Portside

Perhaps the Dump Star Wars story could be described as “silly.” But to deny the politics of Star Wars is to throw the franchise’s rich history under a bus the size of an Imperial cruiser. Star Wars may not overflow with civics metaphors in the fashion of “Star Trek,” but the sci-fi films did not exist in a political void.

Bravo's film was commissioned by Channel 4 in Britain, and won the Distinguished Achievement for Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking from the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York, and played the Toronto International Film Festival to sold-out crowds despite the fact that it opened three days after the September 11th attacks. It has played in arthouses throughout the U.S. It and several other films about Castro, can now be viewed on YouTube and are also listed below.

Julie Dash's Sundance indie, 'Daughters of the Dust', about an African family finally gets the theatrical release it deserves 25 years later – and it couldn't be more timely

The opening scenes of After Fire, the new documentary about the struggles faced by women veterans after they leave military service, make a case for its importance through statistics. Viewers are informed that women are the fastest growing group of veterans, and that one in five veterans are women.

Ever since his workshop days in Japan, gunpowder artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, has been obsessed with creating a Ladder In The Sky, exploring ways to create a structure that could hang in the air and support a series of fuses. Each time he found a sponsor to underwrite the Ladder something fell through, Finally, as shown in the film, he decided to pay for the experiment himself, to create it in the fishing village on Huiyu Island, Gwanhzhu, where his grandmother was born.

A documentary about Donald Trump’s battle with Aberdeenshire residents over a golf course reveals the corporate, sociopathic nature of his political vision. This is the film Donald Trump does not want you to see....

“The Crime of Being Married.” So read the headline that accompanied photos of Richard Loving, a Southern “white trash” construction worker, and his African-American wife Mildred... "Loving" audiences will watch Jeff Nichols’ nobly hatred-proof period romance, as it dramatises and gives due mythological prominence to a remarkable legal case which helped change America’s ugly Jim Crow race laws in the 50s and 60s.

In the stellar documentary "Fire at Sea" Gianfranco Rosi contrasts the lives of the desperate thousands of migrants landing on the shores of a Sicilian island with the everyday existence of the locals.

Before the film was overshadowed by the revelation that Nate Parker was acquitted under dubious circumstances of sexual assault, The Birth of a Nation was lauded as an achievement in filmmaking. It received a standing ovation when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Fox Searchlight acquired it for a record $17.5 million. Parker was praised for his visionary and brave retelling of the life of Nat Turner.

Ava DuVernay’s new documentary chronicles how our justice system has been driven by racism from the days of slavery to today’s era of mass incarceration. The film, "13th," is named for the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery with the exception of punishment for crime.