KUCI: Film School

A stunning tribute to the resilience of Native people and their way of life, SUGARCANE, the debut feature documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is an epic cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning. In 2021, evidence of unmarked graves was discovered on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada. After years...

Now, 43 years after the 1980 release of historical epic CALIGULA, producer and reconstructionist Thomas Negovan has realized the creators' original vision with CALIGULA: THE ULTIMATE CUT, a version comprised of entirely never-before-seen footage shot in 1976. Shadowed by the murder of his entire family, the young, wary Caligula (Malcolm McDowell) eliminates his devious adoptive grandfather (Peter...

HAPPY CAMPERS chronicles the final days of a working-class summer colony in a scrappy trailer park that just happens to hold the secret to a rich life. In a waterfront campground off the coast of Virginia, residents spend their summers living spitting distance apart in rust-bitten RVs. They chuckle about the modest rent they pay for a million-dollar location, but what makes them the luckiest peopl...

WATER BROTHER: THE SID ABBRUZZI STORY follows the life of surf and skate core legend and cultural icon Sid Abbruzzi, and his commitment to protecting the sports’ history and culture. Through a mix of never-before-seen archival film, large format cinematic footage, and personal interviews from culture giants like Tony Hawk, Shepard Fairey, Selema Masekela and more; we are taken on a journey through...

Academy-award winning director David Marsh (Man on Wire) takes viewers on cinematic journey through the life of literary genius Samuel Beckett. DANCE FIRST highlights his lived life of many parts: Parisian bon vivant, WWII Resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband, recluse. But despite all the adulation that came his, way he was a man acutely aware of his own failing...

Director John McDermott’s Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision  chronicles the creation of the groundbreaking recording studio, Electric Lady Studios. Rising from the rubble of a bankrupt Manhattan nightclub to becoming a state-of-the-art recording facility inspired by Hendrix’s desire for a permanent studio, Electric Lady Studios was the first ever artist-owned commercial recording studio...

WAR GAME sweeps audiences into an elaborate future-set simulation that dramatically escalates the threat posed by the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The film follows a bipartisan group of US defense, intelligence, and elected policymakers spanning five presidential administrations as they participate in an unscripted role-play exercise. Portraying a fictional President of the United States and his...

In their cheeky social satire COUP! Co-directors Austin Stark & Joseph Schuman drop us into an isolated seaside estate during the 1918 Spanish Flu. The estate belongs to a wealthy couple, an entitled journalist, Jay (Billy Magnussen) and his socialite wife, Julie (Sarah Gadon).The couple hires a mysterious grifter as a their private cook, Floyd (Peter Sarsgaard). When the plague finally descen...

In their sophomore feature film co-directors Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner track the story of New York yuppies Amy and Max during their time in the wealthy resort town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming while on a summer vacation. Amy wants to enjoy a romantic getaway with her fiancé. But Max neglects Amy to spend the week working, leaving her to wander town alone. Amy finds a friend in Loren, a local wil...

SLEEP NO MORE is a Los Angeles neo noir crime thriller directed by Antonia Boganovich, and Executive Produced by Peter Bogdanovich. Warren, once a master Shakespearian actor, is now a gambling drunk. Puck-like Samuel enchants crowds on the 3rd Street Promenade, reciting Shakespeare. And brother Beckett, a master pickpocket, makes his way through the unsuspecting crowd. When Warren gets in deep wit...

DEVIL PUT THE COAL IN THE GROUND is a moving portrayal of resilience by the people of West Virginia that reveals – despite years of corporate greed and exploitation – how a deep love of family, community and tradition has carried them through it all. From the realities of a crumbling economy, to the ravages of the opioid epidemic, to the irreparable environmental damage and its tragic impact on hu...

GETTING IT BACK: THE STORY OF CYMANDE lovingly recounts the journey of Cymande, a group of Black British musicians who all came to the U.K. from the Caribbean as children, released three brilliant albums in quick succession in the early 1970s and were embraced in the USA. But in the U.K., they faced a music business beset by prejudice against homegrown Black talent and were largely ignored. They o...

MOUNTAIN QUEEN: THE SUMMITS OF LHAKPA SHERPA tracks Lhakpa’s storied mountaineering career in pursuit of her record-breaking 10th summit to reveal a rich personal history – from her childhood as a girl denied an education in rural Nepal, to her experience as an immigrant in America and survivor of intimate partner violence, to her fight to live as a fearless example to her teenage daughters. Throu...

