Sally Jo Fifer
The Body Politic
In a city overwhelmed by violence, a young leader with a bold plan to bring peace is elected mayor. We follow Brandon Scott throughout his first year as the mayor of Baltimore City as he fights powerful political forces to save lives and enact a plan that has the potential to heal the nation.
Apple TV
Fire Through Dry Grass
Fire Through Dry Grass uncovers in real-time the devastation experienced by residents of a New York City nursing home during the coronavirus pandemic. Co-Directors Alexis Neophytides and Andres Jay Molina take viewers inside Coler, on Roosevelt Island, where Jay lives with his fellow Reality Poets, a group of mostly gun violence survivors. Wearing snapback caps and Air Jordans, Jay and the other Reality Poets don’t look like typical nursing home residents. They used to travel around the city sharing their art and hard-earned wisdom with youth. Now, using GoPros clamped to their wheelchairs, they document their harrowing experiences on lock down. Covid-positive patients are moved into their bedrooms; nurses fashion PPE out of garbage bags; refrigerated-trailer morgues hum outside residents’ windows. All the while public officials deny the suffering and dying behind Coler’s brick walls. The Reality Poets’ rhymes flow throughout the film, underscoring their feelings that their home is now as dangerous as the streets they once ran and—as summer turns to fall turns to winter—that they’re prisoners without a release date. But instead of history repeating itself on this tiny island with a dark history of institutional neglect and abandonment, Fire Through Dry Grass shows these disabled Black and Brown artists refusing to be abused, confined, erased.
Apple TV
Apple iTunes
Minding the Gap
Bing Liu's Academy Award®-nominated documentary Minding the Gap is a coming-of-age saga drawing on over 12 years of footage in his Rust Belt hometown hit hard by decades of recession. In his quest to understand why so many of his peers in the skateboarding community ran away from home when they were younger, Bing follows 23-year-old Zack as he becomes a father and 17-year-old Keire as he gets his first job. As the story unfolds, Bing is thrust into the middle of Zack's tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend and Keire's inner struggles with racial identity and his deceased father. As we watch the boys grow up before our eyes, we experience the joy, sacrifice, and hope in the gap between childhood and adulthood.
Apple TV