Cinemafile

In October 1985, Santa Ana, California was shaken by a brazen act of political violence when Palestinian American Alex Odeh, a beloved teacher and community leader, was killed by a tripwire bomb planted in his office. Despite substantial evidence and identified suspects, the case was never solved. Who Killed Alex Odeh? reopens the mystery, tracking a renewed investigation in real time as new leads...

Kallia and Ram are at their wits' end with their sleepless baby when they realize Kallia’s Greek mother is on a secret mission to exorcise the family from the evil eye. Trapped between the pressures of new age parenting, old world superstitions, and meddling in-laws, they fight to hold onto their dreams. Inspired by the cultural clash that took place after moving into the same Manhattan apartment...

Nearly a decade before Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert came under attack for their political humor, an unknown comedian from Ohio finds himself in even more serious trouble for making fun of the government. Crime & Parody follows the story of Anthony Novak, an amateur comedian who creates a parody Facebook page mocking his local police department. The page is satire, but the police take it ve...

The Other Roe uncovers the powerful, long-overlooked story behind Doe v. Bolton, the historic Supreme Court case that was decided on the same day as Roe v. Wade yet has been largely erased from public memory. While Roe became a national symbol, Doe quietly provided the broader legal framework that shaped reproductive rights for generations. The film centers on Margie Pitts Hames, a trailblazing ci...

SMILE…the Worst is Yet to Come tells the story of Elder Millenial’s, BEN and BIRDIE, who are feeling the pressure of time. After closing his bar and suffering a heart attack-ish incident, Ben is struggling to find his purpose. Birdie put her photography ambitions on hold to be the financially “stable one” as a nurse, but is secretly exploring creative pursuits. Several failed IVF attempts have dri...

Currently available on HBO, director Jan Czarlewski’s riveting documentary film 33 PHOTOS FROM THE GHETTO tells the story of the only known photographs from inside the Warsaw Ghetto during the April 1943 uprising and its brutal repression that were not taken by German forces. The images, taken secretly by 23-year-old Polish firefighter Leszek Grzywaczewski, who witnessed the devastating response t...

Award-winning director Kim A. Snyder’s THE LIBRARIANS is four-alarm siren alerting us to nationwide campaign, funded by shadowy network of special interests to censor and deny Americans access to many of the most consequential books and historical information from world celebrated and renown authors, scientists and historians. THE LIBRARIANS highlights a concerted effort in Texas to restrict, ban...

PAYING FOR IT is a live-action adaptation of acclaimed alternative-cartoonist Chester Brown’s best-selling graphic novel. In the late 90s, Chester and Sonny are a long-term, committed, romantic couple. When Sonny wants to redefine their relationship, Chester, an introverted cartoonist, starts sleeping with sex workers and discovers a new kind of intimacy in the process. PAYING FOR IT is about love...

Getting its World Premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, JOYBUBBLES begins in the 1950s, recounting the unbelievable story of Joybubbles, (the legal name of the former Joe Engressia since 1991) as he discovers he can control the global telephone system simply by whistling a magic tone. Born blind and hungry for connection, his early obsession with the telephone sparks a subculture that shape...

Middle-aged and erratic, Oscar is a failed writer who has given up on life. Unemployed and living with family, he wanders the streets of Medellín in a drunken stupor, lamenting the state of literature in his home country, where he has succumbed to the cliché of the tortured artist. However, the opportunity to mentor a young student offers a chance at redemption, if he doesn’t screw it up first. In...

Director Praise Odigie Paige's beautiful narrative short Birdie's will have its World Premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, BIRDIE is a narrative short set in 1970’s Virginia, following a young Nigerian refugee trying to keep her family together in the aftermath of the Biafran War. Director Praise Odigie Paige BIRDIE is a coming-of-age film told through the eyes of 16-year-old English, the...

Director Brittany Shyne’s Oscar Shortlisted Feature Documentary seamlessly weaves together the stories of three Black generational farmers to create a collective and intimate portrait of farming today, SEEDS is a moving and powerful exploration of their lives, joys and struggles as well as the fragility of legacy and owning land. With remarkable intimacy, the film documents their everyday lives -...

