Official selection

In a world of injustice and discrimination, individual actions are also essential.

A professional diver and underwater film director explores filming ordinary individuals under the sea to raise awareness to a world rarely seen.

Elemental, a silent film, addresses the transitioning of the body in form and matter. After enduring lifelong genetic illnesses and a Category 5 hurricane that destroyed my family’s home and business, I sought peace, acceptance, beauty, and connectedness in life, death, the forces of nature, and the Cosmos. This work emerged from trauma, from the recognition of reorientation and survival. I believe nothing is destroyed by nature, but continually enveloped and recreated by it.The film includes universal natural patterning found in the coastal landscape of North Florida superimposed with fleeting images of my medical symptoms and hurricane damage that impacted my family. Seeing the relationship between our bodies and the Cosmos has been a healing force in my life.

In Sicily's Mount Etna region, a group of winemakers fights to preserve ancient stone wine presses carved into volcanic rock after government agencies outlaw their traditional use, sparking a battle between cultural heritage and modern regulations in this meditation on preservation in a globalized world.

A young woman is stuck in the hold queue of a telephone hotline. 

Portrait of a man who fled Nazi-Germany in 1934 to start a new life in Istanbul where he became a legendary teacher.