JustFilms Collection
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For Venida, For Kalief
For Venida, For Kalief debuts the poetry of Venida Brodnax Browder, mother of Kalief Browder. The film weaves a lyrical and cinematic mosaic of legacy, love, and community resistance, all leading up to the movement to transform Rikers Island—the world’s most notorious jail—into a renewable energy center.
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Natchez
In a rural Mississippi town reliant on its antebellum past to survive, a reckoning is at hand. Haunting and gothic, Natchez captures an unsettling clash between memory and history, revealing a panorama of hoop skirts, shackles, drag queens, pilgrimages, and long-buried truths…Who gets to tell America’s story?
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Drowned Land
Deep in the Choctaw Nation of rural Oklahoma rages a fight to preserve the Kiamichi River, reckoning with a cycle of land loss for the Indigenous diaspora and the community at large.
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Pülö: Bloodstream of the Kirike
Pülö means blood and oil. Oil is the blood of Kirike, it keeps the people going. Blood is the stream of life, what happens when this stream is poisoned? The lives of the Kirike people, who rely on the island’s water, are under threat.
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Molly vs. The Machines
At fourteen years old, Molly Russell returned home from class, completed her homework and said goodnight to her family. Hours later she took her own life. Following the tragic story of Molly Russell, the film chronicles a fight against social media corporations and the systems prioritizing profit over children’s safety.
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Invisible Beauty
Invisible Beauty is the story of Bethann Hardison, a fashion revolutionary who has been on the front lines of racial justice in her industry for over five decades. Through her life journey as a pioneering Black model, modeling agent and activist, the film explores race, beauty and representation.
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Eat Bitter 吃苦
During a civil war in the Central African Republic, an immigrant Chinese construction manager and a local worker on opposite ends of the spectrum to construct a bank. As deadlines loom, they don’t hesitate to strip the earth and destroy their family for a seat at the table of prosperity.
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The Tuba Thieves
From 2011-2013 a rash of tuba thefts occurred in high schools across Southern California. The Tuba Thieves does not tell the story of the thieves or the missing tubas. Instead, it asks what it means to listen.
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Unseen
An aspiring social worker, Pedro must confront political restrictions as a blind, undocumented immigrant to get his college degree and support his family. But when attaining his dreams leads to new and unexpected challenges, what will Pedro do?
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Wisdom Gone Wild
Wisdom Gone Wild is an immersive meditation on elder consciousness and the act of caregiving a parent with dementia. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri weaves her mother’s storytelling wisdom into the dream fabric of this film. Rose’s songs provide a soundtrack for time travel as we witness her evolution across nine decades of living.
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Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Going to Mars takes us through the mind-scape of legendary poet, Nikki Giovanni. Her voice guides us across time and outer space, dreams and remembrances, and across decades of American history, as we reimagine her most iconic work with visual lyricism fit for a poet. The film’s cinematic intergalactic journey ventures beyond Nikki’s own lifetime, to Middle Passage and Mars, always keeping hold of possibility and the potential of Black liberation.
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Hummingbirds
Hummingbirds is a uniquely collaborative cinematic nonfiction film about young artist-activists coming of age in a Texas border town.