KUCI: Film School

Director Amanda Nell Eu feature film debut, TIGER STRIPES, focuses on the life of a rebellious and carefree twelve-year-old girl, Zaffan, as she starts to experience horrifying physical changes to her body. Struggling to maintain being normal at school, Zaffan is in denial of her inevitable changes and tries to cover herself. Zaffan’s friends however attack her, when all hysteria breaks loose — on...

Samuel Habib’s goals are pretty typical for a 21-year-old. Moving out of his family’s New Hampshire home. College. Establishing his career. Dating. Sex. Yet every rite of passage is fraught with challenges. Unexpected seizures and uncontrollable movements caused by his rare genetic disorder. Friends’ homes that are inaccessible to his wheelchair. His labored speech and use of a communication devic...

Straddling the line between childhood and adulthood, 14 isn’t an easy age for anyone, least of all Abby (Sierra McCormick, The Vast of Night), who’s forced to find her way in the world after her mother’s death. On the cusp of turning 15 and at a delicate moment in life, she’s forced to move in with her father (Jason Butler Harner, Ozark) and his younger girlfriend (Sabina Friedman-Seitz). Feeling...

Banel and Adama is a great romance, a West African dreamscape, a tragic fable, and a feminist paean. Young, fiery Banel loves her soft-hearted husband Adama with singular passion. She also hates to do chores with other village women, slings stones at small creatures, and fantasizes a liberated life of cattle-herding outside the village in the dunes. Adama is next in line for village chief but resi...

Tayarisha Poe’s spectacular sophomore film finds Celestina, (Kiersey Clemons, DOPE, Hearts Beat Loud) on her wedding day. All that stands between this young woman and marital bliss with her soon-to-be husband, River, (singer/songwriter Leon Bridges) is surviving the chaos and expectations of family and friends, each intensifying her spiraling panic. THE YOUNG WIFE is the story of a young woman gra...

When Eva (Kahyun Kim), the daughter, accidentally shoots her White hippie fiance, Peter (Craig Newman), dead, her parents, June (Margaret Cho), and Sam (Keong Sim) insist on getting rid of the body in order to protect Eva. As the family collides with each other on what is the right thing to do, tension and long-buried secrets about the family's journey to America begin to surface. Faced with this...

Executive produced by Moby, ROWDY GIRL showcases the inspiring work of Renee King-Sonnen, a former Texas cattle rancher who in 2015, after a spiritual awakening, left the cruel cycle of animal agriculture. After going vegan, King-Sonnen and her husband, Tommy Sonnen, transformed her husband’s beef operation into Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, a farm animal sanctuary that seeks to rescue farm animals from f...

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Vanessa Hope’s takes full advantage of her unprecedented access to the first female president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen. Thorough, incisive and bristling with tension, INVISIBLE NATION is a living account of Tsai’s tightrope walk as she balances the hopes and dreams of her nation between the colossal geopolitical forces of the U.S. and China. Hope’s observational...

Roots So Deep (you can see the devil down there) is a 4-part documentary series all about inventive farmers and maverick scientists building a path to solving climate change with hooves, heart and soil. Can an underutilized way to graze cattle, that mimics the way bison once roamed the land, help get farmers out of debt, restore our depleted soils, rebuild wildlife habitat and draw down huge amoun...

Haley Watson directorial debut MOTORCYCLE MARY, documentary short, brings the remarkable life of Mary McGee’s to the big screen with stunning never-before-seen archival footage and photographs. McGee’s racing career spanned thirty years and saw Mary shatter gender norms while mastering multiple racing disciplines. Born in Alaska on the eve of World War II, Mary’s early life is riddled with fear bu...

Director Michelle Ferrari’s comprehensive documentary THE RIOT REPORT tracks a time in recent American history when Black neighborhoods in scores of cities erupted in violence during the summer of 1967. After four consecutive summers of urban violence, President Lyndon Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders - informally known as the Kerner Commission, (named after it...

At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government is determined to fight Communism with culture. The Venice Biennale, the world’s most influential art exhibition, becomes a proving ground in 1964. Alice Denney, Washington insider and friend of the Kennedys, recommends Alan Solomon, an ambitious curator making waves with trailblazing art, to organize the U.S. entry. Together with Leo Castelli, a p...

