Street Smart: Lessons from a TV Icon is a documentary about Sonia Manzano, the first Latina in a regular role on American TV and beloved as Maria from Sesame Street for 44 years. The Miami Film Festival will present Manzano with its Impact Award at the screening. Directed by Ernie Bustamante.
Cookie Queens is a documentary following four Girl Scouts ages 5 to 12 through the pressures and joys of cookie selling season. Directed by Alysa Nahmias, the film examines the tension between community, ambition, and capitalism through the lens of an $800 million American tradition.
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is a documentary portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, featuring poems read by Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Jesse Welles, and Oprah Winfrey. The screening is followed by a conversation with director Sasha Waters.
A girl earns her place in a celebrated choir — and discovers what that place costs her. Set against the fading grandeur of early post-Communist Prague, Broken Voices is a quietly devastating portrait of innocence navigating abusive power, honored at Karlovy Vary with the Europa Cinemas Label and a Special Jury Mention.
The Miami Film Festival screens five short documentaries competing for the University of Miami Documentary Award on April 16 at 6:30 p.m. The program covers stories of immigration, identity, justice, and Americana from filmmakers working across the United States, Vietnam, and beyond.
François Ozon's adaptation of Camus's The Stranger arrives as something rare: a literary film that earns its fidelity. Benjamin Voisin plays Meursault with an unsettling stillness — a man who feels neither compelled to lie nor capable of performing the emotions his world demands. Shot in luminous black-and-white, the film moves with the patient fatalism of the novel, building toward a beach, a gunshot, and a courtroom where indifference becomes its own kind of indictment. In colonial Algiers, a Frenchman who kills an Arab might escape consequence — but a Frenchman who refuses to mourn his mother, or explain himself, or pretend? That, apparently, is unforgivable.
Prince makes his feature film debut in this autobiographical blockbuster. Young musician The Kid channels personal turmoil into an electrifying sound that launches him to stardom. The Oscar and Grammy Award-winning film remains one of the most iconic music movies ever made.
A young prosecutor arrives at a remote Soviet prison camp expecting to find a simple case of bureaucratic error. What he finds instead is something far more systematic. Sergei Loznitsa's adaptation of Georgy Demidov's novella is a quiet, merciless film about the machinery of state terror, told through the eyes of a man idealistic enough to believe the system can correct itself, and the prisoners who know better.
Alfred Hitchcock's masterwork of suspense follows two strangers whose chance meeting on a train spirals into a deadly game of manipulation, murder, and moral entrapment.
With & Without: A Coral Story examines the spread of Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease and the effort to protect coral reefs.