Written and directed and by Kenyan filmmaker Sam Soko, Softie is the first film from Kenya to ever premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. The documentary film which won the Special Jury Award for Editing at the festival will be released in virtual cinemas nationwide starting September 18th.
Directed by Arthur Egeli (Murder on the Cape), The Black Emperor of Broadway is the story of the first African-American leading man on Broadway, Charles Gilpin. Gilpin was cast by playwright, Eugene O’Neill to be the lead in his play “The Emperor Jones” in 1920, a time when “blackface” was the norm on stage. O’Neill and Gilpin clashed numerous times over the cultural representation of Gilpin’s Emperor Jones, and while O’Neill’s name became celebrated, Gilpin’s was tragically lost to history.
Army of Lovers in the Holy Land, is Asaf Galay’s new award-winning documentary about the Jewish roots of the Swedish queer disco-pop band Army of Lovers and its charismatic singer Jean-Pierre Barda’s extraordinary journey to make aliyah – examining the notions of home, identity and family along the way.
John Lewis: Good Trouble, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Dawn Porter (Trapped, Gideon’s Army), will premiere for television Sunday, Sept. 27 at 9:00pm Eastern and Pacific on CNN. The documentary, an official selection of the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, explores the extraordinary life of the legendary civil rights activist and legislator, the now-late Rep. John R. Lewis.
Ahead of its world premiere out of competition at Venice Film Festival on Saturday, September 5, the first trailer debuted for Quentin Dupieux’s (Deerskin) comedy Mandibles (Mandibules).
Set in Australia’s Northern Territory, In My Blood it Runs follows Dujuan, a young Aborginal boy with a spiritual connection to, and vast knowledge of, his cultural ancestry. At home in Alice Springs, Dujuan is surrounded by his loving family, which includes his mother, his two brothers, and his maternal grandmother Nana Carol, with whom he has a special bond.
The BFI London Film Festival unveiled LFF Expanded: the Festival’s new strand of XR and Immersive Art, featuring Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality and including live immersive performance.
Tommy Oliver (“1982”) directs, produces and shoots the documentary 40 Years a Prisoner, chronicling the controversial 1978 Philadelphia police raid on the radical back-to-nature group MOVE and the aftermath that led to a son’s decades long fight to free his parents.
IFC Films debuted the first trailer for Shithouse, written, directed, and starring Cooper Raiff, in his feature debut. Shithouse won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the virtual 2020 SXSW Film Festival, where the film made its World Premiere in the Narrative Feature Competition section. Shithouse will open in in theaters and VOD on October 16.
Showtime dropped the new trailer for the new documentary film Kingdom of Silence exploring the complicated dynamic between the United States and Saudi Arabia as a backdrop to the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.
SFFILM announced the four winners of 2020 SFFILM Documentary Film Fund grants totaling $80,000, which support feature-length documentaries in post-production. Giovanni Buccomino’s After a Revolution (working title), Clarke Lyons and Gabe Dinsmoor’s Squeegee, Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside, and Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing with Fire were each awarded funding that will help push each project towards completion.
