When a massive Chinese industrial park lands in rural Ethiopia, a dusty farming town finds itself at the new frontier of globalization. The sprawling factory complex’s formidable Chinese director Motto now needs every bit of mettle and charm she can muster to push through a high-stakes expansion that promises 30,000 new jobs. Ethiopian farmer Workinesh and factory worker Beti have staked their futures on the prosperity the park promises. But as initial hope meets painful realities, they find themselves, like their country, at a pivotal crossroads.

Standing Above the Clouds highlights the movement to protect Mauna Kea through the intergenerational stories of women in three Native Hawaiian families as they stand for the sacred mountain.

Generations of artists call Robert A. Nakamura “The Godfather of Asian American film,” but his son, Tad, calls him Dad. As the filmmaking son of a filmmaking legend, Tad uses the lessons his dad taught him to decipher the legacy of an aging man who was a child survivor of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans, a successful photographer who gave it up to tell his own story, an activist at the dawn of a social movement—and a father whose struggles have won his son freedoms that eluded Japanese Americans of his generation.

Sri Lanka ranks among the highest in the number of enforced disappearances in the world and most of the disappeared are Tamils. Fusing allegorical magic realism and investigative documentary and made collaboratively with impacted locals clandestinely in a region still occupied by the military, this film is a lyrical examination of these missing persons through 26 years of civil war in Sri Lanka.

The 92-year-old previous nightclub dancer Coby Yee decides to get back on stage again after joining the senior dance troupe Grant Avenue Follies. Together they go on a tour for the last time, bridging once isolated Chinese communities in the US, Cuba and China.

Night and Fog in Kurdistan tells the powerful story of seven Yezidi teenagers who survived the 2014 ISIS genocide. Directed by a Kurdish woman filmmaker with firsthand experience of war and displacement, the film follows their five-year migration journey from refugee camps in Turkey to relocation in Europe.