JustFilms Collection

Invisible Beauty

Invisible Beauty is the story of Bethann Hardison, a fashion revolutionary who has been on the front lines of racial justice in her industry for over five decades. Through her life journey as a pioneering Black model, modeling agent and activist, the film explores race, beauty and representation.

Eat Bitter 吃苦

During a civil war in the Central African Republic, an immigrant Chinese construction manager and a local worker on opposite ends of the spectrum to construct a bank. As deadlines loom, they don’t hesitate to strip the earth and destroy their family for a seat at the table of prosperity.

The Tuba Thieves

From 2011-2013 a rash of tuba thefts occurred in high schools across Southern California. The Tuba Thieves does not tell the story of the thieves or the missing tubas. Instead, it asks what it means to listen.

Unseen

An aspiring social worker, Pedro must confront political restrictions as a blind, undocumented immigrant to get his college degree and support his family. But when attaining his dreams leads to new and unexpected challenges, what will Pedro do?

Wisdom Gone Wild

Wisdom Gone Wild is an immersive meditation on elder consciousness and the act of caregiving a parent with dementia. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri weaves her mother’s storytelling wisdom into the dream fabric of this film. Rose’s songs provide a soundtrack for time travel as we witness her evolution across nine decades of living.

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project

Going to Mars takes us through the mind-scape of legendary poet, Nikki Giovanni. Her voice guides us across time and outer space, dreams and remembrances, and across decades of American history, as we reimagine her most iconic work with visual lyricism fit for a poet. The film’s cinematic intergalactic journey ventures beyond Nikki’s own lifetime, to Middle Passage and Mars, always keeping hold of possibility and the potential of Black liberation.

Hummingbirds

Hummingbirds is a uniquely collaborative cinematic nonfiction film about young artist-activists coming of age in a Texas border town.

Fire Through Dry Grass

On a tiny island in NYC, a group of Black and brown disabled artists fight Covid and the city to protect the lives of 500 vulnerable nursing home residents.

The 19th: Breaking the News

Breaking The News, previously The Untitled 19th News Documentary: follows a fearless group of female journalists in 2020, including founder Emily Ramshaw and editor-at-large Errin Haines, as they seek to ​upend the status quo by launching an all-women news start-up. ​Building a newsroom that reflects the women they’re writing about, Breaking The News could be a model in these changing times — If they can survive their tumultuous first year.

Queer Futures

Queer Futures is a 3 episode collection (soon to be 4) that takes its cues from José Estaban Muñoz who defined the concept as “imagining a future that moves beyond the negative present” and leads the day through the dynamism, creativity, and fluidity of queer experience.

What We Leave Behind

At the age of 89, Julián takes one last bus ride to El Paso, Texas, to visit his daughters and their children — a lengthy trip he has made without fail every month for decades. After returning to rural Mexico, he quietly starts building a house in the empty lot next to his home. In the absence of his physical visits, can this new house bridge the distance between his loved ones? Over several years, director Iliana Sosa films her grandfather’s work, gently sifting through Julián’s previously unspoken memories brought up by the construction project and revealing both the daily pragmatism and poetry of his life. What We Leave Behind unfolds as a love letter to her grandfather, as well as an intimate and insightful exploration of Iliana’s own relationship with him and his homeland.

The Big Payback

An inspiring look at Alderman Robin Rue Simmons’ fight to redress the wrongs of “redlining” and the legacy of slavery through a groundbreaking reparations program in Evanston, Illinois.