In its 29th year of programming, Chicago International Film Festival’s Black Perspectives category continues to exhibit and uplift stories across the diaspora, adding evidence to the archives that Black folk are far from monolithic. Now, more than ever, taking the time to experience stories outside of our own will conserve our ability to be compassionate neighbors. With 10 feature films and a shorts program included in CIFF’s 61st lineup, Black Perspectives, like the other categories, can serve as a strong source for curating one’s own festival experience.

An archival snippet of activist and organizer Rosie Douglas telling us to “learn [your] history” sets the tone for the story that “True North” seeks to tell. The black and white documentary from director Michèle Stephenson, weaves together soundbites, interviews, and a plethora of historical documentation to recount key events and people of the Civil Rights Era in Canada, and, more specifically, Montreal. Not only does “True North” bring our attention to the historical and present day Black-Canadian experience, but the film also directly confronts how anti-Blackness is built and perpetuated by institutions. 

Stephenson strings together a narrative that was once stuck out of sight, a persistent yet unsurprising struggle of the Black experience and Black history. Similar to the foundation of the United States, a majority of the Black population in Canada is due to the transatlantic slave trade and immigration. Anchored in one of the more angsty (and, therefore, inactive) age groups, Stephenson narrows in on college students at Sir George University who are standing up for equal classroom treatment and academic opportunity. As hundreds of students of all races and creed take over the precious college computer lab, the monochromatic scanned photos, peppered with interviews and archival audio illustrate the unnecessary, one-sided violence that quickly gets out of hand and is later taken advantage of within legal context.

All these years later, Brenda Dash, one of the women who was a prevalent player in such protests, states that in some ways her “soul is still colonized.” To no fault of her own, there is so much power in hearing an elder speak truth to the imperfections of combatting and overcoming generational, systemic suffering. In its final moments, “Reach the Sunshine,” a futuristic, psychedelic punk song by rapper Lil Yachty awakens our souls with sounds that fuel us with optimism for our ability to continue correcting such cruel, longstanding corruptions through collective action.

“Pasa Faho,” slang for, or play on, the phrase “parts of a whole,” takes the pieces of our broken hearts and puts them together again. In director and writer Kalu Oji’s feature debut, there is undeniable warmth and understanding of whose story he is trying to tell. Oji, who is Igbo Australian, tells the story of Nigerian shoe-store owner, Azubuike (Okey Bakassi), who slowly endures unexpected hardships right as his tween son Obinna (Tyson Palmer) starts to live with him. The family-drama is also a story of immigrant communities finding their footing in new places, how spirituality can be reshaped amidst such shifts, and how one’s sense of purpose can come into question but persevering through parenthood.

Despite the limited large-scale and landscape shots, each character has a grand presence, framed intimately in close ups that influence the overall perception of what audiences are able to connect to in this story. With exceptional chemistry between the father-son duo, Bakassi and Palmer bring contemplative, complexity to their characters. Even in moments of few words, much is said with their eyes and their physicality.

Over and over the film conveys some iteration of “true love must move along and evolve;” a lesson Azubuike not only reiterates to his son, but one that he, too, is learning and accepting. As the score oscillates between high-vibration afrobeats to more melancholic, classically orchestrated music, each scene is both visually and sonically saturated with emotional queues. “Pasa Faho” is layered and lovely on every level.

At last, the art of Sun Ra, the enigma, the intergalactic sonic savant, is brought to the silver screen. In Christine Turner’s newest documentary, “Sun Ra: Do the Impossible,” we’re flung into his orbit, entranced by his audacious mindset and outlook on life.

The film skims through Sun Ra’s early years and establishes him as a self-proclaimed divine figure from a young age. His beliefs were bigger than the human body can hold; a confidence so courageous and mighty, it was best channeled through making music. Turner transports us to Birmingham, AL in the 1940s, then we’re along for a journey to Chicago, New York, Europe, Africa, and beyond.

Despite the film’s diverse and well stacked line up of sources and interviewees, there is not an explicit, detailed display of Sun Ra’s lasting impact and legacy. Journalists and scholars unanimously agree that Sun Ra and his nature of making was otherworldly. Notably, he’s named “the godfather of Afrofuturism” as the film flashes several artists who embody an offshoot of the aesthetic Sun Ra and his Arkestra brought to the stage. Yet the only musicians included in the documentary are his former bandmates and fellow followers of afro-mythology. Some even admit the almost cult-like mentality the musical troupe underwent to remain in line with Sun Ra’s vision and aspirations.

