USA

The Inheritance is a three-act video montage essay on inheritance as an accumulation of racial and settler dispossessions. Seeking to intervene in what Povinelli has called the current white counter-reformation of white nativism, The Inheritance pivots the ideas and affects of history, inheritance, and social identity against the sedimentations of white supremacy and settler colonialism through a retelling of the immigration stories told to the young Elizabeth Povinelli by her grandparents. Carol Devane has written that the “modes of identification and belonging in relation to Karezol/Carisolo create a tangled inheritance, but one that faded from social experience as the family became absorbed into the privileges of whiteness in the US, even as that assimilation was at times uneasy. The haunting and vivid story of this family offers an entrée for thinking critically about social location, place-based belonging, and the privileges and punishments therein.”

Rembetika music or the Greek blues is a music born of exile and the streets. Developing its roots from the mass migration of people in the early twentieth century, filmmaker M. Zournazi traces the journey of her forebears from Smyrna in Turkey to Sydney Australia but discovers more than family history, she finds out how music connects people during times of struggle and crises. By weaving together different stories of music and migration, she documents experiences that are often left out of the chronicles of history.

An intimate glimpse of the first visible group of transgender men in the Pacific Islands – the Rogers of Samoa. From the loneliness of family rejection and homelessness to the camaraderie of church, cooking, and dance, their stories reveal the challenges and possibilities of life in an island society rooted in culture and tradition.

Hidden among the mountains north of Beijing, a Wild West-themed gated community promises to deliver the American dream to its several thousand Chinese residents. In Americaville, Annie Liu escapes China’s increasingly uninhabitable capital city to pursue happiness, freedom, romance, and spiritual fulfillment in the town; only to find the American idyll harder to attain than what was promised to her.