Portside

Formed in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense remains misunderstood and poorly represented – especially on film. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution tries to sort the fact from fiction.

It was when philanthropist Julius Rosenwald read Booker T. Washington's 'Up From Slavery' and then met the celebrated black educator on the campus of Tuskegee Institute that his life work came into focus. Rosenwald became passionate about providing funding for more than 5,300 schools in the Jim Crow South. At one point in the pre-civil rights era, it was estimated, one in three black youths in the South attended a Rosenwald school.

Oscar-nominated director, Joshua Oppenheimer's 'The Look of Silence', the follow up to 'Act of Killing', revisits the Indonesian massacre from a victim's perspective.

it's possible that Pixar’s obsessiveness about work and employment has somehow been effaced in the public eye by the imaginative diversity of their films’ settings: ant colonies, space, the ocean, a bizarre alternate-world inhabited by sentient vehicles, and so on. But in Inside Out, for the first time, the ground beneath Pixar’s ideological feet comes into view, and it’s the Bay Area, California.

'The Wolfpack' concerns a large family that, self-isolated for years in a New York City housing project, developed its own tribal culture largely based on Hollywood blockbusters. 'The Tribe', is a fiction film set mainly within the dog-eat-dog confines of a Kiev boarding school for hearing-impaired adolescents and played out entirely in sign language by amateur, similarly impaired actor.

As his admirer James Dean probably knew all too well, Brando was a true rebel, partly because he thought being a star was absurd and partly because, as clip after clip in 'Listen to Me Marlon' shows, he always had a cause, whether it was civil rights, black power, Native American sovereignty or his own independence.

Based on a true story, 'Jimmy’s Hall' is about Jimmy Gralton the only Irishman deported as an illegal alien from Ireland, the land of his birth – without so much as a trial! Of course Gralton’s true crime was to fight against the reactionary church, aristocratic landowners and narrow nationalism by setting up a hall where ordinary people could dance to jazz music, study art and pursue a more class conscious politics during the Depression.

Directed by the popular Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis and written by Arab-Israeli journalist Sayed Kashua, 'A Borrowed Idenity' chronicles a young Arab-Israeli man’s painful coming of age--detailing Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. At its best, 'A Borrowed Identity' concerns itself with the malleability of self, with who we are and how society and culture can force identity choices on us.

Though none of his work has been allowed to be publicly shown in China, Hu Jie, known for his trilogy of documentaries about Maoist China, is one of his country’s most noteworthy filmmakers.