Pseudo Secular

When a Chinese-Canadian college student returns home to Toronto, she visits a Hong Kong cafe she frequented during her childhood. Through eating the food, she is suddenly able to relive suppressed memories of her deceased grandmother. Now she must confront their multifaceted relationship and her own identity to find her peace.

Moscow, Russia, December 2016. Edward Snowden, Larry Lessig and Birgitta Jónsdóttir meet for the first time in a secret place. Apparently, Russia is interfering in the US presidential elections while it mourns the death of its ambassador to Turkey. Snowden carefully chooses his interviews, so nobody really knows something about him. As the world prepares for Christmas, they gather to discuss the only issue that matters, their common struggle: how to save democracy.

Young-joon and So-yeo are a young couple with their marriage relatively stable. On a day their mutual friend opens a wine bar, they come across Min-jae and Yu-na, a couple quite the opposite of themselves. After a trade of talks, Young-joon becomes a client of fashion consultant Yu-na, while hotelier Min-jae agrees to help So-yeo book a hotel for her Hong Kong business trip. So-yeo meets Min-jae by chance in Hong Kong, while Young-joon trades suggestive remarks with Yu-na who visits him on a consulting session. That night, the four of them find in the other partner what had been missing in their respective marriages…(hancinema.net)

Behind the gas masks of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, the often very young activists are just as diverse as the youths of the rest of the world. But they share a demand for democracy and freedom. They have the will and the courage to fight – and they can see that things are going in the wrong direction in the small island city, which officially has autonomy under China but is now tightening its grip and demanding that ‘troublemakers’ be put away or silenced. Amid the violent protests, we meet a 21-year-old student, a teenage couple and a new father.

Two 10-year-old girls, one Palestinian and one Israeli, recount their daily lives under bombardment in the West Bank. Two poignant perspectives on the same conflict.

A mild-mannered English conscientious objector moves to what he feels will be the relative calm of Australia after World War I, but gets caught in the middle of violent battles between the rising trade unions and fascist groups.

Three Days is a feature film exploring the on-and-off-tour lives of Jane's Addiction. Set predominately on their 1997 'Relapse Tour', this docu-drama weaves audiences throughout the band's legacy in a colorful, fast-paced orgy of gritty backstage drama and rare musical performances

For seven years, award-winning Chinese-American filmmaker Nanfu Wang follows Rosa María Payá, daughter of the five time Nobel Peace Prize nominated activist, Oswaldo Payá, in Rosa's fight for democratic change in Cuba. Rosa's narrative is interwoven with Wang's poignant reflections on her Chinese upbringing and her observations of eroding democratic norms in the U.S., revealing unsettling similarities to the authoritarian system she left behind.

On January 20, 1981, 52 members of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran were released after 444 days of captivity. Told by those who lived through it, a crisis that traumatized America and upset the political balance in the Middle East.

Two unlucky thieves break into a just murdered man's hotel room and steal his passport, with a hidden microfilm, wanted by a triad boss. Two ass-kicking women cops—one Chinese, one British—are on the case.

A gay man impersonates men he has had sex with and brings this new persona with him to his next hook-up. Only by pretending to be someone else can he be truly himself.

A view of the religious tensions between Muslims and Buddhist through the portrait of the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, leader of anti-Muslim movement in Myanmar.

A documentary film about Comanche activist LaDonna Harris, who led an extensive life of Native political and social activism, and is now passing on her traditional cultural and leadership values to a new generation of emerging Indigenous leaders.

Obsessively referring to the traumas and wounds that the Spanish civil war (1936-39) and Franco's dictatorship (1939-75) caused in their day no longer serves to explain the impassable abyss of incomprehension and hatred that the abject policies and radical positions adopted by both the right and the left in recent decades have opened up before the citizens of a country that is barely known beyond hackneyed cultural clichés.

Activist-pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano pull the rug out from under mega-corporations, government officials and a complacent media in a series of outrageous stunts designed to draw awareness to the issue of climate change.