Directed by Sam Katz and James McGovern
Winner
Once heralded as the spirit of American manufacturing, music, and democracy, Detroit kicked its fiscal can down the road for decades plummeting into insolvency, culminating in the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY is the inside story of how a state-appointed Emergency Manager and the people of this iconic American city– confronting financial ruin–followed a treacherous path towards a new beginning.

Directed by Julie Ha and Eugene Yi
Runner-up
After a Korean immigrant is wrongly convicted of a 1973 San Francisco Chinatown gang murder, Asian Americans unite as never before to free Chol Soo Lee. A former street hustler becomes the symbol for a landmark movement. But once out, he self-destructs, threatening the movement’s legacy and the man himself.

Directed by Marc Shaffer
Finalist
Brilliant, ambitious and mischievous, the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s breakthrough photographs of running horses set the course for the development of cinema and transformed the camera into a machine of unmatched perception and persuasion. But hiding in Muybridge’s work are clues that provoke an enduring question: Can we believe what we see in a photograph?

Directed by Greta Schiller
Finalist
THE FIVE DEMANDS tells the story of the 1969 student strike at the City College of New York that changed the face of higher education. While the late Sixties are known as an era of student activism, largely by white, middle-class students against the war in Vietnam, these Black and Puerto Rican students were at the vanguard of a little-known national Black student movement that transformed the culture, mission, and curriculum of higher education.