Michael Apted’s The Long Way Home, a revealing, rollicking portrait of the Soviet underground rock legend Boris Grebenshchikov, who became the first to record in the West during the early, optimistic days of Glasnost—not quite believing he would collaborate with Dave Stewart, Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, and Ray Cooper—was released to critical acclaim after its broadcast in the UK and premiere at...

Mickey (Zelda Adams) faces a deadly diagnosis, but she isn’t ready to die yet. Heading into the woods with her father (John Adams), she seeks dark magic at the hands of mysterious recluse, Solveig (Toby Poser) , who has an intimate relationship with death and roots that go deep in the land. For three days, Mickey endures Solveig’s extreme rituals of death magic. But every cure has its cost, and ev...

Follow director Adam Bhala Lough as he sets out to better understand the technology and people at the center of the AI boom. His quest sends him on a path towards the father of AI, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. When he isn’t able to sit down with Altman himself, Adam travels to India to create an AI version of him to interview instead. DEEPFAKING SAM ALTMAN is a verité documentary with a sci-fi comedic...

In the wake of the opioid epidemic, insurance companies were now required to cover addiction and mental health treatment at the same reimbursement rate as other medical conditions, but without any of the regulations, a move that effectively monetized the 40 million Americans struggling with these issues. Shot over the course of three years, Shuffle follows three individuals trapped by the insuranc...

Shortlisted for this year’s Best Feature Documentary Oscar, Director Brandon Kramer’s deeply empathetic story begins with the despicable attack that took place on the morning of October 7, 2023, while Israeli-American Liat Atzili and her husband Aviv were at home when Hamas attacked their kibbutz. By nightfall, Liat and Aviv are captives in Gaza along with 250 other people - 12 of whom, like Liat,...

In the heart of the Mississippi Delta, the village of Glendora may seem quiet and remote. But beneath its stillness lies a vibrant, tightly knit African-American community whose strength, resilience, and creativity thrive despite chronic scarcity. GLENDORA is the result of five years of close collaboration between filmmaker and townspeople—an intimate portrait of life where economic fragility meet...

In co-directors Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee's Peabody Award winning documentary portrait, ANY OTHER WAY: THE JACKIE SHANE STORY a star is reborn. With an outsize stage presence that eclipsed R&B greats like Etta James and Little Richard, Black trans soul singer Jackie Shane was the real deal. After mysteriously vanishing from public view for almost 40 years, this little-known icon...

In pre-internet 1987, Conor and his dog Sandy live a life of seclusion, lost in the slow-rendering graphics of early Macs and televisions aglow with late night horror movie marathons. But when he begins playing OBEX, a new and mysterious, state-of-the-art computer game, he finds himself trapped in a low-tech, but high-stakes analog hellscape as the line between reality and game blurs. Audacious an...

Ripped from today's headlines , MEN OF WAR is an insider account of the failed 2020 coup in Venezuela as told by former US Army Green Beret Jordan Goudreau, a three-time Bronze Star recipient who organized the ill-fated mission. A harrowing look into the realpolitik world of exiled leaders, private armies and shadowy intelligence operatives and what made one man believe he could change the course...

A deeply moving, multigenerational drama, ALL THAT’S LEFT OF YOU follows a Palestinian teenager who gets swept into a protest in the Occupied West Bank and experiences a moment of violence that rocks his family. The film unfolds as his mother recounts the political and emotional threads that led to that fateful moment. Spanning seven decades, the film traces the hopes and heartaches of one uproote...

HOMEGROWN follows three conservative activists—a newly politicized father-to-be in New Jersey, an Air Force veteran organizing conservatives in New York City, and an activist from Texas—crisscrossing the country in the summer of 2020 campaigning for Donald Trump. When they become convinced that the election is stolen, they take their fight to the streets. The result is a chilling portrait of the g...

American Genre Film Archive , a non-profit organization devoted to the collection, preservation, and distribution of genre movies — most of them works made on the margins of the mainstream film industry — that is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. The archive’s collection currently holds over 6,000 films, many of which it distributes theatrically to repertory cinemas, and AGFA makes many...

Established by independent film veteran Mark Mathias Sayre, THE FORGE is a distributor and international sales agency of compelling independent films and documentaries. As CEO and founder, Sayre’s vision for The Forge extends beyond distribution. It’s about creating a conduit for films that embody authentic voices and narratives that might otherwise be overshadowed in the conventional studio syste...