America the Beautiful

A miners’ strike is brew­ing in Butte, Mon­tana, in the rev­o­lu­tion­ary year of 1917. Tens of thou­sands of men have already lost their lives in the copper mines of the … read more

Detroit’s story has encap­su­lat­ed the iconic nar­ra­tive of Amer­i­ca over the last cen­tu­ry— the Great Migra­tion of African Amer­i­cans escap­ing Jim Crow; the rise of man­u­fac­tur­ing and the middle class; … read more

One region, two lan­guages: Brault’s film ELOGE DU CHIAC takes place in New Brunswick, in the east­ern­most part of Canada, where both French and Eng­lish are spoken. A ded­i­cat­ed young … read more

In some parts of St. Louis, Mis­souri, preg­nant moth­ers hope they will have girls. Half of the boys who grow up here don’t live to cel­e­brate their eigh­teenth birth­day. This “school to prison pipeline,” as it is some­times called in the US, is a spiral of vio­lence, drugs, gangs, and arbi­trary police bru­tal­i­ty caused by a zero tol­er­ance policy that makes it dif­fi­cult, espe­cial­ly for young African Amer­i­cans, to break out of dis­ad­van­taged neigh­bor­hoods. Daje, who is 17, knows this all too well. Already as a child, she felt like she was pushed into the role of the trou­ble­mak­er. It’s some­thing she is never quite able to shake, and she even­tu­al­ly gets expelled from public high school after get­ting in a fight. At the new school, they explain to her how seri­ous the sit­u­a­tion is: If she doesn’t grad­u­ate from school, she won’t be able to go to college.

The film­mak­ers follow her in her new school for two years. They doc­u­ment her set­backs and suc­cess­es: the mild summer nights with her first real love, her preg­nan­cy that puts every­thing into ques­tion again, and how she becomes a polit­i­cal young woman. Fer­gu­son is not far away, and the #Black­Lives­Mat­ter move­ment takes to the streets right out­side Daje’s front door. As one set­back fol­lows the next, this inti­mate coming-of-age doc­u­men­tary feels almost like a fast-paced fea­ture film.

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Jeremy S. Levine geb. 1984 in Bev­er­ly (Mass­a­chu­setts, USA).
Landon Van Soest geb. 1981 in Denver (Col­orado, USA).
Beide studierten Film / Fotografie am Ithaca Col­lege (New York). 2006 grün­de­ten sie in Brook­lyn die gemein­same Film­pro­duk­tion Tran­sient Pic­tures, im Jahr darauf das Brook­lyn Film­mak­ers Col­lec­tive. Filme u.a. WALKING THE LINE (2005), GOOD FORTUNE (2010, Emmi Award), EVAPORATING BORDERS (2014, R: Iva Radi­vo­je­vic, P: L. Van Soest).

What is this land that promis­es a better future for so many people, luring them to come and settle, to cul­ti­vate it, to live? What is this land whose real­i­ty … read more

In 1979, short­ly before he died, James Bald­win wrote an unfin­ished work in which he reflect­ed on his life as a homo­sex­u­al writer in the con­text of the black Civil … read more

What char­ac­ter­izes public life? What­ev­er it is, it could hardly be more lively than in Jack­son Heights, where 167 dif­fer­ent lan­guages are spoken. There are shops, restau­rants, and places of … read more

In LONG STORY SHORT, over 100 people at home­less shel­ters, food banks, adult lit­er­a­cy pro­grams, and job train­ing cen­ters in Los Ange­les and the Bay Area in Cal­i­for­nia dis­cuss their … read more

In the early 1980s, Diego Echev­er­ria took a 16mm camera into the streets of the South­side of Williams­burg, then a pri­mar­i­ly Puerto Rican neigh­bor­hood and one of the city’s poor­est, … read more