Let The Red Moon Burn is an impressionistic portrait of the ancient ritual of fire dancing in Bulgaria. Weaving 16mm hand-processed images, the film blurs past and present to evoke ghosts in the landscape, the spirits of ancestors unearthed by the throbbing pulsations of live music. All images and sounds are recorded during Zheravna Festival of Costume in Bulgaria, where thousands of people gather each summer to perform traditional dances under a full moon. —Ralitsa Doncheva

A one take recording of a family's visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.
—Xiaolu Wang

The site is pretty easy to find. So says the young woman who has been filming an outing to her grandmother’s grave. Along the way, she and her extended family happen upon an imam on the road. Smiling, he offers them his services, and in a long, unbroken shot, they drive him to the gravesite to chant. The route is orderly, the car new and softly beeping, the family plot well-tended, if a little dusty. But the journey is twistier than it first seems. The woman, the filmmaker, explains to the imam that she is from the United States. Later, she reveals that her grandmother once appeared to her in a dream. Each turn is another opportunity to lose one’s bearings, for time to slip past, for languages and customs to become strange. What might seem mundane becomes remarkable in its unlikeliness: a distant family reuniting at a leaf-strewn grave. —Genevieve Yue

A documentary portrait of twenty-year-old Amie Lowe, whose father disappeared during Yahya Jammeh’s violent dictatorship in The Gambia when she was only 3 years old. The personal portrait that emerged illuminates the intimate and small in the interminable wake of unresolved loss. —Aminata Ndow

Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs?'Avant Seriana' is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are formed : the Algeria of the mountains and an imaginary one born of the tales I've read in colonial archives. My gaze no longer belongs to the places where I was hoping to return to my roots. —Samy Benammar