Filmmaker and gay activist Sridhar Rangayan embarks on a personal journey to expose the human rights violations faced by the LGBTQ community in India due to a draconian law Section 377 and homophobic social mores of a patriarchal society. The gritty documentary BREAKING FREE features searing testimonies of gay and transgender persons who have been victimized or exploited, as well as wide-ranging interviews with advocates and activists. See-sawing between despair and joy, anguish and hope, the film offers an insider view of the Indian LGBTQ community and is a documentation of its movement from invisibility to empowerment.
Mehran Tamadon explores what it was like being interrogated by the Iranian regime by asking prisoners to reconstruct their experiences.
Alongside his companion film Where God Is Not, My Worst Enemy finds Tamadon shifting focus from the interrogated to the interrogator. The filmmaker sought an individual who had been interrogated by Iranian authorities in order to draw on their experiences to play an interrogator. The role finally fell to the Cannes-winning lead actor of Holy Spider, Zar Amir Ebrahimi. Together in an anonymous room, with Tamadon stripped to his underwear, they reconstruct the interrogation process, which gradually becomes an examination of the nature of power and coercion. The resulting film is intense and, at times, uncomfortable. And as it progresses, My Worst Enemy becomes an exploration of cinema’s relationship with its audience, questioning whether there is a limit to what it can show.
A 12-year-old boy turns to a charismatic loner for help after being beaten up at school, in director Miles Warren’s searing feature debut about fathers, families, and the effects of fighting.