DocuDay LA

Hatidze lives with her ailing mother in the mountains of Macedonia, making a living cultivating honey using ancient beekeeping traditions. When an unruly family moves in next door, what at first seems like a balm for her solitude becomes a source of tension as they, too, want to practice beekeeping, while disregarding her sustainable methods. (85 minutes)

An exploration into the truth behind the unraveling of two Brazilian presidencies. Combining access to leaders past and present, including Presidents Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva, with accounts of her own family's political and industrial past, director Petra Costa witnesses their rise and fall and the polarized nation that remains. (121 minutes)

In the Absence: When the passenger ferry MV Sewol sank off the coast of South Korea in 2014, over three hundred people lost their lives, most of them schoolchildren. Years later, the victims’ families and survivors are still demanding justice from national authorities. (29 minutes)

Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if you’re a girl): Learning To Skateboard In A Warzone (if you’re a girl) is the story of young Afghan girls learning to read, write—and skateboard—in Kabul. The film follows a class of girls as they progress both in the classroom and the skatepark, navigating not only the challenges of their education but also the challenges of the increasingly unstable world in which they live. (40 minutes)

Life Overtakes Me: Facing deportation, hundreds of refugee children in Sweden have become afflicted with resignation syndrome, withdrawing from the world into a coma-like state as if frozen for months, or even years. Life Overtakes Me brings viewers into the lives of the parents who struggle to care for their sick children. (40 minutes)

St. Louis Superman: Bruce Franks Jr., a Ferguson activist and battle rapper who was elected to the overwhelmingly white and Republican Missouri House of Representatives, must overcome both personal trauma and political obstacles to pass a bill critical for his community. (28 minutes)

Walk Run Cha-Cha: Paul and Millie Cao reunited in California after the Vietnam War. Forty years later, they are rediscovering themselves on the dance floor. (20 minutes)

A stirring portrait of courage, resilience and female solidarity, delivers an unflinching look at the Syrian war and some of its most unlikely heroes. For besieged civilians, hope and safety lie inside the subterranean hospital known as the Cave, where pediatrician and managing physician Dr. Amani Ballour and her colleagues work as equals alongside their male counterparts. (105 minutes)

For Sama is an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. (95 minutes)

In post-industrial Ohio, a Chinese billionaire opens a new factory in the husk of an abandoned General Motors plant, hiring two thousand blue-collar Americans. Early days of hope and optimism give way to setbacks as high-tech China clashes with working-class America. (110 minutes)