Vino Vérité is back with a stunning acid-trip meditation on class and consumption in contemporary China. A true vérité feat from first-time feature filmmaker Jessica Kingdon, Ascension unfolds through keenly-observed vignettes, freed from narrative certainty, that together represent a climb up China’s social ladder and a descent into hedonistic consumerism.

Our first Vino Vérité of 2020 challenges our conceptions of observational documentary. The Ross Brothers fabricate an elegy to a Vegas dive bar from real world pieces populated by actual characters—eliciting authentic experience from creative construct.

Our fourth season continues with a high-stakes thrill ride through Mexico City’s wealthiest neighborhoods, where the Ochoa family runs a private ambulance, competing with other for-profit EMTs for patients in need of urgent help.

Our fourth season continues with our first selection filmed in Africa. Director Mo Scarpelli’s creative exploration of a 10-year-old boy-“a young lion”-coming of age in a quickly changing Ethiopia.

The first selection of our fourth season comes directly from its world premiere at SXSW to Iowa City. Director Rebecca Stern’s feature debut is a heartening and humorous look at the Technicolor world of championship creative dog grooming that casts new (rainbow-colored) light on our definitions of art.

The sixth selection of our third season is cinema poetry, a rich visual and sonorous ode to an agrarian lifestyle that is so close to us here in Iowa City, but is becoming increasingly distant – a vision from Belgium that is a beautiful reminder of our own local heritage.