“Omar is dead!”, a voice cried out in Dakar, on the 11th of May in 1973. A young militant philosopher, and the articulate Maoist in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) had allegedly committed suicide in his Gorée Island prison cell. His family and friends did not believe a word of it, demanding that light be shed on this political crime.  Just a Movement is a free reprise of La Chinoise, that reallocates its characters fifty years later in Dakar, and updates its plot, offering a m editation on the relationship between politics, justice, and memory. Omar Blondin Diop, becomes the key character. Through this cinematographic gesture that oscillates and circulates between documentary and filmed essay, Vincent Meessen questions the Senegal of yesterday and today, and the not-so-subtle neo-imperialism of a China that uses the soft powers of education and culture to penetrate the present and future of Senegal.

Lake Managua holds tremendous significance for Nicaraguans, it is the polluted and stagnant lake where the ashes of the revolutionary, Augusto Sandino, were thrown after his assassination. Nicaragua remains in a state of of unresolved suspension, the war in Nicaragua ended with negotiations for which opposing factions never provided a public explanation. Narrated in the first person, the film blends archival footage with dazzling landscape captures. Filmmaker Mercedes Moncada focuses on her personal narrative of the brutality of the Somoza dictatorship that followed the Sandinista revolution in 1979 and the corruption of Sandinista leaders who eventually betrayed the revolution. In Magic Words, Lake Managua appears like a metaphor for the rotten legacy of corrupt regimes that have marked the modern history of Nicaragua.

Directed & Written by: Luis Argueta, Justo Chang; The Silence of Neto is set in the six months that followed the CIA-staged coup that overthrew Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in 1954. As a nation loses its innocence, an asthmatic 12-year-old boy, Neto Yepes (Óscar Javier Almengor) begins to discover his identity and sexuality while navigating love and death.

Weaving a collage of rare posters, magazine covers, archival footage and graphic novels, Before the Dying of the Light harkens back to the artistic scene of the 1970s in Morocco. Culling footage from a Moroccan independent experimental film censored in 1974, About Some Meaningless Events by Mostafa Derkaoui, in which  a group of young filmmakers explored the new role of Moroccan cinema, the film revives a counterculture of resistance,.  Marxist student movements  saw cinema as a means of politicizing the public. Dedicated to the victims of censorship and oppression, Before the Dying of the Light employs riotously edited fragments evoking a time of excitement about the future, before it was extinguished by the repressive years under the monarch Hassan II.

In his feature-length debut, Ephraim Asili drew inspiration from his own life experience as a member of the radical Black group MOVE to direct an impressive ensemble piece almost entirely set in a house in West Philadelphia. Described alternately as a “speculative re-enactment”, or as an experimental hybrid genre, that blends scripted drama with archive news footage, voice-overs, and interviews, The Inheritance could not be a timelier work to reflect with intelligence and heart on building radical grass-roots political movements. MOVE was the victim of a notorious and tragic police bombing in 1985.