Cinemafile

Trifole, Igor, an aging truffle hunter, faces failing health and disappearing woodlands while struggling to keep pace with the modern truffle trade. Into his quiet, tradition-bound life bounds Dalia, his 28-year-old granddaughter from London, estranged from her roots and searching for direction. Tasked with caring for him, their uneasy reunion softens as she is drawn into his passion for truffle h...

From director Nathan Silver, "CAROL & JOY was born from a convergence of mothers. In my previous documentary, CUTTING MY MOTHER, I followed my own mom Cindy’s life and discovered that she was in a b'nai mitzvah class in her late 60s (customarily reserved for pre-teens). This would become the original premise of my fiction film BETWEEN THE TEMPLES, and Carol Kane would play the b'nai mitzvah st...

NUNS VS. THE VATICAN is a groundbreaking investigative documentary that exposes a historic showdown inside the Catholic Church. NUNS VS. THE VATICAN follows Gloria, a former nun who risked everything to challenge the church's silence on abuse, corruption and systemic erasure of women's voices within Catholic power structures. After she experienced this abuse at the hands of her mentor and guide, F...

At 15, he took a life. Three days later, his brother’s life was taken. A moving chronicle of forgiveness, family, and the transformative power of art, SONGS FROM THE HOLE weaves music and mixed-media storytelling into an innovative documentary visual album. Through clear-eyed narration and lyrical journal entries, incarcerated musician James “JJ’88” Jacobs reveals his innermost struggles as a pers...

Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton was hot on the trail of the next great American true crime documentary—a riveting account of a highway patrolman's quixotic effort to identify and capture the infamous Zodiac Killer. Shackleton devised a plan, began collecting interviews, and shot “evocative B-roll” footage of ghostly California freeways and parking lots where the killer may have once lurked. And then...

Winner of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award winner (World Cinema Documentary) Co-directors Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni's Cutting Through Rocks drops us into the world of the fearless mid-wife Sara Shahverdi, who decides she wants to be the first woman to run for the local area council. Not only does she win, she takes on the local patriarchy in her remote Iranian village. Sar...

Decades after the disappearance of her uncle during Argentina’s Dirty War, a filmmaker joins the Caravan of Mothers, a group of Central American women who travel by bus along the migrant route in search of their loved ones who have disappeared trying to reach the U.S. Their stories intertwine across generations and geographies, the film becomes a powerful testament to resilience, memory, hope, and...

Currently screening at 2025 DOCNYC, FLOPHOUSE AMERICA places us in the middle of the ongoing housing crisis in the U.S.,where many people are forced to live in rundown hotels,  known as flophouses. Twelve-year-old Mikal shares a small, inexpensive room in one of these hotels with his parents and their cat, Smokey. Their home is marked by chaos and alcohol abuse, but also by love and the hope...

Co-directors Peter Yost & Michael Rohatyn’s DROP DEAD CITY is the first-ever feature documentary devoted to the NYC Fiscal Crisis of 1975, an extraordinary, overlooked episode in urban American history that saw an already crumbling city of eight million people brought to the edge of bankruptcy and social chaos by a perfect storm of debt, greed, ambitious social policy and poor governance. Name...

Co-directors Barbara Miller and Philip Delaquis WISDOM OF HAPPINESS shows us a timeless truth: happiness is still possible, even in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. This powerful message of hope is delivered as a personal audience with one of the greatest living thinkers, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tenzin Gyatso, known to billions around the world as the Dalai Lama.  Speaking as a member of...

Endlessly struggling to feel seen, David becomes infatuated with a mysterious company’s promise to transform people’s lives by permanently changing the color of their eyes. After traveling to India to get the controversial procedure, he begins to question if this artificial beauty will give him the fulfillment he truly seeks. CATERPILLAR explores the lengths that people are willing to go in p...

THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT is through the lens of entirely archival footage, and we're given an infuriating fly-on-the-wall perspective of the pivotal years surrounding climate change through the George H.W. Bush administration. A time when global warming was first introduced to the public with scientific-backing and as a non-partisan issue, but as chief of staff John Sununu used climate change to fur...

PLAN C for CIVILIZATION tackles one of the most controversial approaches to mitigating and possibly reversing the dire impacts of climate change.   As emissions pour into the atmosphere and world leaders struggle for solutions to a climate emergency, the controversial climate-cooling technology called solar geo-engineering is entering the world’s stage. It’s an idea so powerful and full of un...

