Russia/Chechnya : Voices of Dissent

Director: Carlo Nero

Year: 2006

An Englishwoman wakes up in the middle of the night in a small hotel in a poverty-stricken foreign city where a civil war is being fought. She has a fever, and tries to remember why she has returned to this frightening country. During the night, she starts to retrace her happy childhood and her relatively happy adult existence as a kind, hard-working professional woman who loved her family and friends, appreciated music and the arts. But she is also retracing the unusual events that have led her to this place, and how the people she has met on that journey began to change her understanding of the world. Now, in this lonely hotel room she is struggling with a new and unpleasant perception of herself and her life. As the dawn breaks, her fever subsides and with it comes an honest appraisal of herself. With gut-wrenching clarity she has come to understand her responsibility for the violence of poverty and exploitation she sees in the world.

Director: Ornella Mutoni

Year: 2024

A group of young adults born during or just after the 1994 genocide against Rwanda's Tutsi people gather to find the courage to break a powerful taboo. Rwanda is one of the few nations in the world providing specialist counselling for children conceived through rape, who number 10,000 across the country. Here, course leader Emilienne, a mother, therapist and genocide survivor, helps the group to imagine a future free from family secrets and societal stigma. In a circle of supportive peers, they tell their individual stories and face their struggles together, in the hope their participation will advocate for others facing similar trauma. Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2024 NY African Film Festival 2025

Director: Aaron Brookner, Rodrigo Areias

Year: 2025

NOVA '78 resurrects the legendary Nova Convention, the groundbreaking three-day gathering held in New York in 1978 to celebrate William S. Burroughs and the artistic revolution he inspired. Built from newly restored, previously unseen 16mm footage shot by Howard Brookner, the film captures extraordinary performances and intimate backstage moments featuring Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and many other defining voices of the era. More than a concert film or historical record, NOVA '78 is an immersive time capsule of a fleeting moment when literature, music, art and radical ideas collided to reshape contemporary culture.