Virtual Showing 
2020 | USA, Mexico | 93 min | Documentary
Director: Varda Bar-Kar
Producers: Kabir Sehgal, Doug Davis
Editor: Luisa María Martínez Arcaraz

FANDANGO AT THE WALL follows Multi Grammy Award winners Arturo O’Farrill and Kabir Sehgal, as they prepare to record a live album at the U.S.-Mexico border wall. The project is inspired by the annual Fandango Fronterizo Festival, which unites people on both sides of the Tijuana-San Diego border. This festival features son jarocho, a 300-year-old folk music tradition. Before recording, festival organizer, Jorge Francisco Castillo, takes O’Farrill and Sehgal on a tour of Veracruz, Mexico, where this musical mixture of indigenous, Spanish, and African traditions originated. As they travel, they meet legendary son jarocho musicians such as Patricio Hidalgo, Fernando Guadarrama, Ramón Gutiérrez, Wendy Cao Romero, Tacho Utrera, Andrés Vega, Martha Vega, Yaratczé Hidalgo Sandoval — and recruit many of these artists for the upcoming festival. Their travels cumulate with the annual celebration, promoting peace and celebrating unity. From executive producers, Quincy Jones, Andrew Young, Carlos Santana, the film introduces the beautiful music of the region through intimate interviews and captivating concert footage.

Virtual Showing 
2020 | USA | 92 min | Documentary
Director: Kevin Smokler, Christopher Boone

The vinyl record renaissance over the past decade has brought new fans to a classic format and transformed our idea of a record collector: younger, both male and female, multicultural. This same revival has made buying music more expensive, benefited established bands over independent artists and muddled the question of whether vinyl actually sounds better than other formats.

Vinyl Nation digs into the crates of the record resurgence in search of truths set in deep wax: Has the return of vinyl made music fandom more inclusive or divided? What does vinyl say about our past here in the present? How has the second life of vinyl changed how we hear music and how we listen to each other?

Virtual Showing 
2020 | USA, United Kingdom, China, South Africa | 90 min | Documentary
Director: Shalini Kantayya
Producer: Shalini Kantayya

When Joy Buolamwini’s makes the startling discovery that most facial recognition software does not accurately see dark-skinned faces or women, she is forced to reckon with bias encoded in algorithms, the invisible mathematical equations that are remaking our behavior, our culture, and our democracies. Coded Bias follows poet of code Joy Buolamwini’s journey to push for the first-ever legislation to govern AI in the United States. But can the best of our humanity challenge the power of big tech yielding bias in artificial intelligence at scale?

Virtual Showing
2020 | Norway | 92 min | Documentary
Director: Victor Kossakovsky
Producer: Anita Rehoff Larsen
Editor: Victor Kossakovsky

GUNDA chronicles the unfiltered lives of a mother pig, a flock of chickens, and a herd of cows with masterful intimacy. Using stark, transcendent black and white cinematography and the farm’s ambient soundtrack, Master director Victor Kossakovsky invites the audience to slow down and experience life as his subjects do, taking in their world with a magical patience and an other worldly perspective. GUNDA asks us to meditate on the mystery of animal consciousness, and reckon with the role humanity plays in it. Executive produced by Joaquin Phoenix.

Virtual Showing
2020 | USA | 84 min | Documentary
Directors: Joshua Tickell, Rebecca Harrell Tickell

Right now, soil might be the last thing on your mind. But in a moment when the future of our planet and humankind is at stake, nothing may be more important than regenerating the ground beneath us. We’re in need of a kind of hope we’ve never felt before. KISS THE GROUND unveils a game-changer to our climate crisis: the Earth’s own soil. 

Virtual Showing
2019 | Syrian Arab Republic, United Kingdom | 100 min | Documentary
Directors: Waad Al-Kateab, Edward Watts

An intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. The story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while conflict rises around her.