2018 Harlem International Film Festival Announces Lineup

The lineup for the 13th Harlem International Film Festival in New York City has been revealed, with 80 films including 23 features. This year’s festival will be taking place May 3-6 at the Magic Johnson Theatre.

Take a look at the feature lineup below and be sure to click over to the official site here for more information.

OPENING NIGHT
THE RAINBOW EXPERIMENT                                             New York Premiere              
Director: Christina Kallas
Country: USA, Running Time: 129 min
Things spiral out of control in a Manhattan high school when a terrible accident involving a science experiment injures a kid for life. A who-dun-it with a how-they-saw-it leads to an explosion of emotions touching the teachers, the parents, the school authorities and, ultimately, the students themselves.

CLOSING NIGHT
MANDELA’S GUN                                                                 World Premiere
Director: John Irvin
Countries: Algeria/Botswana/Ethiopia/South Africa/Tanzania/UK/USA, Running Time: 87 min
MANDELA’S GUN is the startling true story of the last 6 months of Nelson Mandela’s freedom before his arrest and life imprisonment in 1962. Five years in the making, it follows his epic journey as he illegally left South Africa.

Additional Feature Films

THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS
Director: Adrian Goiginger
Countries: Germany/Austria, Running Time: 103 min
One kid’s true story of his life in the unusual world of his heroin addicted mother and their true love for each other.

THE BREEDING                                                                    World Premiere
Director: Daniel Armando
Country: USA, Running Time: 83 min
A chance restroom encounter with a recently divorced financier named Lee (newcomer Joe MacDougall) leaves Thomas curious about exploring the taboo fetish of “race play.” But when the game gets too real, chilling actions are taken that will forever change the trajectory of these men’s lives.

ELVIS WALKS HOME                                                           New York Premiere
Director: Fatmir Koci
Country: Albania, Running Time: 94 min
Mickey Jones is marooned in the Balkan wars – carrying a guitar and wearing an Elvis Presley jumpsuit. His world tour kicks off by entertaining the British troops, but when the military police discover that he is an Albanian, they try to arrest him. As he flees, he meets a group of refugee children trying to get to the United Nations camp. Jones claims he is a UN doctor and can lead them there, and while they don’t trust him, the children agree, hoping he will take them to safety.

THE FOREIGNER’S HOME                                                  Manhattan Premiere
Directors: Geoff Pingree, Rian Brown
Countries: France/USA, Running Time: 56 min
Exploring the vision and work of Toni Morrison through “The Foreigner’s Home,” the 2006 exhibition she guest‑curated at the Louvre. Morrison invited renowned artists whose work also deals with the experience of cultural and social displacement to join her in a public conversation that she had been pursuing for years through her own research, writing and teaching at Princeton University.

FORGOTTEN MAN                                                               New York Premiere                                      
Director: Arran Shearing
Countries: UK/Canada, Running Time: 84 min
FORGOTTEN MAN tells the story of Carl, a troubled young actor with a history of incarceration in an East London Theatre Company for the homeless. When the opening night of his new play ends with a fellow actor attacking an audience member, Carl, in the affluent attire from his play, abandons the theatre for the bustling streets of contemporary London. He meets Meredith, a wealthy out-of-towner in the city for a funeral. Their sweet romance has Carl risking parole violation to pursue another life, but when Meredith invites Carl to see the very play he is the lead actor in, and the theatre erupts in violent conflict, Carl is found trapped between his desire and obligation.

HARLEM TO HOLLYWOOD                                                World Premiere
Director: Alan Swyer
Country: USA, Running Time: 96 min
From being the first white male ever to play the Apollo as part of a duet with a black woman to his improbable hit, “At The Moment,” from the 1980s television series, “Family Ties,” Billly Vera has had a remarkable unsung, yet influential career in the music business.

INCARCERATED RHYTHM                                                  World Premiere
Director: Indrani Kopal
Countries: Malaysia/USA, Running Time: 80 min
Six imprisoned men join a dance rehabilitation program that has never been tested before in the prison system. Upon their release they discover that the “rhythm of freedom” is harder to find than the “rhythm of incarceration”.

THE JAZZ AMBASSADORS                                                New York Premiere
Director: Hugo Berkeley
Country: USA, Running Time: 90 min
The Cold War and Civil Rights movement collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. In 1955, as the Soviet Union’s pervasive propaganda about the U.S. and American racism spread globally, African-American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. convinced President Eisenhower that jazz was the best way to intervene in the Cold War cultural conflict. For the next decade, America’s most influential jazz artists, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck, along with their racially-integrated bands, traveled the globe to perform as cultural ambassadors. But the unrest back home forced them to face a painful moral dilemma: how could they promote the image of a tolerant America abroad when the country still practiced Jim Crow segregation and racial equality remained an unrealized dream? Told through striking archival film footage, photos and radio clips, with iconic performances throughout, the documentary reveals how the U.S. State Department unwittingly gave the burgeoning Civil Rights movement a major voice on the world stage just when it needed one most.

MEERKAT MOONSHIP                                                         East Coast Premiere
Director: Hanneke Schutte
Country: South Africa, Running Time: 96 min
After her father’s sudden death, Gideonette de la Rey, a fearful young hypochondriac with an overactive imagination, descends into darkness as she realizes that she’s the only one left with a cursed family name. With the help of her new friend Bhubesi and his make-shift Meerkat Moonship, she’ll have to find the inner strength to face her fears in order to break the curse.

