KUCI: Film School

Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal tells the dramatic and inspiring story of the ordinary women who fought against overwhelming odds for the health and safety of their families. In the late 1970s, residents of Love Canal, a working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, discovered that their homes, schools and playgrounds were built on top of a former chemical waste dump, which was...

FINDING THE MONEY follows American economist Stephanie Kelton on a journey through Modern Money Theory or “MMT”. Kelton provocatively asserts the National Debt Clock that ticks ominously upwards in New York City is not actually a debt for us taxpayers at all, nor a burden for our grandchildren to pay back. Instead, Kelton describes the national debt as simply a historical record of the number of d...

BREATHE is a heart pounding thriller set in the future.  After Earth is left uninhabitable due to lack of oxygen, a mother Maya ( Jennifer Hudson) and her daughter Zora (Quvenzhané Wallis) are forced to live underground, with short trips to the surface only made possible by a coveted state of the art oxygen suit made by Maya’s husband, Darius (Common), whom she presumes to be dead. When a mysterio...

Cooper Ganz’s (Daniel Dorr) seemingly perfect life quickly unravels when he is diagnosed with a crippling form of OCD called Pure Obsessional. This often-misunderstood illness forces him to question his identity and sanity, all while trying to keep it together for his fiancé, Emily (Hope Lauren) family, and co-workers. As he struggles to accept his disease, and the vulnerability that comes along w...

For 50 years, Chinese American photographer Corky Lee documented the celebrations, struggles, and daily lives of Asian American Pacific Islanders with epic focus. Determined to push mainstream media to include AAPI culture in the visual record of American history, Lee produced an astonishing archive of nearly a million compelling photographs. His work takes on new urgency with the alarming rise in...

AN AMERICAN BOMBING: THE ROAD TO APRIL 19TH looks at the surge in homegrown political violence through the story of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, showing the roots of anti-government sentiment and its reverberations today, along with the emotionally charged warnings of those who suffered tragic losses in the deadliest homegrown attack in U.S. history. The Oklahoma City bombing was the single, de...

Zarrar Kahn’s feature film debut focuses on the lives of Mariam (Ramesha Nawal), her younger brother Bilal (Jibran Khan) and their mother, Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar) in a tiny apartment in Karachi. When Mariam’s maternal grandfather passes, his brother tries to manipulate them into signing over their apartment to him, a common occurrence in Pakistan, where women’s property rights are fragile. Maria...

LOST ANGEL: THE GENIUS OF JUDEE SILL is an intimate documentary portrait of a one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter from 1970s LA – Judee Sill.  It charts her life from a troubled adolescence of addiction, armed robbery and prison through her meteoric rise in the music world and early tragic death. In two years, Judee went from living in a car to a deal with Asylum Records  and the cover of  Rolling Sto...

BRANDY HELLVILLE & THE CULT OF FAST FASHION dives int a world where fashion is identity for teenage girls and one brand, Brandy Melville, has developed a cult-like following despite its controversial “one size fits all” tagline. Hiding behind its shiny Instagram façade is a shockingly toxic world, a reflection of the global fast fashion industry. Through a calculated social media presence and...

From the award winning team of Jesse Moss (The Overnighters, The Family) and Amanda McBaine (Boys State, The Mission) comes their latest mesmerizing documentary GIRLS STATE. The film follows 500 adolescent girls from all across Missouri as they come together for a week-long immersion into a sophisticated democratic laboratory, where they organize a Supreme Court to consider the most contentious is...

Rural hospitals around America are closing at alarming rates, leaving communities without care. Since 2005 more than 190 rural community hospitals, mostly in the South, have closed. In this documentary If Dreams Were Lightning: Rural Healthcare Crisis Oscar-and Emmy-nominated director Ramin Bahrani visits Appalachia, where American communities are left with limited or no access to healthcare. Expl...

For over 50 year’s PBS’ FRONTLINE has been the standard by which all other long form broadcast journalism is measured.  Under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief and Executive Producer Raney Aronson-Rath FRONTLINE has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including Peabody Awards, Emmy Awards, and, in 2019, the first Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Gold Baton to be awarded in a decade. FRONTLINE’...

Why would US military veterans take up arms against the country they swore an oath to protect? Through gripping personal perspectives from all sides of this ongoing crisis, Charlie Sadoff’s AGAINST ALL ENEMIES goes deep inside the violent extremist movement in America, alongside the Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, and with never-before-seen footage of the Oath Keepers. These groups, organized and led by...

