The New School Summer Streaming List
Looking for new movies to add to your watch list? Alumni and faculty media makers have created insightful documentaries, compelling dramas, and experimental works to inspire, inform, challenge, and entertain everyone. From the cultural investigations of Disclosure, O.J.: Made in America, and Decade of Fire, to the blockbuster Harriet, and the personal explorations of The Cancer Journals Revisited and Dear Pyongjang, these directors, producers, and editors have made engaging works to entertain you at home.
Films by Alumni
Dear Jesse
Directed by Tim Kirkman, MA Media Studies ’97
Available on Amazon
Foreshadowing the Trump era, Dear Jesse is a gay filmmaker’s “letter” to anti-gay senator Jesse Helms. Shot during his final senate campaign, the film features Helms fans and foes, plus an interview with Matthew Shepard, the gay college student whose murder in Laramie, Wyoming, called attention to antigay violence.
Dear Pyongjang
Directed by Yang Yong-Hi, MA Media Studies
Available on Kanopy
A young girl’s father sends her three brothers from Japan to live permanently in a homeland foreign to them — North Korea. In this autobiographical documentary spanning ten years, a daughter — filmmaker Yonghi Yang — struggles to understand why her loving father would, out of political loyalty, send his three sons to an isolated and enigmatic regime.
Disclosure
Directed by Sam Feder, MA Media Studies ’04
Available on Netflix
Disclosure is an unprecedented, eye-opening look at transgender depictions in film and television, revealing how Hollywood simultaneously reflects and manufactures our deepest anxieties about gender. Leading trans thinkers and creatives, including Laverne Cox, Lilly Wachowski, Yance Ford, Mj Rodriguez, Jamie Clayton, and Chaz Bono, share their reactions and resistance to some of Hollywood’s most beloved moments. Grappling with films like A Florida Enchantment (1914), Dog Day Afternoon, The Crying Game, and Boys Don’t Cry, and with shows like The Jeffersons, The L-Word, and Pose, they trace a history that is at once dehumanizing, yet also evolving, complex, and sometimes humorous.
Harriet
Directed by Kasi Lemmons, New School for Social Research
Available on iTunes and Amazon
Harriet tells the extraordinary tale of freedom fighter Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and transformation into one of America’s greatest heroes. Haunted by memories of those she left behind, Harriet (Cynthia Erivo) ventures back into dangerous territory on a mission to lead others to freedom. With allies like abolitionist William Still (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and the entrepreneurial Marie Buchanon (Janelle Monáe), Harriet risks capture and death to guide hundreds to safety as one of the most prominent conductors of the Underground Railroad.
O.J.: Made in America
Edited by Maya Mumma, MA Media Studies ’09
Available on ESPN+, Disney+
Through interviews, news footage, and archival audio and video, O.J.: Made in America traces the life and career of O. J. Simpson, starting with his arrival at the University of Southern California as an emerging football superstar and ending with his incarceration in 2007 for robbery. Throughout the documentary, Simpson’s life – the football success, television career, relationship with Nicole Brown, the domestic abuse, Nicole and Ron Goldman’s murder, the trial – runs parallel to the larger narrative of the city of Los Angeles, which serves as host to mounting racial tensions, and a volatile relationship between the city’s police department and the African American community.
Films by Faculty
Bourek
Directed by Vladan Nikolic, Dean of the School of Media Studies and Associate Dean of the Schools of Public Engagement
Available on Amazon
In this humanistic comedy, set against the backdrop of economic crises and bad news, an extravagant international cast of characters meet, fight, and fall in love, while hiding from the end of the world and other calamities on the tiny Greek island of Khronos. Each one of them discovers something or someone that gives new meaning to their lives, helped in no small part by the food they share, especially the Mediterranean pastry Bourek.
Dark Night
Directed by Tim Sutton, Schools of Public Engagement Faculty
Available on Amazon
Dark Night enigmatically unfolds over the course of a lazy summer day, as it traces the events leading up to a mass shooting in a suburban multiplex. Abandoning the narrative confines of the true crime genre, the story is told through fragmented moments from the lives of several characters, whose fates are tragically intertwined. As the sky grows darker, the placid surface of daily life becomes disturbed by a lurking and inevitable horror.
Decade of Fire
Produced by Neyda Martinez, Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Media Management
Viewing information available here
Through a rich seam of archival and home movie footage, Decade of Fire confronts the racially-charged stereotypes that dehumanized residents of the South Bronx in the 1970’s, and rationalized their abandonment by city, state and federal governments. Through exposing the history, and lifting up the stories of survivors whose deep commitment to their homes and communities saved the borough, Decade of Fire offers the emergence of a new narrative for the South Bronx and places like it across the nation.
Hot House
Directed by Shimon Dotan, Schools of Public Engagement Assistant Professor
Available on Amazon
Granted extraordinary access to the highest security institutions in Israel, filmmaker Shimon Dotan explores the lives of Palestinian inmates. What emerges is a glimpse of prisoners as informed thinkers, forging political alliances and making decisions that impact far beyond the prison’s walls.
Love Hunter
Co-directed by Branislav Bala, Schools of Public Engagement Faculty
Available on Amazon
In the 1990’s, singer-songwriter Milan Mumin, the lead singer of the hugely influential Serbian rock band, Love Hunters, electrified and gave voice to a generation of Serbians fighting an oppressive regime. Now, after ten years, we find Milan in New York City, driving a taxi (long shifts and loopy fares), cobbling together funds for a recording session of his dream album–to be recorded and released in America.
The Cancer Journals Revisited
Directed by Lana Lin, Associate Professor of Film Theory and Digital Cinema
Watch the trailer on Vimeo
The Cancer Journals Revisited is prompted by the question of what it means to re-visit and re-vision Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 memoir of her breast cancer experience today. At the request of the filmmaker, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, twenty-seven writers, artists, activists, health care advocates, and current and former patients recite Lorde’s manifesto aloud on camera, collectively dramatizing it and producing an oration for the screen. The film is both a critical commentary and a poetic reflection upon the precarious conditions of survival within the intimate and politicized public sphere of illness.