Whether we’re arguing over media bias, fighting for a favorite politician, or battling over social injustices, it often feels as if America – indeed the world – is a nearly constant state of conflict. And it seems the friction has only risen in recent years. In their own ways, each of these shorts explore how we’ve reached a place of strife and disunity, and what it feels like to live amidst the tumult.

Jade Helm

In 2015, the U.S. military conducted routine training across the American Southwest. But were these military exercises actually cover for something more sinister? Built on deep suspicions of the government and the mainstream media, a fearful backlash erupted in the Texas heartland, and the exercises, called Jade Helm 15, became a national news story — with a surprise ending that is still playing out today. Directed by Debi Cornwall. (2022)

Detroit Will Breathe

Produced in connection with the Detroit Will Breathe organization, the film captures George Floyd-inspired protests of summer 2020, weaving together footage from police body cameras, protesters and bystanders, as well as moving portraits of key protestors. The film provides an unprecedented and poignant look into what it means to be part of an integrated movement fighting for Black lives. Directed by Detroit/NYC-based filmmaker Kate Levy. 

You’ve Been Lied To

At a Warren polling place on Election Day 2020, the dialogue amongst demonstrators reveals just how extreme our political divide has become. Directed by metro Detroit native Mitch McCabe. (2023)

Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles

Against a radio backdrop of news about the war, Ukrainian sculptors known for creating sublime statues of angels, spiritual figures and the like instead build anti-tank obstacles to block the advancement of Russian troops. Directed by Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk. (2022)

Freep Film Festival celebrates its milestone 10th year bringing the best in documentaries to Detroit. The 2023 festival, which will be held April 26-30, will feature five days of programming at the Detroit Film Theatre including its opening night film. Screenings will include conversations with filmmakers and people featured in the films.  The festival’s focus is on documentaries with strong connections to Detroit or Michigan or films that resonate strongly with Midwest communities. For a complete list of the festival schedule go to freepfilmfestival.com
 

They work with wood, with paint, with their imaginations. Whatever the approach, the unforgettable personalities featured in these six short documentaries make indelible impacts on the world by following their own paths – and their own creative instincts.

Out of the Woodwork

In northern Michigan, sawyer Dan Baker is obsessed with wood and the state's forests. But his preoccupation comes with a cost. Directed by Brody Kuhar. (2022)

Senghor Reid: Make Way for Tomorrow

Discover the evocatively colored and boldly themed work of Detroit visual artist Senghor Reid. Here he reflects on family, the calming power of water and the inspiration provided by his hometown. Directed by Detroiters Eden Sabolboro and Desmond Love. (2023)

Really Good Friends

In a NYC hotel room, a woman shares a surprising and provocative story of longing and unlikely connection. Directed by Detroiter and U-M Dearborn assistant professor Adam Sekuler. (2022)

In Bloom

An intimate depiction of two women who lean into custom woodworking as means of artistic expression and building a life together in their Indiana community. Directed by Detroiter Ashley Davidson. (2022)

Daron, Daron Colbert

While navigating a hardscrabble existence in the oft-neglected southwest Detroit neighborhood of Delray, aspiring actor Daron Colbert unspools stories of his past through audition tapes. But what’s true, and what isn’t? Directed by Detroiter Kevin Steen. (2022)

Sydney G. James: How We See Us

This revealing portrait of the acclaimed Detroit muralist delves deeply into her art – and her mission of uplifting Black women and Black people in general by emblazoning the walls of the city. Directed by Detroiter and Wayne State faculty member Juanita Anderson. (2023)

Freep Film Festival celebrates its milestone 10th year bringing the best in documentaries to Detroit. The 2023 festival, which will be held April 26-30, will feature five days of programming at the Detroit Film Theatre including its opening night film. Screenings will include conversations with filmmakers and people featured in the films.  The festival’s focus is on documentaries with strong connections to Detroit or Michigan or films that resonate strongly with Midwest communities. For a complete list of the festival schedule go to freepfilmfestival.com
 

USA/2022-directed by Elvis Mitchell

From celebrated writer, film historian and Highland Park native Elvis Mitchell, Is That Black Enough For You?!? is both a documentary and deeply personal essay. The film examines the craft and power of cinema from a perspective often overlooked: the African American contribution to films released from the landmark era of the 1970s.

Mitchell will be joined onstage for a conversation by American actor Laurence Fishburne and DIA film curator Elliot Wilhelm.

Freep Film Festival celebrates its milestone 10th year bringing the best in documentaries to Detroit. The 2023 festival, which will be held April 26-30, will feature five days of programming at the Detroit Film Theatre including its opening night film. Screenings will include conversations with filmmakers and people featured in the films.

The festival’s focus is on documentaries with strong connections to Detroit or Michigan or films that resonate strongly with Midwest communities. For a complete list of the festival schedule go to freepfilmfestival.com.
 

USA/2022-directed by Brian Kaufman and Mark Kurlyandchik

For 30 years, soft-spoken chef Jimmy Lee Hill has run a highly regarded culinary training program out of a prison in Coldwater, Mich., offering incarcerated men a renewed sense of purpose through the craft of fine dining while demonstrating the life-changing potential that trust and compassion can offer the incarcerated. This will be the Michigan premiere of Coldwater Kitchen and opening night of the festival.

Freep Film Festival celebrates its milestone 10th year bringing the best in documentaries to Detroit. The 2023 festival, which will be held April 26-30, will feature five days of programming at the Detroit Film Theatre including its opening night film. Screenings will include conversations with filmmakers and people featured in the films.