Winner of the 2023 SXSW Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature Dan Covert’s GEOFF MCFETRIDGE: DRAWING A LIFE focuses on one of the most prolific artists of his time, Geoff McFetridge, an artist who has undoubtedly influenced the way the world looks. His art is everywhere—on your Apple watch, in countless galleries around the world, in title designs for films by Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze,...

From acclaimed director Levan Akin (AND THEN WE DANCED), CROSSING is a moving and tender tale of identity, acceptance and unlikely connection that transcends borders and generations. Lia, a retired school teacher living in the country of Georgia, hears from a young neighbor Achi that her long lost niece Tekla, a transgender woman, has crossed the border into Turkey. Hoping to bring Tekla home, Lia...

HOLLYWOODGATE chronicles a sliver of the larger picture around the take over by the Taliban when the United States withdrew from its twenty-year old “forever war” in Afghanistan. In the time since the Taliban have re-established their control over the ravaged country, they located and pillaged an American military base loaded with weaponry - a portion of the over $7 billion in U.S. armaments still...

SORRY/NOT SORRY charts how an open secret about comedian Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct evolved into a front page article on The New York Times. Following the story’s publication, Louis C.K. admitted “these stories are true” and faced initial repercussions, only to return to the stage nine months later. While the story of C.K.’s rise and fall largely played out in public, this film reveals the sto...

Chris Skotchdopole’s feature film debut, CRUMB CATCHER At a remote estate in upstate New York, where newlyweds Leah (Ella Rae Peck) and Shane (Rigo Garay) are about celebrate their honeymoon, when the appearance of two workers from their wedding reception brings an escalating sense of dread and menace. Leah works for the publisher who will be releasing Shane’s debut novel, a lightly autobiographic...

Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese first encountered the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger when he was a child, sitting in front of the family TV. When their famous logo came up on screen, Scorsese says, “You knew you were in for fantasy, wonder, magic - real film magic.” In the documentary film, Made in England, The Films of Powell & Pressburger, director David Hinton, with the...

In his riveting feature documentary CHAMPIONS OF THE GOLDEN VALLEY director Ben Sturgulewski peels back the social, religious and community layers in the remote mountain villages of Bamyan, Afghanistan, to find what has created the newfound passion for skiing. This passion has attracted young athletes from rival ethnic groups who showcase their resourcefulness and skill on the slopes. Equipped wit...

Director Tomas Gomez-Bustillo magical tale, CHRONICLES OF A WANDERING SAINT focuses on a tiny rural village in Argentina, where Rita Lopez, (Monica Villa) a pious yet insatiably competitive woman, decides that staging a miracle could be her ticket to sainthood. After discovering a lost statue in the back room of her chapel, she convinces her neglected but loving husband to help her orchestrate the...

Nick August-Perna complex documentary feature TELL THEM YOU LOVE ME explores the story of Anna Stubblefield, an esteemed  Rutgers University professor who becomes embroiled in a controversial affair with Derrick Johnson, a Black man with cerebral palsy, and who has been non-communicative since his earliest days. Using a highly disputed technique Anna says she unlocked Derrick’s mind from his body...

Director Ilana Trachtman illuminating documentary AIN'T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND is the untold story of the first organized interracial civil rights protest in U.S. history. When five Howard University students sat on a Maryland carousel in 1960, the arrests made headlines. When the white community near Glen Echo Amusement Park joined the Black students in picketing, an extraordinary history-ma...

Filmmakers Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland feature length, speculative documentary, LYD follows the rise and fall of a 5,000-year-old metropolis, Lyd. It was once a bustling Palestinian town until it was conquered when the State of Israel was established in 1948. As the film unfolds, a chorus of characters creates a tapestry of the Palestinian experience of this city and the trauma left by the...

Gennadiy (Gena) Chabotarev is a queer artist from a small town in Russia, dresses in otherworldly costumes made from junk and tape, and protests the government on the streets of Moscow. Born and raised on the harsh streets of Magadan, a frigid outpost of the Soviet gulag, Gena is only 21. She stages radical performances in public that become a new form of art and activism. By doing that, she wants...