Corky Lee  was born in 1947 in New York to Chinese immigrants who owned a laundry in Queens. He majored in history at Queens College and became a community organizer in Manhattan’s Chinatown in the 1970s. Over the next five decades he photographed countless protests and cultural events in the Asian American Pacific Islander community. Lee’s photographs documented the birth and growth of...

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lynsey Addario has risked her life to capture the stark realities of war — from the Middle East and Afghanistan to Ukraine. From National Geographic Documentary Films and Academy Award® -winning filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, “Love+War” chronicles Addario’s ascent in the male-dominated world of conflict photography . But her work comes at a steep perso...

A gently humanist story of the American West from Max Walker-Silverman (A Love Song), Rebuilding follows Dusty (Josh O’Connor), a reserved, divorced father whose ranch has burned down in a devastating wildfire. Now living in a trailer community on a government-run campsite, Dusty finds solace with his new neighbors who have also lost everything, quietly reassembles his life, and starts reconnectin...

Co-directors Bonni Cohen and John Shenk's latest documentary IN WAVES AND WAR follows highly decorated Navy SEAL Marcus Capone, who returns from Afghanistan and attempts to readjust to civilian life. But years of unprecedented warfare have left Marcus with treatment-defiant PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and severe depression beyond what current government treatment options can effectively addres...

Creator / Director Sean King O’Grady’s SUSPICIOUS MINDS is a docuseries that investigates the disturbing rise of artificial intelligence as a trigger for delusional thinking. Through powerful firsthand accounts and in-depth interviews with leading experts in psychiatry, neuroscience, and AI ethics, the series unpacks a growing psychological phenomenon: individuals developing complex, often li...

Director Barak Goodman’s KISSINGER, is a new two-part, three-hour biography, offers an incisive portrait of Henry Kissinger, the enigmatic powerbroker who served in the topmost echelons of American diplomacy. Whether celebrated or reviled, Kissinger’s contradictions reflect those at the heart of America’s foreign policy during the second half of the 20th century, a period in which America became t...

Nothing is as it seems when filmmaker Emily Wyland (Brittany O’Grady) teams up with cinematographer Danny (E. J. Bonilla) to shoot an intimate documentary about reuniting with Emily’s estranged mother after a decade apart. When her mother suddenly goes missing, possibly succumbing to the addictions that first tore her family apart, Emily and Danny must piece together increasingly sinister clues to...

Surviving racism, homophobia and childhood trauma, Carl Bean found his voice through song – first as a gospel singer in Harlem’s Christian Tabernacle Choir and then later performing with his group Carl Bean and Universal Love on their 1974 album “Universal Love.” But it was the recording of the 1977 Motown hit “I Was Born This Way” that would earn him fame; the song was celebrated as the world’s f...

With unprecedented access to the global migration crisis, ROADS OF FIRE weaves together three powerful, deeply personal narratives: a human smuggler guiding refugees through the treacherous Darién Gap, an asylum seeker rebuilding her life in New York City, and volunteers working on the frontlines of a mounting humanitarian emergency. ROADS OF FIRE offers an unflinching, intimate look at the human...

Keith Jarrett’s legendary performance in January 1975 nearly didn’t happen. Based on a true story, Köln 75 follows how the concert was conceived and orchestrated by the efforts of a teenage up and coming concert promoter, Vera Brandes, (played by German actress Mala Emde). Her enthusiasm set her to multitasking – from organizing the concert venue (the Cologne Opera House), promoting the event, and...

RIVER OF GRASS is a present-day reimagining of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s groundbreaking book, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” (1947), which transformed the public’s understanding of the area from worthless swamps to an essential source of freshwater, enabling the ecosystem to endure, just barely, today. In the wake of a hurricane, Douglas visits filmmaker Sasha Wortzel in a dream and...

Resurrection, ancient prophecies, and globe-spanning adventures—this is the outrageous true story of Patrick McCollum, an eccentric spiritual leader who’s been identified by Indigenous Elders as the man foretold to fulfill a sacred prophecy to save the Amazon. McCollum has lived a life so improbable, it sounds like a myth. From carnival worker to renowned jewelry designer, kung fu master, reverend...