The festival’s focus is on documentaries with strong connections to Detroit or Michigan or films that resonate strongly with Midwest communities. For a complete list of the festival schedule go to freepfilmfestival.com
 

Italy/2019-directed by Mimmo Calopresti | 87 minutes 

In 1951, in Africo, a small village in the southern valley of Aspromonte, a woman dies in childbirth because a doctor fails to arrive on time. No road connects Africo with other villages. In the wake of this tragedy, all of the inhabitants put aside their work and unite to build their own road. Giulia (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), the new school teacher arrived from the North, has another mission: to teach standard Italian to the local children to help them integrate with the rest of Italy.

But she will have to contend with local mafia leader, Don Totò (Sergio Rubini), who is determined to ensure that the town remains cut off and under his control. Director Mimmo Calopresti will be in attendance and will answer questions after the show.

"A vibrant portrait of an archaic world, where poor folk demanding basic rights are met with nothing other than indifference on the part of institutions, and the tyranny of local crooks who are allowed to lay down their own version of the law, Aspromonte is intended to be a tale that’s at once neorealistic and epic.” -Vittoria Scarpa, Cineuropa

The Italian Film Festival USA is the largest festival dedicated exclusively to contemporary Italian cinema in the United States. It presents new, feature-length comedies, dramas, documentaries and even short animated films. They all share iconic Italian locations and language that resonate with audiences worldwide, and offers Detroiters an opportunity to discover a new wave of young Italian film artists without hopping on a plane.

All films are in Italian with English subtitles. For the complete festival schedule visit italianfilmfests.org.  

The Italian Film Festival USA is presented under the auspices of the Consulate of Italy in Detroit. This activity is supported by the Michigan Arts & Culture Council and Detroit Film Theatre.

Italy/2019-directed by Leonardo D’Agostino | 105 minutes 

Young, talented, and very spoiled, Christian Ferro (Andrea Carpenzano) is “The Champion”, a rock star of the Italian soccer world. Lonely, shy, and burdened with financial problems, Valerio (Stefano Accorsi) is the professor who is assigned to this young soccer star to help him pass his high school equivalency exam. The two men could not be more different. But they will learn to lean on each other, generating a bond that will change them both.

"Leonardo D'Agostini’s debut film starring Stefano Accorsi and Andrea Carpenzano is a compelling story about friendship set in the world of professional, millionaire footballers in Italy” -Camillo De Marco, Cineuropa 

The Italian Film Festival USA is the largest festival dedicated exclusively to contemporary Italian cinema in the United States. It presents new, feature-length comedies, dramas, documentaries and even short animated films. They all share iconic Italian locations and language that resonate with audiences worldwide, and offers Detroiters an opportunity to discover a new wave of young Italian film artists without hopping on a plane.

All films are in Italian with English subtitles. Free admission. For the complete festival schedule visit italianfilmfests.org.  

The Italian Film Festival USA is presented under the auspices of the Consulate of Italy in Detroit. This activity is supported by the Michigan Arts & Culture Council and Detroit Film Theatre.
 

Senegal/1968—directed by Ousmane Sembène | 91 minutes

This second feature by Ousmane Sembène was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward the realization of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by, about, and for Africans. After jobless Ibrahima Dieng receives a money order for 25,000 francs from a nephew who works in Paris, news of his windfall quickly spreads among his neighbors, who flock to him for loans even as he finds his attempts to cash the order stymied in a maze of bureaucracy, and new troubles rain down on his head.

One of Sembène’s most coruscatingly funny and indignant films, Mandabi—an adaptation of a novella by the director himself—is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption, greed, and poverty. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. 

“Sembène’s classic 1968 feature about colonialism resonates today.” –  Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors, working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London. 

Senegal/1973—directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 89 minutes

With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. In this New Wave–influenced fantasy drama, two young lovers long to leave Dakar for the glamour and comforts of France, but their escape plan is beset by complications both concrete and mystical.

Characterized by dazzling imagery and music, the alternately manic and meditative Touki Bouki is widely considered one of the key works of Senegalese cinema and was named in the recent Sight & Sound poll as one of the 100 greatest films of all time. In Wolof, Arabic and French with English subtitles. 

“In Touki Bouki, rejection of one’s homeland is inextricably bound to a glamorization of the colonizer’s homeland.” – Derek Smith, Slant 

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors, working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London. 
 

Senegal/1966—directed by Ousmane Sembène | 59 minutes

Ousmane Sembène, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de . . .). Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a figurative and literal prison—into a complex, layered critique on the lingering colonialist mindset of a supposedly postcolonial world.

Featuring a moving central performance by Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s. Winner, 1966 Prix Jean Vigo. In French with English subtitles.

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors, working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London. 
 

France/1970—directed by Med Hondo | 102 minutes

A furious howl of resistance against racist oppression, the debut from Mauritanian director Med Hondo – one of the founding fathers of African cinema – is a bitterly funny, stylistically explosive attack on Western capitalism and the legacy of colonialism. Laced with deadly irony and righteous anger, Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun) follows a starry-eyed immigrant (Robert Liensol) as he leaves West Africa and journeys to Paris in search of a job and cultural enrichment—but soon discovers a hostile society in which his very presence elicits fear and resentment.

Drawing on the freewheeling style of experimental cinema of the 1960s, Hondo deploys a dizzying array of narrative and stylistic techniques—animation, docudrama, dream sequences, musical numbers, folklore, slapstick comedy, agitprop—to create a revolutionary landmark of political cinema and a shattering vision of awakening black consciousness.

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London. 

Winner, Golden Leopard, 1970 Locarno International Film Festival. In French and Arabic with English subtitles.