Pt. I: “Building the Movement.” Filmed throughout 2018 and into 2019 by a team of women filmmakers of color, this documentary follows candidates and organizers across the country, asking whether democracy itself can be preserved—and made stronger—by those most marginalized. The series features history-makers, including Rashida Tlaib and Stacey Abrams.

Pt. II: “Claiming Power.” Filmed throughout 2018 and into 2019 by a team of women filmmakers of color, this documentary follows candidates and organizers across the country, asking whether democracy itself can be preserved—and made stronger—by those most marginalized. The series features history-makers, including Rashida Tlaib and Stacey Abrams.

Fashion designer Darlene Perkins of Red Lightning Couture uses her fashion shows as a vehicle to bring awareness to a serious Indigenous health crisis. Her newfound Indigenous celebrity alliances join her to raise awareness of the epidemic of diabetes throughout Indian Country.

Every day brings new challenges for those of us coping with wellness issues such as physical and mental disabilities, addiction, food insecurity, and homelessness. The subjects in this group of short films do what’s necessary to get by.

Underscoring the interconnectivity between self-identity and one’s emotional wellbeing, this collection of short films explores diverse themes of self-love, self-loathing, and self-hood.

Capturing first-person accounts across a span of four decades, director Phillip Pike chronicles the story of how black queer folks in Toronto mustered the courage, tenacity, and creativity to prevail against the forces of marginalization to become a vibrant community.

Explore opposing viewpoints of ethnic pride and racial animus in this collection of timely short films that profile the complexities of racial identity and the implications of intolerance.

Prompted by the question of what it means to re-visit and re-vision Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 memoir of her breast cancer experience today, 27 writers, artists, activists, health care advocates, and current and former patients recite Lorde’s manifesto aloud on camera, collectively dramatizing it and producing an oration for the screen. The film is both a critical commentary and a poetic reflection on the precarious conditions of survival within the intimate and politicized public sphere of illness.

In 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party, notably led by the charismatic Fred Hampton, began to form alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latino group the Young Lords Organization and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots. Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar America to collectively confront police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition.

Foregrounding the health and wellness possibilities enabled by plant-based vegan diets and lifestyle choices, filmmaker Jasmine and Kenny Leyva explore the problem of unhealthy dietary patterns in the African American community.

Filmmaker Amanda Lukoff unravels the long-reaching history and lasting implications of the word retard(ed) that have informed current attitudes and perceptions about people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Through the personal narrative of four sibling stories and the first-person accounts of self-advocates, we get an intimate and nuanced perspective of people’s challenges and triumphs living with an intellectual disability.

A suicide attempt survivor is on a mission to find fellow survivors and document their stories of courage, insight, and humor. Along the way, she discovers a rising national movement transforming personal struggles into action.

Megaphones and merit badges collide in the Radical Monarchs, a troop of young Oakland girls of color who earn badges for social activism, march in protests, and practice radical love. This powerful and inspiring doc from MFF 2011 alum Linda Goldstein Knowlton (*Somewhere Between*) follows the troop and its leaders as they empower young women of color to take up space, love themselves, and smash the patriarchy.

Women are generally socialized to put the needs of others before themselves. These short stories center women’s sexual health and self-healing as a priority for a healthy community.