2010

Emma (Sarah Paulson), single, successful, and NOT a dog person, gets stuck with a dog because her younger married sister is pregnant with twins and moving into a dogfree apartment. Her sister insists the dog is good luck — he’ll help you a find a man, and it’s true… for Emma’s assistant.

The personal side of immigration as child migrants from Mexico and Central America risk everything to make it to the US riding atop freight trains.

Filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world’s largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores” — self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz’s initial objective was to “paint” the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Director Lucy Walker (DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, BLINDSIGHT, COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) has great access to the entire process and, in the end, offers stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.

Two Spirits interweaves the tragic story of a mother’s loss of her son with a revealing look at the largely unknown history of a time when the world wasn’t simply divided into male and female and many Native American cultures held places of honor for people of integrated genders.

When Nahid, an Iranian exile, set out to make a documentary about Farah, the wife of the shah of Iran, she expected to encounter her opposite. As a child, Nahid had lived in poverty, watching Farrah’s wedding as if it were a fairy tale. In this poignant consideration of subjectivity as truth, we learn that people write history. And can also heal it.