a crash course with tragedy.

Two friends pick up a psychopathic escaped convict who tells them that he intends to murder them when the ride is over.

A man secretly married to two women feels the pressure of his deceit.

When a corrections officer is transferred to the letter room, he soon finds himself enmeshed in a prisoner's deeply private life.

Film adaptation of the Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical about Evan Hansen, a high-school senior with social anxiety disorder, and his journey of self-discovery and acceptance after a classmate's suicide.

A documentary about Michael Brody Jr., a 21-year-old hippie millionaire who in 1970 promised to give away his $25M inheritance in an effort to usher in a new era of world peace.

Ferguson Rises is the inspiring story of the residents of Ferguson, Missouri, a small town that suffered a powerful loss and became the flash point for a modern day civil rights movement.

How Divine, aka Harris Glenn Milstead, became John Waters' cinematic muse and an international drag icon.

AmaIn the 1950s and 1960s, Ida Lupino was the only woman in Hollywood with a serious career as a director: first in cinema and mainly for her own production company The Filmmakers Inc., and then in television, contributing episodes to some of the most celebrated series of the era. A staunch Democrat and Catholic, Lupino's cinema often tackled subjects considered risky if not outright taboo in her day, ranging from rape and bigamy to the way people suffering from polio were ostracised. Too humble for the vanity fair that is Hollywood, independent producer-writer-director Lupino remained historically a fringe figure in film - when she should have been venerated as one of the most complete and politically responsible filmmakers of all time. With their Ida Lupino: Gentlemen and Miss Lupino, Clara and Julia Kuperberg now offer a concise look at her career, themes, obsessions and achievements, bringing a long-overdue appreciation of this loneliest of path-breakers.

A New Yorker's life is thrown into a tailspin when his younger cousin surprise-visits him, starting a strange, unpredictable adventure.

A writer loses her memory. Adrift in NYC, she connects with a group of teenagers - in conversations both real and imagined - and searches for a way home.

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it," Stewart Brand wrote in '68. The pioneer of LSD, cyberspace, futurism, and modern environmentalism now urges people to use our god-like powers to fight extinction by reviving lost species.

A cinematic ode to the moon, made in large part from archival sources combined with literary fragments and bound together by a haunting original score. The film steps lightly through the ideas that people through the ages have drawn from the moon - dreams of escape, myths of heaven, songs of longing and loss, odes of yearning - taking the viewer on a constantly surprising night-walk through the night sky.

A weekend of healing for Dennis and Mia becomes a hallucinatory nightmare when Dennis' estranged brother arrives and begins to distort their sense of reality.

A series of vignettes that all have coffee and cigarettes in common.

By day, Ed Popil worked as the manager of a telemarketing center in post-industrial Rochester, New York for 18 years. By night, he transformed into drag queen Mrs. Kasha Davis. Not your average aspiring pop star drag queen, Mrs. Kasha Davis is a 1960's era housewife trying to liberate herself from domestic toil through performing at night in secret - an homage to Ed's own mother. After seven years of auditioning to compete on reality television show RuPaul's Drag Race, Ed Popil was finally cast onto the show and thrust into a full time entertainment career at the late age of 44. Workhorse Queen explores the complexities of mainstream television's impact on queer performance culture. In addition to following Ed's life and career before and after being cast onto RuPaul's Drag Race, the film focuses on the growing divide between members of a small town drag community - those who have been on television, and those who have not. Throughout the film, Ed Popil navigates the exciting highs and devastating lows of pursuing the fame promised by a reality television platform. With one foot inching toward Hollywood's doorstep and the other cemented firmly within her beloved Rochester community, Mrs. Kasha Davis finds a surprising new audience at home as she works toward becoming the queer role model for children that Ed didn't have and desperately wanted growing up.

A SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME is a borderlands Western that follows Sundog, an eccentric recluse who lives off the land in the Sonoran Desert. As Border Patrol surveillance encroaches on his relative freedom, he becomes increasingly unnerved and ventures beyond the confines of his survivalism. With an unsettling fantasy of eco-terrorism, and with the first cinematic depiction of smoking a Sonoran toad's psychedelic venom, the complex figure of Sundog raises provocative questions about environmental justice and human survival amidst the specter of global collapse.

A Spanish teacher and her student develop an unexpected friendship.

Brings us into the lives of three Latinx people in McAllen Texas, whose different beliefs end up coming to a head at the last abortion clinic in the US/Mexico border.

Ludi, a hardworking and exhausted nurse, battles coworkers, clients and one impatient bus driver to learn her self worth as she chases the American Dream in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood.

After hitting dead ends in life, Jyothi, an Indian housewife, and Sophie, a stoner musician, find themselves on the run from the law, together on a wild, surreal American road trip from Durham, North Carolina to Montreal, Canada.

A Korean American family moves to an Arkansas farm in search of its own American dream. Amidst the challenges of new life in the strange and rugged Ozarks, they discover the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.