October 2020 WORLD Highlights

COCAINE PRISON follows the lives of three indigenous Bolivians who work at the lowest levels of the cocaine trade. Two inmates of an overcrowded prison film their daily experiences, while one inmate’s sister must decide whether to traffic cocaine or become the first person in her family to pursue a college education. Cocaine Prison bridges the ever widening gap between the North and the South and brings a new perspective to the War on Drugs being waged in the Andes.

Directed by Raúl Pastrana, a Mexican immigrant filmmaker, BORDER SOUTH rides the rails with a Nicaraguan migrant trying to cross into America, and a US researcher seeking traces of others who never made it. Pastrana assembles a vivid portrait of the thousands of immigrants who disappear along the trail. Border South reveals the immigrants’ resilience, ingenuity, and humor as it exposes a global migration system that renders human beings invisible in life as well as death.

FIRST VOTE is a character-driven documentary film with unparalleled access to a diverse cross section of politically engaged Chinese Americans: a gun-toting Tea Party-favorite candidate courting GOP votes in the South; a podcaster in Ohio who became a citizen in order to vote for Trump; a progressive journalist confronting Chinese Americans for Trump after moving to a battleground state; and a University of North Carolina professor teaching about race and racism in the US. A vérité look at Chinese American electoral organizing in North Carolina and Ohio, the film weaves their stories from the presidential election of 2016 to the 2018 midterms, and explores the intersection of immigration, voting rights and racial justice.

How did the idea of “rugged individualism” become a curse for everyday Americans? Distraught over the loss of too many childhood classmates, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn explore the causes and costs of opioid addiction, poverty and incarceration plaguing America, from the inner city to small towns like Kristof’s hometown of Yamhill, Oregon. While pockets of empathy and aid exist, are they enough to rescue the thousands of Americans in despair, for whom the American Dream of self-reliance is impossibly out of reach?

AMERICA LOST is a documentary triptych that explores life in three of America’s “forgotten cities”—Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California.

The film shows the dramatic decline of the American interior through a mosaic of stories including an ex-steelworker scrapping abandoned homes to survive, a recently incarcerated father trying to rebuild his life, and a pair of sisters hoping to escape their blighted urban neighborhood.

Veteran PBS director Christopher F. Rufo spent five years gathering these incredibly intimate portraits of Americans living on the edge. The film sheds light on how our crumbling social institutions have created a dangerous divide between the haves and have nots.