Portside

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.

Raoul Peck's new film 'I Am Not Your Negro' about James Baldwin has a powerful structure utilizing rare videos and photos and personal writings of Baldwin, and at the same time aligning them with contemporary issues of police brutality and race relations, creates a mesmerizing awareness of the continuity in the struggle for civil rights.

Snowden, Oliver Stone’s new film is a perfunctory biopic about the NSA’s international surveillance programs that lacks his trademark fearlessness. The film feels trite in its efforts to depict America’s ensnarement in the creepy web of online spying.

It is the festival's Documentary Programme that offers the most bang for the buck. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, about urban activist Jane Jacobs who saved New York neighborhoods in the 60s; it’s been awhile since we’ve seen a film about the revered muckraker, but All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone will once again raise the issue of truth in the media; the Canadian doc Black Code exposes how governments use the Internet to spy.