Leaving August 1

Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | 91 mins | 2010
The first film from Chad to feature in the Cannes competition, where it was awarded the 2010 Jury Prize, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s affecting, postcolonial father-son story is set against the backdrop of civil war, but flouts war fil...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu | 116 mins | 2009
A Tokyo waiter’s sex doll (Korean star Bae Doona) comes to life in this bittersweet modern fairy tale from the director of "Shoplifters" and "Nobody Knows." Her wide-eyed wanderings bring out the loneliness of the metropolis—shot b...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Ugo Bienvenu | 6 mins | 2012
A discreet hole in the wall provides the middle-aged protagonist of this moodily inked, ennui-infused short with stolen views of the young woman next door.

Leaving August 1

Directed by Billy Woodberry | 89 mins | 2015
Assembled from archival footage, new interviews, and readings from such figures as Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, this high-spirited screen portrait of the late African American Beat poet and bon vivant Bob Kaufman is given an appropriatel...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Khalik Allah | 77 mins | 2018
Allah trains his eye on Jamaica, the land of his mother’s birth, using the progression of a pregnancy as a structural outline. Mysterious and sensual, rich and rhythmic, it’s a mesmerizing symphony of a film, embodying both the spiritual...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Wendell B. Harris Jr. | 95 mins | 1989
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1990 but criminally underseen for decades, the sole feature by Wendell B. Harris Jr.—a canny, inventive, and remarkably assured comedy based on the incredible escapades of real-life ...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Ugo Bienvenu | 4 mins | 2017
A retrofuturist tale of doomed lovers on a loop, illustrated in the spirit of seminal French comics magazine "Métal Hurlant" and set to a propulsively plaintive synth groove.

Leaving August 1

Directed by Alain Gomis | 124 mins | 2017
Gomis’s vibrant, tumultuous fourth feature follows Félicité, a free-willed nightclub singer in the heart of Kinshasa, whose life is thrown into turmoil when her 14-year-old son gets into a terrible car accident. To raise the money to sav...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Abba Makama | 102 mins | 2016
Not quite Nollywood: this ebullient feature debut—named for the colors of the Nigerian flag—puts a cannily satirical spin on a coming-of-age tale. When three friends, each from one of the nation’s major ethnic backgrounds, decide to make...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | 100 mins | 2013
The dancefloor is where 25-year-old Souleymane, nickname Grisgris, comes into his own—an electric, commanding presence, even with his paralyzed leg. But when his beloved stepfather falls gravely ill, Grisgris—played with verve b...

Leaving August 1

Directed by RaMell Ross | 76 mins | 2018
The results of five years of living among African American families in rural Hale County, Alabama—also the setting of Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Ross’s debut feature documentary is a lyrical and...

Leaving August 1

Directed by India Donaldson | 14 mins | 2019
Amy Zimmer and Brenna Palughi give finely calibrated, increasingly squirm-inducing performances in Donaldson’s beguiling, darkly funny two-hander about a woman named Hannah who returns to her apartment one day to discover another woma...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Rungano Nyoni | 93 mins | 2017
A young Zambian girl is accused of being a witch and then pressed into soothsaying service by a slick government official in this strikingly shot deadpan satire. Skewering superstition and corruption, it’s a feminist exposé of exploitat...

Leaving August 1

Directed by India Donaldson | 8 mins | 2021
Set in an off-season beach town emptied out for the winter, Donaldson’s by turns unsettling and comic short is a deft character study done in small, precise strokes, following a troubled, lonesome, dog-obsessed woman who decides to tak...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Cate Shortland | 109 mins | 2012
Cate Shortland followed her moody and startling feature debut, "Somersault" (2004), with another bruising story of a teen girl expelled from home—in this case, by history in the making. Abandoned by her high-level Nazi parents in the ...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 5 mins | 2013
An unsettling portrait of domestic anomie, in which communication between family members has broken down. What remains is the persistent whistling of a pot, an iron thumped against the wall, and the matriarch’s wordless, ...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Wanuri Kahiū | 82 mins | 2018
Realized with bold, confident strokes in a vivacious palette, "Rafiki" is both the first Kenyan film to have been selected for Cannes and the first to tell a love story between women—a fact that saw it banned in director Wanuri Kahiū’s h...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis | 101 mins | 2016
Davis’s documentary on the LA Rebellion, a surge of artistically ambitious, far-from-the-mainstream Black-American-directed films that came out of southern California—specifically, out of the UCLA film production program—beginnin...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Amos Poe | 113 mins | 1981
A Pied Piper is terrorizing the city, luring victims with the sound of his saxophone blowing before blowing them away. A mood-drenched memento from Fun City NYC—invested with pungent ambience by future "Sugarbaby" DP Johanna Heer—"Subway Ri...

Leaving August 1

Directed by Amos Poe | 92 mins | 1978
Described by its director as an “anti-homage,” Poe’s noir-inflected tale follows a French secret agent (Eric Mitchell), arrived in NYC on a mission whose exact nature is unclear, and targeted by enemies whose grudges are equally ambiguous. S...