MR. HANDY’S BLUES                                                           East Coast Premiere
Director: Joanne Fish
Country: USA, Running Time: 85 min
MR. HANDY’s BLUES is a musical documentary about W.C. Handy, known worldwide as The Father of the Blues. Handy transformed the oral traditions of his Post Civil War African American countrymen into a unique and popular musical genre called the Blues.

MY TOURETTES                                                                  
Director: Alessandro Molatore
Country: USA, Running Time: 76 min
Five brave individuals with severe Tourette’s Syndrome take part in an experimental case study that transforms their lives and raises profound questions about our perception of the neurological disorder.

ONE BEDROOM                                                                   
Director: Darien Sills-Evans
Country: USA, Running Time: 90 min
Breaking up is easy. Moving out is hard. After 5 years of ups and downs, a 30-something African American couple in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood spends their final afternoon together arguing and remembering better days.

PANI: WOMEN, DRUGS AND KATHMANDU                     New York Premiere
Director: Raul Gallego Abellan
Country: Nepal, 87 min
Female drug addiction is an extreme taboo in Nepal, but a group of brave women reveal their struggle to eradicate it, especially the cheap and dangerous drug called ‘Pani,’ a cocktail of opioids which users inject into their veins.

PRIDE OF DC: THE HYDE RUGBY ODYSSEY                   World Premiere
Director: Jonni Masella
Country: USA, Running Time: 100 min
PRIDE OF DC: THE HYDE RUGBY ODYSSEY is a feature length documentary that tells the inspirational story of the first all African-American, high school rugby team. Filmmaker Jonni Masella captures the most intimate moments of the team experience as players struggle to learn an unfamiliar sport, only to find an extended brotherhood in the game of rugby, against the gritty backdrop of everyday life in Northeast Washington, DC.

RETRACING JENEBA                                                          World Premiere
Director: Liat Krawczyk
Countries: Guinea/Liberia/Sierra Leone/USA, Runnning Time: 64 min
The extraordinary story of a young man who survived the horrors of the Sierra Leonean and Liberian civil wars as a child, elevated himself through education and has set out on a journey to face his past and rebuild the country he once saw destroyed. At first glance, Joseph seems like any other U.S. college student, but it is soon revealed that very few people know the full story of his life. Such begins Joseph’s journey back to West Africa to face the horrors of his past for the first time. A survivor of the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, he retraces his experiences as a child prisoner and as witness to child soldiers, all the while coping with the loss of his father and grandmother.

SAYAKBAY – HOMER OF THE 20^TH CENTURY
Director: Ernest Abdyjaparov
Country: Kyrgyzstan, Running Time: 82 min
The film tells about young Chingiz Aitmatov’s visit to the great storyteller Sayakbay Karalaev to understand the value and greatness of the epic ‘Manas’. In the two days spent the future world-famous writer chronicles his origins and the roots of Kyrgyz Culture and spirituality.

STATE OF EXCEPTION
Director:  Jason O’Hara
Country:  Brazil, Running Time: 88 min
As Rio de Janeiro prepares to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympics, a community of self-described “urban Indians” are threatened with forced eviction to make way for a stadium named after the original indigenous inhabitants of the territory. As the mega-events begin threatening a number of other communities with displacement, residents unite to fight back in defense of their constitutional rights, temporarily suspended under a “state of exception”.

THE SILENT EYE
Director: Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Country: Australia, Running Time: 70 min
THE SILENT EYE is a highly intimate, impressionistic portrait of the unspoken rapport between Cecil Taylor and Min Tanaka – two masters of their form, at work together.

TIGERNUT HOMELAND OF THE WHOLEHEARTED WOMEN    New York Premiere
(THE DARK SIDE OF SUPERFOODS)
Director: Andoni Monforte
Countries: Spain/Burkina Faso/Germany/Mali, Running Time: 79 min
A worldwide trade war has broken out over the control and distribution of the new healthy Superfood, tiger nuts. An investigation uncovers a plot of international corruption and abuses around the production of tiger nuts by European and American companies exploiting African labor and resources. The film documents the growing movement among 30,000 African farmers to combat this exploitation.

VIANEY                                                                                   World Premiere
Director: Marco Vuorinen
Country: USA, Running Time:
VIANEY is an intensely personal documentary portrait about the life and hardships of the New Jersey and Bronx based underground hip hop artist Vianey Otero, also known by the stage name So Icey Trap. The movie reveals the reality behind growing up on the streets, the lure of escorting, everyday life in jail, and being a female artist in the music industry.

VIF                                                                                          East Coast Premiere
Director: Didier Beringuer
Countries: Indonesia/Brazil/France/Mexico/USA, Running Time: 98 min
VIF tells the story of Christian Audigier, who revolutionized the Fashion Industry with glittering tattooed tees and trucker caps. After being diagnosed with MDS, an aggressive type of blood cancer, Audigier was forced to accept what lies ahead of him. To find the strength to do so, he looks to his past, remembers what made him who he is today, what matters most to him and takes us on an introspective journey through his life.

WRITE WHEN YOU GET WORK                                          New York Premiere
Director: Stacy Cochran
Country: USA, Running Time: 99 min
Write When You Get Work is a comedy of money and access, a love story set in the Bronx and at a pricey school for girls on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Years after they’ve parted ways, Jonny Collins pursues Ruth Duffy for profit, and love.