Portside

Six black filmmakers discuss a 1990s boom that went bust. They talk about racism, misogyny, of being marginalized by executives who feigned interest in their work, of lacking a safety net that buoyed white peers, of 'director's jail'.

This moving and profound portrait serves as a fitting biographical tribute as well as a piercing, often painful recount of African American history from slavery and the Civil War to the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights movement and beyond.

Jennie Livingston's 1991 documentary is the story of the queer, working-class, black and brown subculture that then revolved around the fierce and fabulous ballroom competitions in New York City.

Martin Scorsese blends fact and fiction for a playfully experimental film about the most freewheeling tour Bob Dylan ever did. The true shock of Rolling Thunder Revue is in how good, how alive, Dylan is on stage.

In 2014 "She's Beautiful When She's Angry", Mary Dore's powerful documentary about the early women's movement, screened around the world. If you missed it, her film now streams on Amazon Prime and Kanopy. "Yes, we have come a long way baby, BUT..."

The big draw of the exuberant documentary “Knock Down the House” — about four women who ran for Congress in 2018 — is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. 

The film series “Roberto Gavaldón: Night Falls in Mexico” at the Museum of Modern Art (NY) showcases the rarely screened signature achievement of the Western hemisphere’s second-most-robust film industry in the decades surrounding World War II.

The film recounts the 1819 bloody massacre that left 15 peaceful working-class voting-rights demonstrators dead and hundreds more injured (coined "Peterloo" by journalists who reported the atrocity in contemporary papers as a play on Waterloo.

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a factory in an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class Americans.