In 1993, Danielle Metz, a 26-year-old mother of two young children, was labeled a drug kingpin by the U.S. Government as a part of her husband’s drug ring. Sentenced to a triple life plus 20 years for nonviolent drug offenses, she was sent to Dublin Federal Correctional Institute in California, more than two thousand miles from her family in New Orleans. In 2016, after having served 23 years in pr...

Alison O’Daniel’s powerful feature THE TUBA THIEVES re-examines a tuba-stealing crime spree that took place between 2011 and 2013 and the ramifications it had on students, marching bands and the high schools from which they were stolen. The Tuba Thieves starts from these questions. It is a film about listening, but it is not tethered to the ear. It is a film about Deaf gain, hearing loss and the p...

MUCH ADO ABOUT DYING begins when the filmmaker Simon Chambers receives a call from his elderly gay uncle, David Newlyn Gale, – “I think I may be dying!” – Simon takes it as a summons. As it turns out, eccentric Uncle David, a retired actor living alone in a cluttered, mouse-infested London house, is being dramatic, sort of: For the next five years, Chambers both cares for and documents David, thro...

Ivan Sen’s latest film zeroes in on a jaded police detective Travis (Simon Baker) as he arrives in the remote Australian Outback town of Limbo to investigate the cold case murder of a local Indigenous girl 20 years ago. As truths about the crime begin to unfold, Travis gains new insight into the unsolved case from the victim’s fractured family, the surviving witnesses, and the reclusive brother of...

UNFRIENDING is a dark comedy of manners about a group of friends that includes Blake and his girlfriend, May. The dinner party is the cover story for a 'life intervention' that focuses on the outcast of the group, Isaac, where the friend group tells him all the reasons he has become a burden to them and society in general, and that he should really just kill himself already. This off-kilter comedy...

Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen’s feature film debut, YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME, drops us in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, where a soaking wet and seemingly shaken to her core, a young woman (Jordan Cowan), knocks at a stranger’s door in an RV park looking for shelter and comfort. Patrick (Brendan Rock), is a strange and lonely resident, lives in one of the mobile homes. At first glance, she find...

Friedrich Moser’s frightening and surprisingly hopeful documentary, HOW TO BUILD A TRUTH ENGINE, about the pervasive influence of disinformation and conspiracy theories that have reached a level unwitnessed since the turmoil of the 1930s. HOW TO BUILD A TRUTH ENGINE portrays a crack-team of investigators from the fields of technology, journalism, folklore and neuroscience who show that if you hack...

In this hybrid political thriller and verité portrait documentary, A REVOLUTION ON CANVAS, Sara Nodjoumi, working with co-director and husband, Till Schauder, makes her directorial debut with this personal film, diving into the mystery surrounding the disappearance of more than 100 "treasonous" paintings by her father, seminal Iranian modern artist Nickzad Nodjoumi. The film follows Sara Nodjoumi...

Filmmaker Mila Turajlić was born in Belgrade, and grew up singing patriotic songs extolling Yugoslav leader Josep Broz Tito. The images that populated her "Yugoslavia of the mind" came largely from government newsreels--and the most iconic of those were shot by Stevan Labudović. In NON-ALIGNED: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIĆ REELS, Turajlić delves into Labudović's work documenting the birth of the Non-...

BREAKING THE NEWS follows the launch of The 19th*, a news startup that seeks to change the white, male-dominated news industry, asking who’s been omitted from mainstream coverage and how to include them. As Donald Trump was getting sworn in as President and the Women’s March set an angry, outspoken tone for the country’s discourse, journalist Emily Ramshaw  decided to meet the moment by launching...

In GOD SAVE TEXAS: THE PRICE OF OIL, Houston born and raised filmmaker Alex Stapleton turns her lens on her hometown to chronicle the impact of the Texas oil industry on Houston residents, specifically Black and disenfranchised communities, including the lives of her own family, who arrived in Texas in the 1830s as slaves and have stayed in the state for nearly 200 years. Tracing her personal stor...

2024 Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary Short “Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó” is a personal love letter from first generation Taiwanese-American director Sean Wang, to his grandmothers. Sean turns a camera on his grandmas (“Nǎi Nai” and “Wài Pó”), who are inseparable best friends and roommates in their 80s and 90s. The film captures their daily lives in hilarious and unexpected ways as they dance, st...