Although this is a seemingly weak point of the overall film, “Sun Ra: Do the Impossible” has a central thesis of placing its subject within the archive as someone who is larger than life. With deep care and patience, Turner sifts through mountains of archival anecdotes (from letters to albums to found footage) to present just one iota of all Sun Ra was. As the film dances through time, the entirety of the score is composed of sounds created by Sun Ra; before the synthy ’70s, we boogie to the big band of the ’40s. The evidence is in the air while the psychedelic editing enhances our ability to have faith and make believe.

“Atmospheric” and “measured” are the two words that describe the three films composing this latest Chicago International Film Festival dispatch. All three works, hailing from the festival’s New Director’s Competition, are films that consider loss and isolation in an unhurried manner. These sensorial works are also ambitious and assured, trusting the audience to accompany their stories on narrative paths whose emotional ends aren’t readily given; they’re earned.   

A quietly moving film about grief, writer/director Stefan Djordjevic’s “Wind, Talk To Me” is an unassuming hybrid work that effortlessly blends documentary with fiction. It follows a mournful  Djordjevic, who, while driving to visit his grandmother for her 80th birthday, accidentally hits a dog with his car. Eventually, Djordjevic will adopt this dog and name her Lija. That fictional element of this docudrama, however, is only a sliver of the overall film. Djordjevic is arriving at his grandparent’s home with a heavy heart: His mother Negrica recently passed away, and he hopes to complete the real film he was making about her. 

Without warning, Djordjevic’s film navigates into the past, becoming several films within a film. The first involves the documentary footage Djordjevic is presently shooting of his family climbing trees, luxuriating in their rural spaces, and completing a lake house. The second film is composed of previously shot footage of Djordjevic’s mother, such as the holistic treatment she undertook and her many musings about how humans can control the wind. The majority of “Wind, Talk To Me,” therefore, is Djordjevic using these two elements, including his therapeutic relationship with Lija, to process his loss. 

In his meditations, nature becomes its own character. A close-up captures Djordjevic’s rubbing hand over tree bark, creating a sound akin to crumbling charred tissue paper. In other moments, the wind and leaves whisper with soulful intensity. The film’s DP Marko Brdar is especially attuned to the sensorial environment, enveloping us in its majesty and solemnity with soft precision. And while “Wind, Talk To Me” can be knowingly distant, juxtaposing Djordjevic’s lonely heart to the intimacy of family life, the docudrama is never too cute nor too vague. By the end, we fully perceive the necessity of holding and cherishing every moment with a loved one, grasping at opportunities to simply commune with them.      

While I wouldn’t necessarily call “Brand New Landscape,” writer/director Yuiga Danzuka’s melancholic debut feature, slow cinema. It’s certainly an unhurried rumination. It starts with a family of four who’ve arrived at a vacation home for the weekend when their selfish architect father Hajime (Kenichi Endo) asks his wife if he can immediately depart to take on a job. The brazenness Tanakao displays as he slowly dismisses his wife’s many counterarguments, to the point of wearing her down into a fetal position, permanently changes his observant son. Fast forward ten years: His son Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) delivers flowers and his daughter Emi (Mai Kiryû) is preparing to be married. 

Danzuka’s film doesn’t readily turn to melodrama. Ren is such a quiet spectator, when Emi tells him about her impending marriage, he can barely mumble “congratulations.” It’s not until he discovers a floral arrangement addressed for his dad—who’s just returned to the country after working overseas for three years—that he becomes emotionally shaken. Emi, on other hand, declares that she doesn’t really care about their dad anymore. But as she advances closer and closer into her move on date with her fiance, we see how much her father’s abandonment has affected her too. This tricky dynamic between these three characters holds much of “Brand New Landscape” together, especially as the film shifts into phantasmagorical territory. 

