NewFilmmakers Los Angeles Presents its Annual Slate of Documentary Films with DocuSlate

NewFilmmakers Los Angeles presents its annual slate of Documentary films with DocuSlate on December 7th, 2019. Offering up six programs that include five feature documentaries and seven short documentaries, the line-up creates a day full of opportunities to explore new perspectives from up close.

The morning begins with Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly, the directorial debut of Cheryl Haines, the curator of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, a landmark exhibition that highlighted the reality of the struggle for fundamental human rights and connected visitors to isolated prisoners of conscience worldwide, in creative collaboration with Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei.

We explore the history of San Francisco's gay liberation movement with the story of the lesser-known but immensely impactful activist Hank Wilson in Thanks to Hank, and examine ways our early environments shape us in a pairing of award-winning director Stuart Harmon's The Money Stone, a coming-of-age story set in Ghana's gold mining industry, which is preceded by short documentary The Cowfoot Prince, whihc explores an immigrant man's relationship with his youth in Sierra Leone. The program takes a look at environmental impact and the efforts of those fighting it with The Condor & The Eagle, a beautiful and innovative documentary that takes us into the world of Indigenous climate activism, in a program that opens with Being with Elephants, a contemplative look at the struggle to protect elephants in Kenya. Invigorated by the connective power of music, Karl Nickoley's This is My Home then takes us across America through the eyes of a pair of Irish immigrants out to set a musical Guinness World Record.

The evening concludes with a line-up of thought-provoking short documentaries that tell stories of a family coping with breast cancer, draw parallels between genocides continents apart, take us behind the scenes of a human interest story that captured the evening news, takes us into the first craft brewery on the West Bank, and takes us into the secret world of the dedicated men known as Mardi Gras Indians in Michal Pietrzyk's acclaimed documentary All on a Mardi Gras Day.