VAISHALI NAIK / INDIA

A few years back, Sudhir and Vinod- two brothers- put up a Business together, “7 Star Dinosor Entertainment.” Dressed as giant dinosaurs they would dance to Bollywood songs at weddings, birthday parties, and mall events. Life was good.

But today we find them two years deep into the pandemic. No public functions are allowed anymore. We find the brothers jobless and hungry. The giant dinosaurs cramped with them in a single tiny room of the shoddy tenement.

JAZMIN BRYANT / USA

“71 Seconds” follows Trayvon Martin’s journey on the last page of his life written on February 26, 2012. This story highlights Martin’s innocence, as well as typical teenage angst. After making a stop at a convenience store, Martin is followed by the neighborhood watch member, George Zimmerman. After a brief and violent altercation, Zimmerman fatally shot and killed Trayvon Martin. This film is an exploration of the 71 seconds that are unaccounted for in the report of the altercation.

NINA LEE / USA

A little girl with Down syndrome befriends a neighborhood drug dealer. Billie Thomas is a lonely teenage artist. Longing for a friend she finds one in an unlikely person. Former SeaHawks football running back Marshawn Lynch plays a leading role in a touching performance.

MATHILDE BAYLE / FRANCE

Fanny has become infatuated with the handsome, womanizing Diego, for whom her heart aches. One evening, at a party, she tries to make him jealous by letting a random man hit on her… It works. But this “random man,” Victorino, a Peruvian photographer, has no intention of giving up that easily.

MEHRNOUSH ALIA / IRAN 

Farsi with English subtitles

A new driver at a ride-hailing company has hit the rock bottom; he was fired from his job, his wife has left him, and he is behind on rent. On his third day on the job, he receives a request from a woman to deliver a dog. Knowing too well that having a dog in the car is against the Islamic law of the land, he is reluctant to accept the ride but is convinced after the woman claims that the dog belongs to a blind man. Several ordeals follow until they finally arrive at their destination, where the driver realizes the dog is actually stuck in the middle of a divorce and is unwanted by the couple who previously owned him. Angry with the situation he is dragged into, he also abandons the dog. What ensues changes his perception of himself and his place in the world.

CARRIE STETT / USA

A gripping documentary that profiles an underdog team in America’s first all-girls tackle football league. This band of misfits and outcasts compete for the title while tackling their struggles both on and off the field.

JEAN CHARLES FINCK & SANDRINE STOÏANOV / FRANCE

While preparing for her first exhibition, a young painter commits so passionately to her creations that she loses touch with reality and descends into hallucinatory chaos. Confined in a clinic, she progressively rebuilds herself through painting and the daily observation of a squirrel under her wind.

JINGJING TIAN / USA

A reclusive senior citizen seeks a release from the struggles of life as she struggles to say goodbye to a loved one.

CHERIE GAULKE / USA

Alma W. Thomas broke color barriers on and off the canvas, yet did not receive national attention until she was 80. Born a generation after slavery, Alma Woodsey Thomas grew up in the South, in a home where education was a priority. “Miss Alma Thomas” is the first documentary film that explores Thomas’ incredible life through the lens of curators, art specialists, scholars, and her family, and features award-winning actress Alfre Woodard as the voice of Alma Thomas.

LAURA VANDERVOORT / CANADA

Quinn (30’s) suffers from what many of us do: she has become accustomed to relying on technology for all of her needs. Her social life, her entertainment, and her validation. And it’s killing her.

TEMPE HALE / USA

“Night Hike” is a film noir-inspired experimental short constructed almost entirely from still photographs. A woman grappling with a recent loss goes for an evening walk. Coyotes howl and shadows play tricks on the eyes as she wanders deeper into the wilderness after dark. In this self-help thriller, touches of hard-boiled crime and dreamlike imagery reveal the woman’s authentic self in a most unexpected way.

POLLY PIERCE / USA

After her comedy video with the school baseball team goes viral, a plus-size broadcasting student discovers that locker room talk is not just talk.

SARAH MENZIES / USA (FERNDALE)

LOCAL DIRECTOR

Mutinda was on Kenya’s most wanted list in the 80s and 90s. He was single handedly decimating the wildlife population in the Amboseli region, and Kenya Wildlife Service had a warrant out for his arrest, or possibly death. His wife told him she was leaving him if he couldn’t find another job because she was scared he would be killed, and she couldn’t stick around to watch any longer. But this was all Mutinda knew. His father was a poacher and taught him everything he knew. Mutinda had a family to provide for, and felt that poaching was his only option for work. 18 years ago, he was presented with another option that would allow him to use his tracking skills for good.

SHIR ELDAD / ISRAEL

Aya, a social worker in her twenties, volunteers at an “at-risk” teenage mobile unit in the city center. One night, she accidentally gets drawn into a gang of youths and their night time activities.

ANISSA DAOUD / FRANCE

Due to his wife’s business trip, Imed, a young father, finds himself alone for a few days for the first time with his five-year-old son and must confront his deepest fears.

SARAH MENZIES / USA (WHATCOM COUNTY)

LOCAL DIRECTOR

Mutinda was on Kenya’s most wanted list in the 80s and 90s. He was single handedly decimating the wildlife population in the Amboseli region, and Kenya Wildlife Service had a warrant out for his arrest, or possibly death. His wife told him she was leaving him if he couldn’t find another job because she was scared he would be killed, and she couldn’t stick around to watch any longer. But this was all Mutinda knew. His father was a poacher and taught him everything he knew. Mutinda had a family to provide for, and felt that poaching was his only option for work. 18 years ago, he was presented with another option that would allow him to use his tracking skills for good.

BROOKE SWANEY / USA 

“Lost birds” is a term for Native children adopted out of their tribal communities. Right after the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 became the law of the land, Kendra Mylnechuk Potter was adopted into a white family and raised with no knowledge of her Native parentage. “Daughter Of A Lost Bird” is a beautiful and intimate film that follows Kendra on her journey to find her birth mother April, also a Native adoptee, and return to her Lummi homelands in Washington State. With a sensitive yet unflinching lens, director Brooke Swaney (#Blackfeet /#Salish) documents Kendra and April as they connect with relatives and navigate what it means to be Native, and to belong to a tribe from the outside looking in. Along the way, Kendra uncovers generations of emotional and spiritual beauty and pain and comes to the startling realization that she is a living legacy of U. S. assimilationist policy. By sharing a deeply personal experience of inherited cultural trauma, the film opens the door to broader and more complicated conversations about the erasure of Native culture and questions of identity surrounding adoption.

NANCY SVENDSEN / USA

“Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” chronicles Pasang Lhamu Sherpa’s tragic and inspiring journey to become the first Nepali woman to summit Everest in 1993. As an uneducated, indigenous woman and a Buddhist in a Hindu kingdom, Pasang’s dream to scale the legendary mountain pits her against family, foreign climbers, her own government, and nature itself. Her determined pursuit of Everest plays out within the context of her nation’s quest for democracy and the emergence of the commercial climbing industry. As told by the Nepalis who knew her, by some of the world’s most notable alpinists, and by Pasang herself, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest,” documents her historic quest that would transfix her country and uplift a new generation’s belief in its possibilities.

AURIÉLIA GEORGES / FRANCE

Nelie escaped a miserable existence by becoming a frontline nurse in 1914. One day, she takes the identity of Rose, a young woman from a good family, who dies in front of her. She presents herself in her place at Madame de Lengwil’s house, to become the reader of this wealthy woman. The lie works beyond her expectations.