USA

Taiwan Premiere

Ever since fleeing Myanmar as a child, Mu, a young Kayan woman, lives confined as a refugee and tourist attraction in Thailand. Soon after she becomes a single teenage mother, the U.N. initiates a resettlement plan for the refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border which creates an opportunity for potentially tens of thousands of people to start new lives in the USA.

Determined to pursue freedom for herself and her baby, Mu ruptures ties with her traditional mother, her culture and tribe to fulfill the requirements of the rigorous vetting process. Once she finally arrives in America, her romanticized ideas are challenged by the reality that unfolds. As Mu fights to adapt, she begins to wonder where her world truly lies.

OYATE is a film about life on Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. It follows two families on Pine Ridge as they go about their daily activities over the course of a single summer. They attend rodeos, shoot clay pigeons, and participate in pow wows. Family members get married, have children, and celebrate the 4th of July. All the while, the difficult, often intractable realities of modern reservation life threaten to encroach upon them.

10/8  22:10

Tribal Justice is a feature documentary about a little known, underreported but effective criminal justice reform movement in America today: the efforts of tribal courts to create alternative justice systems based on their traditions. In California, the state with the largest number of Indian people and tribes, two formidable Native American women are among those leading the way. Abby Abinanti, Chief Judge of the Yurok Tribe on the northwest coast, and Claudette White, Chief Judge of the Quechan Tribe in the southeastern desert, are creating innovative systems that focus on restoring rather than punishing offenders in order to keep tribal members out of prison, prevent children from being taken from their communities, and stop the school-to-prison pipeline that plagues their young people.

10/5  17:00

The film evolves around questions of identity, popular memory and culture. While focusing on aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives and history of women resistance in Vietnam and in the U.S, it raises questions on the politics of interviewing and documenting.

Awards: First-Prize Blue Ribbon, American Film Festival; First-Prize Film As Art, SECA, San Francisco; Merit Award, Bombay Film Festival

This road movie documentary follows mobile homes across the highway, connecting the grandiose vastness of the American West to the transitory nature of the homes and the tenuous life stories of their inhabitants. In fragmented stopovers, the film revolves around questions of home, belonging, and an American Dream that has become brittle.