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Mimi Bartels is Head of Production of FilmOne Entertainment, which is the largest production and distribution company in West Africa. She is one of the top names in Nollywood in Nigeria and has managed to keep production going during the pandemic – a challenge that she saw as both personal and one on a national level.

The massive difficulties of consensus-building in a polarized world are ably highlighted in The First Step, a sociopolitical documentary that should find engaging reception with both those acutely interested in the sharp-elbowed realm of American political gamesmanship as well as those just contemplating real-world events of the past several years. Taking as its central subject lawyer, author, and activist Van Jones, director Brandon Kramer’s movie, fresh off its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and accompanying presentation at AFI Docs, focuses on the efforts of his nonprofit organization #cut50 (now Dream Corps) as it lobbies for criminal justice reform.

His amazing portrayal of Lieutenant-colonel Tawfiq Zacharya in Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit was one of the keys to the success of the Israeli film, which won three awards at the Un Certain Regard section in the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. That led to winning the Best Actor at the European Film Awards and the Jerusalem Film Festival, among many others, in the same year.

An idiosyncratic and engaging work that finds a way to mimic the at-odds kineticism and inherent melancholy present in its subject’s music, Moby Doc serves as both a bouncy nonfiction exploration of pioneering electronica artist Moby and a document of therapeutic self-examination. Directed and edited with considerable aplomb by Rob Gordon Bralver, the movie holds at bay some of the (very present) clichés of rock star bio-docs, from drug abuse to suicidal ideation, by way of an atypical structuring and the use of various narrative end-arounds and filters.

In 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates, a native of Baltimore wrote his bestselling non-fiction book “Between the World and Me” as a letter to his then 15-year-old son. In it, he speaks of the emotions and realities of being Black in America.

“What a shit year it was,” Dave Chappelle said by way of greeting the live audience. “I’m so sorry if you lost someone, or lost something, during this pandemic.

Finnish filmmaker Jenni Kivistö wanted to make a poetic documentary about peace in Colombia with her co-director Jussi Rastas. Kivistö tells HFPA journalist Greet Ramaekers that there was so much hope in the air in 2016 but the peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Colombian Government plunged the country into chaos.

 If there's one team sport in the U. S.

With Shadow in the Cloud, New Zealand filmmaker Roseanne Liang has created a fantasy action film with a feminist twist. The year is August 1943, and the film opens at Auckland allied airbase, where Maude Garretts embarks on the B-17 bomber plane called “The Fool’s Errand” on a secret military mission.

There have been many documentaries and films about Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ creative force, widely recognized as genius due to his novel approaches, pop composition, exceptional aptitude and mastery of recording techniques. But most have focused on his 1960s heyday or the difficult times during struggles with mental illness and drug addiction.