The Alabama Solution

Directed by Andrew Jarecki & Charlotte Kaufman
Featuring: Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, Sandy Ray...

The prison system in Alabama functions as a prison industrial complex, using taxpayer money to build and maintain a network of facilities that perpetuate involuntary labor, inhumane conditions, and systemic abuse. Parole denials and punitive retaliation ensure continued exploitation, while deaths and violence occur with minimal oversight. This system fosters black-market economies within prisons, contributes to the ongoing drug crisis, and continues to expand beyond state lines with the rapid expansion of ICE. Its corruption is rooted in entrenched racism and prioritizing profit and institutional growth over human life, safety, and rehabilitation.

The Apprentice

A portrait of moral erosion that extends beyond individual corruption into the system itself, showing how the relentless pursuit of power can ultimately dismantle the foundations of democracy. A horror story that reflects the American tragedy unfolding before our eyes.

Weapons

 written & directed by Zach Cregger

A classroom absent of students. How haunting an intrusion can be. In its allegory, the film carries real-world weight, invoking the terror of destructive forces invading spaces meant to be safe. It's a wild ride and a cautionary meditation on guarding our children and our homes, both physically and spiritually. 

THE LOST CHILDREN

 "The measure of our humanity is found in how we stand together to care for the youngest among us, whose well-being holds the hope of a better tomorrow." - J.A.

Ghostlight

 

written and co-directed by: Kelly O'Sullivan

Goodness & the Individual

“The theme [in “Lord of the Flies”] is an attempt to trace the defects of society to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable."

—William Golding

Society of the Snow

Numa Turcatti: Don't lose faith.

Arturo Nogueira: I have more faith than I ever had in my whole life.

Numa Turcatti: What, are you an altar boy now?

Arturo Nogueira: Don't laugh at me. But my faith—sorry, Numa—isn't in your god. Because that god tells me what I'm supposed to do at home. But he doesn't tell me what to do on the mountain. What's happening here is a completely different situation. Numa. This is my heaven. I believe in another god. I believe in the god that Roberto keeps inside his head when he comes to heal each of my wounds. In the god that Nando keeps in his legs and that lets him continue walking no matter what. I believe in Daniel's hands when he cuts the meat. And Fito, when he gives it to us without saying which of our friends it belonged to. That way, we can eat it without... without having to remember their faces. That's the god I believe in.

 

The Second Tree from The Corner

 "Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted.  “What do you want”” he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep formless enduring and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the bars, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of their glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it.  

Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of those things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor’s office would fall flat on his face.

Trexler felt invigorated.  Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,” he said answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away."

—E.B. White 

The Swimmers

 

Directed & Screenplay by Sally El-Hosaini

based on the true story of sisters, Sara and Yusra Mardini

TÁR

 

“But there are other kinds of plagues that visit us […]power, true power."

Directed, Produced, Edited by Todd Field, Starring Cate Blanchett

THE WHALE

 "People are incapable of not caring."

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Starring Brendan Fraser

Tobias Wolff

The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is. 

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

 

DUNE

Jamis: The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve…but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it. [Ghostly voice: Let go.]

Based on Dune by Frank Herbert / Directed by Denis Villeneuve / Screenplay by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth

Produced by Mary Parent, Denis Villeneuve, Cale Boyter, Joe Caracciolo Jr.

Starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac

Cinematography Greig Fraser

Edited by Joe Walker

Music by Hans Zimmer

Production companies Legendary Pictures

What the Thunder Said

                                    I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Tree

Trees and their indifferent majesty [...] teaches us how [insignificant we are] and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.

- Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of a Hedgehog