Doc Watchers: Three Short Docs

Curated by Hellura Lyle

One of These Mornings

Valery Lyman, 2010, 17 min.

Realizing the feeling would be big as people went to vote for Obama, filmmaker Valery Lyman set up a phone line and asked folks to call right after they voted and say whatever was on their minds. Messages poured in from all over the country, and while it all still hung in the balance. This tapestry of incredibly moving messages narrates our journey from dawn til dusk, revealing a nation on the brink of transformation.

Weightless

Faith Pennick, 2010, 39 min.

Fat girls rule the water in this film about a scuba diving camp for plus-size women called Big Adventures. The camp was created by a psychologist and certified scuba diver & instructor who felt ostracized by other divers because of her size. Weightless depicts larger women as they are rarely seen, physically active and not consumed by the need or expectation to be thin.

Why Are They Here?

Yara Costa, 2010, 30 min.

A tiny village in Lesotho, an isolated island in Mozambique, the bustling capital of Ghana...poor Chinese immigrants come here hoping to thrive and prosper, but find themselves facing all kinds of obstacles - even death. This film takes a close look at three stories representing the most personal encounters between Africans and Chinese in the past ten years.