Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick St., Maysles Cinema, 343 Malcolm X Blvd., the Quad, 34 West 13th St., the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd St., the Center for Remembering and Sharing, 123 Fourth Ave., and the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave.
March 16-22, free – $15 (all access pass $200)
www.ratedsrfilms.org
Started last year by Nora Armani as a response to the violence in mainstream movies, both in the narrative as well as the style of filmmaking, the Socially Relevant Film Festival consists of fiction and nonfiction films from more than thirty countries focusing on “human interest stories that raise awareness to social problems and might offer positive solutions through the powerful medium of cinema.” The festival, running at Tribeca Cinemas, Maysles Cinema, the CUNY Graduate Center, the SVA Theatre, the Center for Remembering and Sharing, and the Quad, opens March 16 with a free screening (advance RSVP recommended) of Hϋseyin Karabey’s Come to My Voice, in which a young Kurdish girl, with her grandmother, has to find a gun to free her imprisoned father. Other programs include Michael Buckley’s Plundering Tibet with Giordano Cossu’s Umudugudu! Rwanda 20 Years On; Justin Thomas’s Truth Through a Lens, about the evolution of onetime Brooklyn street kid Dennis Flores; Matthias Leupold’s Lighter than Orange, which looks at the human cost of the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam; and Kaouther Ben Hania’s mockumentary Challat of Tunis, about the vicious slashing of eleven women in 2003. Most screenings will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and other guests. There will also be panel discussions on distribution, storytelling, casting, and, closing the festival, “Next: An Open Dialogue on the Potential of Art as a Revolutionary Tool,” with Jessica Vale and Cherrell Brown, moderated by Adam Kritzer.