Week 3 of Salem Film Fest starts tomorrow, July 24, giving you an opportunity to watch feature-length films and shorts from all over the world! These films are only available this week, so make sure to rent them while you can.
Click here to view the full catalogue or click the film titles to be directed to the streaming page.
Here’s What’s Available from Salem Film Fest Week 3
Americaville
Hidden among Beijing’s northern mountain range, a gated replica of the Wyoming town of Jackson Hole promises to deliver the American dream. Its several thousand Chinese residents, escapees from increasingly uninhabitable Beijing, pursue happiness, freedom, romance, and spiritual fulfillment in the Chinese reproduction of the American Wild West, only to find their dreams of living an American life in China is fraught with complications.
Ara Malikian: A Life Among Strings
Click here to watch the trailer
Ara Malikian, a multifaceted violinist of Lebanese origin and Armenian roots, left Beirut when he was only 14 years old to escape the violence of civil war. Against the backdrop of his latest international “Symphonic Tour,” ARA MALIKIAN: A LIFE AMONG STRINGS chronicles the musician’s personal journey and his career in classical and contemporary music. Malikian has toured in over 40 countries on 5 continents, recorded more than 30 albums, performing all music genres—from Bach to Led Zeppelin—with multiculturalism as his calling card.
Bedlam
In the wake of decades of deinstitutionalization in which half a million psychiatric hospital beds have been lost, America’s prisons have become its largest mental institutions. Through intimate stories of patients, families, and medical providers, BEDLAM takes us inside one of America’s busiest psychiatric emergency rooms, into jails where psychiatric patients are warehoused, and to the homes—and homeless encampments—of mentally ill members of our communities, where silence and shame often compound personal suffering.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Producer Peter Miller directed PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA (SFF 2016).
The Journey
Niggi, a passionate photographer, and Annette, a painter and graphic designer, lead a storybook life of love and art until multiple sclerosis leaves Annette paralyzed from the neck down. Twenty years later, now in their 60s, Niggi refurbishes their van as a mobile nursing room and takes his wife on a road trip to their favorite vacation spots. With courage and charm they wrest all they can from life, but what happens to love when circumstances change so drastically?
Massacre River
Racial and political violence erupt when the Dominican Republic reverses its birthright citizenship law, leaving Pikilina, a Dominican-born woman of Haitian descent stateless, along with over 200,000 others. This sends Pikilina on an epic journey as she faces the choice of fighting for her rightful citizenship and exposing herself to danger, or fleeing with her family to Haiti, a country she barely knows.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Suzan Beraza directed URANIUM DRIVE-IN (SFF 2014).
Mossville: When Great Trees Fall
Mossville, Louisiana, was a community rich in natural resources and history; a town founded by formerly enslaved people, where neighbors lived in harmony, insulated from the horrors of Jim Crow. Today, surrounded by 14 petrochemical plants and the future site of an apartheid-born South African $21.2 billion plant, Mossville is a shadow of its former self. Stacey Ryan, who promised his dying parents to fight the sprawling chemical plants whose pollution killed them, refuses to leave his ancestral home. How long can he keep that promise in an increasingly dangerous chemical war zone?
MOSSVILLE: WHEN GREAT TREES FALL is the winner of the Michael Sullivan Award for Documentary Journalism (SFF 2020)
The New Bauhaus
Often referred to as the “genius of all media,” László Moholy-Nagy worked in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, film, typography, product design, and exhibition design. A faculty member of the Bauhaus in Germany, he left in 1934 after the Nazi regime shuttered the school. Settling in Chicago in 1937, he opened The New Bauhaus, forever transforming arts education in America and beyond. By drawing extensively on personal archives and interviews, THE NEW BAUHAUS creates an intimate portrait of this early champion of human-centered design and his enduring influence on American art, design, and culture.
Alysa Nahmias co-directed UNFINISHED SPACES (Special Jury Award SFF 2012), and produced SHIELD AND SPEAR (SFF 2015).
Rising from the Tsunami
In March 2011, an unprecedented tsunami strikes Japan, leaving in its wake a devastated country and 20,000 dead. While gigantic breakwater walls are erected to counteract future great waves, reports of ghosts and spirits returning home spread all along the Japanese coast. A trip to Mount Osore—where in the Buddhist tradition the dead souls find sanctuary—reveals the lasting trauma of the disaster. The visible and the invisible conflate in this no-man’s land where reconstruction has begun taking place.
Scattering CJ
Hallie Twomey lost her eldest son, CJ, to suicide. After years of grief, she was compelled to undertake one last maternal act. Something that commemorated the way he lived, not how his life ended. Hallie put a call out on Facebook, asking for help in honoring CJ’s love of travel by scattering his ashes in amazing places he might have visited had he lived. Over 21,000 people answered Hallie’s call. The initiative became a global phenomenon. SCATTERING CJ finds hope in the darkest of places, exploring the extraordinary generosity of strangers, and one troubled family’s attempt to find peace.
Andrea Kalin directed FIRST LADY OF THE REVOLUTION (SFF 2017).
A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem
Lacy and Maria are two former NFL cheerleaders who stand up against an all-powerful industry in order to change what they love for the better. In the process of alleging wage theft and illegal employment practices, they reveal a culture of toxic masculinity and the ingrained devaluation of women’s labor in society. They face attacks from the public and their former teammates, women who insist on upholding the status quo. Lacy and Maria arrive at a feminist awakening on the heels of the #MeToo movement.
Filmmaker Q&A’s and Events
- Five-minute Student High School Documentary Contest
- Mass Reality Check and Q&A
- All Me: The Life And Times Of Winfred Rembert Q&A
- The Blood Is At The Doorstep Q&A
- For Ahkeem Q&A