“Brand New Landscape” becomes shakier, however, when Danzuka moves away from the narrative’s family drama to critique the soulless new structures dotting Tokyo. While he tries to parallel his aesthetic disgust with the film’s condemnation of Hajime—the character’s most famous project is a vapid megamall that required the government to clear the houseless from the land to build—his interrogation remains too far on the edges of the film to fully succeed. That failing, thankfully, can easily be chalked up to first-time filmmaker issues. The character-based components of “Brand New Landscape” are so strong, it’s easy to ignore the faults in its foundation. 

Louise Hémon’s hypnotic and sumptuous “The Girl in the Snow” uses the arrival of French teacher Aimée Lazare (Galatéa Bellugi) in 1899 to critique the customs, homophobia, and female sexual repression of a small snowbound Hautes-Alpes village. A lowlander, Aimée has arrived in this mountainous setting with nary any knowledge about their local beliefs. When she attempts to teach the children what a cow sounds like, they correct her by telling her a cow makes a “broo broo” call rather than a “moo” sound. When she attempts to give two of her students a bath, the elderly women scold her: in their minds the kids need crust on their heads to protect their brains. Worst yet for this very horny protagonist, she becomes attracted to the local men—Pépin (Samuel Kircher) and Enoch (Matthieu Lucci)—while ignoring the infatuation displayed by the quiet stableboy Daniel (Oscar Pons). 

With a prickly folkloric score, “The Girl in the Snow” becomes a supernatural tale that proposes a woman’s sensuality as a kind of malevolent spirit. Homosexuality is similarly pitched as a desire that must be hidden away, often in caves, lest they upset the “natural” balance of the village. The more these appetites are hidden, of course, the greater angst and trouble they inspire within this tiny hamlet that believes the mountain gives gifts and takes away people. Despite that tension, it would be a mistake to think Hémon’s film considers these modest folks smallminded. When Aimée writes down one of their oral stories, in French no less—the locals speak Occitan—the elders are incensed. Not only does Aimée not see how she’s erasing their language, thereby, locking this amorphous tradition in a kind of colonized state. She also laments that all she wants to do is bring enlightenment to them. 

With that want in mind, Hémon displays an enrapturing visual eye. The snowy, hilly landscape allows the director and her DP Marine Atlan to rely on negative space to visualize how separated Aimée is from the spirit of the land she resides on and the ideas of the people who inhabit it. While the director and DP’s chiaroscuro shadows often recall the Dutch masters, their hallucinatory staging, which combines airy lighting with a kind of rural claustrophobia, deepens the haunting residue the film leaves. The effect is a startling directorial debut whose sense of place and mood become as timeless as a folktale.    

Documentary is a filmmaking approach inherently designed for remembrance. In fact, it’s the approach that most closely can be aligned with photography and the desire to capture a moment, a person, or a thing before the forces of time overcome and erase its existence. So, you know, usually with these films, you’re going to get a topic of some import. The three films in this Chicago International Film Festival dispatch take the form’s ability to heart in a bid to preserve the memories of a Kosovo village, the legacy of a disgraced Ghanaian president, and an area of Italy previously wiped out by a volcano. These films, to varying degrees of success, stand as a testament to the importance of remembrance, even when the memories hurt.   

For the last year or so, cinema has been inundated with films about unmoored individuals and shaken communities grappling with the loss of their homelands. Swiss-Albanian director Dea Gjinovci’s elegiac documentary “The Beauty of the Donkey” is a fine addition to that trend. It concerns the filmmaker’s father, who, with his daughter, returns to their small village in Kosovo for the first time in nearly 60 years. While there, her father, Asllan, shares memories that Gjinovci decides to stage as abstract theatrical productions, bringing the past back to modernity with potency.

This is also a film that mixes politics with loss. In 1968, a 19-year-old Asllan was a political activist when he was exiled. Upon leaving the country, he lost contact with his family, particularly his mother, whose death has always lived in family lore. Asllan shares the oppression his family suffered under Serbian authorities and the risks taken to combat their rule with stunning clarity; he also investigates his mother’s death with equal fervor. These family stories, of course, impact Gjinovci as well. Because she grew up in Switzerland, she’s never seen her father’s homeland. In the opening sequence, when Asllan emerges from the woods, walking toward the field where his stone home once stood, in the assuredness of her lens you can feel the haunting reverence Gjinovci has for this moment.

