I’m not only behind on Sundance but also on the fests announcing this week. Sorry friends! Miami runs from February 28 – March 9, and the docs are programmed by the lovely Karina Rotenstein. She travels between Miami, New York and Toronto so many of you probably have met her; she world premiered last year’s Mississippi Chicken. She has a nose for good docs, so I’m always excited to hear about what she is showing. Here are the documentaries from the MIFF line-up:

Documentary Features: World & Ibero-American Cinema Competition

Divorce Albanian Style
Adela Peeva, U.S. Premiere
In the 1960s, Enver Hoxha became the paranoid leader of Albania, breaking up families and imprisoning innocent people whose crimes were nothing more than marrying a foreigner. Firsthand accounts tell of children left to fend for themselves and nightmarish interrogations that led to long prison sentences ending in the 1980s.

Drifter
Cao Guimarães, U.S. Premiere
What is the value of an isolated existence? Brazilian documentarian Cao Guimarães explores the question in this powerfully meditative film that follows three transients as they drift along the roads connecting the cities of Montes Claros and Pedra Azul. Punctuated by highway imagery both ephemeral and abstract, the men’s soliloquies and conversations invoke a quiet despair and existential immediacy that recall Samuel Beckett.

Frontrunner
Virginia Williams, East Coast Premiere
Frontrunner is an enthralling journey through a moment in history—a woman’s quest to become Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president. Nimbly navigating hostile terrain, filmmaker Virginia Williams offers a riveting portrait of Dr. Massouda Jalal, a pediatrician and mother of three who faced near insurmountable challenges in her bid to lead a rigid Muslim society.

Hippie Masala
Ulrich Grossenbacher and Damaris Lüthi, Regional Premiere
Also titled Forever in India, Hippie Masala profiles a disparate band of aging European flower children that fled to India in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s and never returned home. Some went in search of adventure and spiritual awakening; others sought a new way of life. All, in the end, embraced this land of ancient traditions and transcendent pleasures as their own.

Jogo de Cena
Eduardo Coutinho, International Premiere
After interviewing 83 women in Rio de Janeiro, filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho chose a handful to appear on film to share their accounts of the female experience. The stories they tell—of motherhood, divorce, love, sex, regret and sacrifice—are at times related by the women themselves, at others, they are interpreted by actresses, a crafty technique that effectively blurs the distinction between real life and cinematic art.

Katrina’s Children
Laura Belsey, World Premiere
This memorable and highly evocative documentary about the effects of Hurricane Katrina examines the tragedy through the eyes, voices, and drawings of the city’s children. A heartfelt ode to the spirit of New Orleans, the original short version of Katrina’s Children was awarded a jury prize at the 2007 New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival.

Lucio
Aitor Arregi and Jose Maria Goennaga, North American Premiere
This riveting documentary introduces audiences to Lucio Urtubia, a modest construction worker from Spain who was also a master traveler’s check forger and leftist radical who held court with Che Guevara and Eldridge Cleaver, among others. Through the use of archival footage, reenactments and interviews, Lucio paints a vivid portrait of a legendary dissident who remains as enigmatic a figure as ever.
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The Old Thieves
Everardo González Reyes, North American Premiere
Elderly ex-thieves recall their lives of crime in 1970’s Mexico City in this winner of the Guadalajara International Film Festival’s award for best Mexican documentary. A “Buena Vista Thieving Club” for legendary bandits, The Old Thieves chronicles a fascinating subculture of petty crooks for whom honor and respect meant everything.

A Paper Tiger
Luis Ospina, North American Premiere
Revolutionary, groundbreaking, unforgettable…How else to describe Colombian artist Pedro Manrique Figueroa, a master of collage and agitator whose colorful life is the stuff of legend? Luis Ospina’s dazzling, wickedly playful portrait of Manrique Figueroa mirrors his own country’s political upheaval from the 1940s to the 1970s, and deliberately blurs the line between fact and fiction.

Santa Fe Street
Carmen Castillo, Regional Premiere
On October 5, 1974, Chilean leftist radical Carmen Castillo, then pregnant, was shot and badly injured in a police raid that left her partner and fellow dissident of the Pinochet regime dead. Calle Santa Fé is Castillo’s poignantly personal journey to the homeland she was forced to leave behind, as well as her search for meaning in the struggle against oppression.

Santiago
João Moreira Salles, Regional Premiere
A fascinating meditation on the measure of a man, João Moreira Salles’ splintered documentary is a portrait of his family’s butler Roteiro Santiago. Proud and profoundly erudite, Santiago spent three decades writing 30,000 pages of notes on a history of aristocracy. That singular obsession fuels Salles’ moving deconstruction of the nature of memory and truth.

Silhouette City
Michael Wilson, World Premiere
Religious fundamentalism, American-style, lies at the heart of this timely documentary about far-right Christian extremist movements and their influence on mainstream politics. Interweaving footage of a religious survivalist cult active in the 1970’s and 1980’s with that of contemporary “dominion” movements and glad-handling politicians, Silhouette City is a fascinating exposé of the state of religion in contemporary America.

Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel
Ari Libsker, North American Premiere
The words pornography and Holocaust shouldn’t mix. But they did in the Stalag books from the 1960’s. The film Stalag documents this singular and shocking obsession that lasted just a few years in Israel, but permanently affected the country’s perception of the Holocaust more than a decade after it was over.

Stars
Federico Leon and Marcos Martinez, East Coast Premiere
Led by the undaunted Julio, who is part Che Guevara, part Don Quixote, the residents of an impoverished Buenos Aires neighborhood build an arts community — a filmmaking collective for hire. The goal is to make everyone in the community, no matter how poor or forgotten, a shining star.

Trader’s Dreams
Marcus Vetter and Stefan Tolz, North American Premiere
Stefan Tolz and Marcus Vetter’s engaging documentary examines how eBay’s “pay what you will” brand of capitalism has leveled the global market playing field for the world’s would-be entrepreneurs. It is, as well, a portrait of a devoted community of buyers and shoppers for whom eBay is more than an online auction site—it is a way of life.

Stranded: I’ve Come from a Plane that Crashed on the Mountain
Gonzalo Arijon, East Coast Premiere
Stranded tells the harrowing survival story of an Uruguayan rugby team’s plane crash in the Andes 35 years ago. Through the use of carefully constructed dramatizations, news footage, and interviews with survivors atop the crash site, filmmaker Gonzalo Arijón crafts a moving testament to the strength and endurance of the human spirit.

Very Young Girls
David Schisgall, World Premiere
A sobering look at the underage sex trade in New York City, Very Young Girls follows several young women who were lured into “the life” by viciously manipulative pimps. Their story is not without hope—the film is also a profile of GEMS, an organization tirelessly devoted to providing refuge for sexually exploited girls.