Borders | No Borders Documentary Shorts 2021

Along the scorching southern desert border in Arizona, it is estimated that only one out of every five missing migrants are ever found. This film is the story of one group of searchers, the Aguilas del Desierto, themselves largely immigrant Latinos. Once a month these volunteers—construction workers, gardeners, domestic laborers by trade—set out to recover missing loved ones referred to them by word of mouth, phone calls, or Facebook message.

Deep in the Choctaw Nation, a picturesque lake hosts an unusual sight: an island populated by rows of headstones. This cemetery floating in a man-made lake is the last relic of what was the town of Sardis, Oklahoma.

Folk Frontera is a magical-realist portrait of life in the borderlands. The film follows two fronteriza women as they struggle to find their place in the vast Chihuahuan Desert, a region whose culture is thousands of years old, but which is bisected by the U.S.-Mexico border.

The interconnected daily journeys of bus riders and operators on the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority bus lines illuminate why the Black community here has been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. While Valerie Jefferson, the head of the operator's union, fights for proper PPE, hazard pay, and sick time off, she continues to provide the necessary but dangerous services to frontline workers, the sick, and the houseless population throughout the pandemic.

Each year, hundreds of Central American migrants journeying north towards the United States go missing. Their mothers, left behind with nowhere to turn for support, organize together and journey by bus through Mexico, retracing the last known steps of their missing children. Since you arrived, my heart stopped belonging to me is a short documentary that follows these mothers, offering a perspective from the alternate side of the immigration crisis. The film intimately explores the familial grief and longing of these mothers for their children and the tremendous personal costs of the social forces that affect migration.

In the aftermath of a cancer outbreak, a community looks for answers.

The story of one man who changed the National Rifle Association (NRA) forever. Told through meticulously crafted archive, The Rifleman takes us into the life and trajectory of Harlon Carter, the leading force behind a coup who paved the way for the NRA’s staunch anti-regulation stance and unyielding influence in American politics.

On Jan 21st, 2019, Martin Luther King Day, Lead to Life, a collective that transforms guns into the otherwise to commemorate black folks and land impacted by the wake of violence, gathered to reclaim Dr. King’s radical legacy and the black feminist prophetic tradition. between starshine & clay explores the memory of this evening where Lead to Life transformed guns into the constellations that were above Oscar Grant the evening he was murdered 10 years prior by Oakland police.

In collaboration with community members across California, who have been impacted by the wake of police brutality, gun violence, indigenous displacement and environmental racism, we gathered to imagine our town free from violence, our people and the land well, and cast our prophecy into the stars.