Based on a true story, THE KEEPER tells a sweeping story of US Army veteran George Eshleman, a man heavily impacted by his fellow veteran's suicides, he decides to help raise awareness for military member suicides by hiking the entire nearly 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia. On the trek, he carries 363 name tapes from the uniforms of military members who committed suicide, given...

In the next decade, NASA intends to send astronauts to Mars for the first time. To succeed, crew members will have to overcome unprecedented life-threatening challenges. And while many of these hazards are physical, the most elusive are psychological. Throughout their three-year absence, crew members won’t be able to communicate with Earth in real time due to the immense distance. The psychologica...

This twisted tale of love and death begins and ends with Ray, an ordinary man who runs an ordinary business in the fictional town of LaRoy, Texas. He longs for his wife Stacy-Lynn’s affections, but Ray discovers that his wife is cheating on him and decides to end his life in a motel parking lot. Just before taking action, a stranger breaks into his car, thinking he is dealing with the killer he hi...

The celebrated filmmaker duo of Bill Ross and Turner Ross (Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets & Contemporary Color, 45365) turn their pioneering hybrid approach to the cinematic road trip that is GASOLINE RAINBOW. This raw and deeply affecting film is an expansive portrait of the new generation as told in their own words. With high school in the rearview, five teenagers from inland Oregon embark on on...

Based on real events, I AM GITMO follows the reaction the United States to the 9/11 attack and the human cost that came about from the implementation of the War on Terror. The film focuses on Gamel Sadek, a Muslim schoolteacher as he is taken from his home and delivered to Bagram Air Base, a CIA black site, where he is questioned on the whereabouts of the 9/11 mastermind, Osama Bin Laden. He is to...

Director Francis Galluppi’s feature film debut, The Last Stop in Yuma County, is a rockin’ good time of genre hopping mix of Western, Noir and desert dry humor. While awaiting the arrival of the next fuel truck at a middle-of-Arizona rest stop, a traveling young knife salesman is thrust into a high-stakes hostage situation by the arrival of two similarly stranded bank robbers with no qualms about...

In Marija Kavtaradze’s latest film, SLOW, contemporary dancer Elena meets Dovydas when he is assigned to interpret via sign language in a class she is teaching to deaf youth. Their connection is immediate, kinetic, and frictionless. As they gravitate toward each other, resisting the forces and interventions of their separate daily lives, their bond deepens from platonic to romantic. When Dovydas d...

RESISTANCE - THEY FOUGHT BACK provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis. For decades, the world believed that Jews faced their fate passively during the...

For many Anita Pallenberg was at various points in her life a newspaper headline: a “rock n’ roll goddess,” a “voodoo priestess,” and an “evil seductress.” She was accused of trying to break up the Rolling Stones, among other things. What is made clear in co-directors Alexis Bloom & Svetlana Zill’s compelling documentary CATCHING FIRE: THE STORY OF ANITA PALLENBERG those who loved her consider...

Within hours of his funeral, Hong Kong movie studios began to produce hundreds of unauthorized biopics, spin-offs and rip-offs starring a competing roster of Bruce Lee lookalikes. Over the next decade, ‘Bruceploitation’ would become a staple of global cinema. Director David Gregory examines this fascinating phenomenon via interviews with Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Liang and Dragon Lee; martial arts...

In this quietly powerful documentary, Little Empty Boxes a strong and independent woman, Kathy Lugavere finds herself struggling with her own memory. In a quest to find his mother the best care, 32-year-old son Max moves home to New York City and begins to consult with top health experts to investigate the origins of Dementia, a disease which now affects a staggering 55 million people globally. Th...

James Norton (Bob Marley: One Love, Little Women) stars as John, a 35-year-old window cleaner who has dedicated his life to bringing up his 4-year-old son, Michael (Daniel Lamont), after the child’s mother left them soon after giving birth. When John is given only a few months left to live, he attempts to find a new, perfect family for Michael, determined to shield him from the terrible reality of...

After the Civil War, freed African Americans settled in the floodplains along North Carolina's Tar River. This land becomes Princeville, the first town chartered by Blacks in America. FREEDOM HILL is an immersive tour of this historic site that chronicles the ongoing legacy of this community. Guided by Princeville native Marquetta Dickens, the camera captures what makes the town so special: a car...