A scene from The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo . Photo by Michael Sedano     by Abel M. Salas Filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez still can’t take his eyes off the metropolis he calls home. If anything, his gaze has intensified, zeroing in on the untold paradigms of racial divide and the dynamics of difference that have long beleaguered Los Angeles, a city not yet completely comfortable with its Mexican soul. In the 14 years since the broadcast of Los Angeles Now —one of his earliest documentaries for PBS—an examination of the demographic shifts that signaled the “browning of America,” the now grey-bearded Angeleno has mined contemporary issues of race, identity and cultural diversity with increasing depth and intuitive foresight. This even as his lens, calibrated by an acute, erudite and humanist Latino perspective, has been artfully rotated toward the past. His recent focus on subjects culled from the period of social turmoil and political unrest that erupte...

By William Alexander Yankes Hooligan Sparrow, a documentary by debut filmmaker Nanfu Wang, takes its name from a well-known Chinese feminist and human rights activist who first gained notoriety when she offered to take the place of women being exploited as sex workers and provide the same services free of charge. Unconventional and daring, it was her way of drawing attention on their plight in a country where women’s rights are ignored or, worse, systematically trampled upon. In the film, Wang trains her camera on nine women, among them Ye Haiyan—source of the film’s title—that band together to protest the sexual abuse of six grade-school aged girls by their principal in 2013. ( Above: Filmmaker Nanfu Wang) Wang joins them in China’s Hainan Province where she and her subjects are followed, intimidated and threatened with bodily harm by government authorities when they take to the streets to demand justice for the six young victims and a legal sanction of their abuser. Her film, ...