STAFF TOP 10 DOC PICKS OF 2019
We chose these 10 curated docs for our Staff Picks because they captured the most profound and poetic stories from 2019.
DANCING TOWARDS THE LIGHT
The winner of this annual dance competition in a small arctic town gets 2 thousand dollars. For the dancers, the contest is for something more valuable than money. They’re battling for their own survival, and the survival of the town.
Directed by Kitra Cahana
TALLER THAN THE TREES
Masami Hayata is a Tokyo man delicately balancing his roles as ad executive, father, husband and devoted son to his ailing mother.
Directed by Megan Mylan
TUNGRUS
A pet chick for the house cats has now grown into a domineering rooster. He terrorizes the family, and won’t clean up after himself.
Directed by Rishi Chandna
A VIEW FROM THE WINDOW
This is the story of a young girl and her mother as they move together through transitions of home, identity, and name.
Directed by Ryan Maxey
THE CHINESE PRISONER’S CHILDREN
Three Chinese kids are shunned by their relatives after their father accidentally kills a child. He will most likely get the death penalty.
“Who would want to live without parents? I wish I was an orphan. Orphans are better off, because they don’t have parents. Orphans don’t have to bear this horrible memory.”
In this powerful short doc, we see the fate of parentless children across China.
Directed by Kaspar Astrup Schröder
HOW TO MAKE A RAINBOW
This is the story of a young girl and her mother as they move together through transitions of home, identity, and name.
Directed by Ryan Maxey
STOPPING TIME
Dancer Lindsay Kemp taught David Bowie and Kate Bush how to move, and now at 77 is still teaching and dancing.
He’s full of life but also dealing with passing time, which is both eating at his body and pushing him further adrift from his love of performance and the stage.
Directed by Adrian Sibley
NET CAFE REFUGEES
In the mid 2000’s Japan, customers began using internet cafes as living quarters. Internet cafe refugees are mostly temporary employees; their salary too low to rent their own apartments.
Directed by Shiho Fukada
LOS RAMBOS
Bootleg copies of the film Rambo circulated in remote communities of Papua New Guinea, becoming a crude tutorial on the use of automatic weaponry.
The film's influence was so pronounced that the term Rambo is used in Papuan dialects to describe hired mercenaries who are paid to support local combatants in violent tribal disputes.
Directed by Chris Phillips
THE SURRENDER
Stephen Kim was a top level state department intelligence analyst sentenced to prison for leaking unclassified information about North Korea. The Surrender intimately documents Stephen Kim’s struggle to understand the events leading up to his his last free days.
Directed by Stephen Maing
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