Despite the film’s fanciful title, however, there aren’t many donkeys in this picture. Two scenes featuring donkeys bookend the work, and while you can certainly sense how the animal traces back to a moment of innocence in Asllan’s life and serves as a reminder of his own endurance, the moments don’t cohere enough to be the film’s throughline. Instead the film is strongest when it doesn’t give way to twee metaphorical scenes, but focuses on the cathartic reclamation of one’s history.   

I really wish director Ben Proudfoot’s messy historical documentary “The Eyes of Ghana,” a partial product of executive producers Michelle and Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, was better. It’s one of those films whose desire to tell a little-known story grants it some slack, but whose unsteady execution quickly evaporates much of the goodwill you came into it with. The film concerns legendary Ghanaian cinematographer and director Chris Hesse’s desire to reclaim over a thousand cans of footage from London that he shot of the country’s first president Kwame Nkrumah before the leader’s downfall from a military coup in 1966. While that story alone would make for an incredible documentary, Proudfoot overpacks “The Eyes of Ghana” with far too many other threads for it all to hold together. 

Proudfoot is a two-time winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film (“The Last Repair,” “The Queen of Basketball”), a background you can unfortunately feel when “The Eyes of Ghana” begins with the three cold opens. The first opener introduces Hesse; the second produces his protege, director Anita Afonu; the third brings in the steadfast projectionist of Ghana’s Rex Cinema, Addo, who often dreams of hosting film at the disused movie house again. With that set-up you can pretty much guess where this film will end up. Nevertheless, Proudfoot doesn’t neatly interweave these threads. He continues shifting subjects, giving us the early history of Ghanaian moviemaking, Nkrumah’s troubled story, and how America disrupted the Pan-Africa movement via destabilizing newly independent governments. Rather than making a coherent feature out of these varied topics, unfortunately, Proudfoot has produced several shorts whose total composition lacks focus as a feature. 

His film is further hobbled when he begins including the digitized and restored pieces that Hesse shot (in a sense “The Eyes of Ghana” is a well-meaning advertising for further funds to restore the rest of Hesse’s stored footage). Not because the images aren’t exceptional, because Hesse’s films are so much better than the movie we’re watching, which relies on a garish Disney-esque score by Kris Bowers and an on-the-nose desire to capture Hesse at such an angle that we’re always staring deeply into his eyes. Though Proudfoot clearly has an appreciation for the material—“Rwanda and Juliet,” his only other feature, considered the post-genocide lives of that African country—this film is too slick and too broad for such a sensitive story.    

The history of Vesuvius, whose eruption led to the decimation of Pompeii, has served as a shot that continues to be heard round the world. So when Gianfranco Rosi’s gorgeous, black and white shot documentary “Below the Clouds” fixes its lens on the mountain, you immediately expect his film will hyper focus on that looming threat. But Rosi, whose previous films include overtly political works like “Fire at Sea” and “Notturno,” rarely takes notice of the life inside the volcano. He instead weaves through the ordinary life bustling around Naples and the recording of lives long past gone by the archeologists excavating local historical sites. 

“Below the Clouds” isn’t a talky documentary, per se. It’s totally observational. Even so, Rosi’s meditative lens takes notice of the chatter emanating from its many locations. There’s the emergency call center where people phone for assistance following every tremor. While you’d think these would be intense communications, their inherent franticness is cut down by the humor and sweetness of the officials taking these calls. Greater chatter is found via Syrian boatmen looking for entry into the port for their Ukrainian grain. And even more talk occurs whenever we jump into the work performed by archaeologists, who are navigating, at times, vast tunnels and excavated caverns holding the frozen, calcified victims of Pompeii.   

When combined, all of these scenes entail a documentary fascinated by the fragility and suspension of life. The rhythmic editing, for instance, creates a circular pattern, returning to and remixing images whose continual convergence imbues these mundane images with great meaning. Rosi also ventures into a movie house, where he plays films like “Last Days of Pompeii” (1913) and “Voyage to Italy” (1954), which speak to the long-held cultural fascination with an event that continues to fascinate outsiders and remains ever prevalent in the minds of those living near the famed volcano. In a sense, by locking his contemporary documentary in this rich black and white photography, Rosi has also put his film along those. Thereby, preserving the artifacts of memory that make this place home.