Alexandra Strauss

Editor

Biography

No biography available.

Filmography

Exterminate All the Brutes

Hybrid docuseries offering an expansive exploration of the exploitative and genocidal aspects of European colonialism, from America to Africa, and its impact on society today.

7.2

Orwell: 2+2=5

George Orwell was one of the most visionary authors of the 20th century, whose novels 1984 and Animal Farm foretold a chilling, authoritarian future. Acclaimed director Raoul Peck interweaves clips, readings from Orwell's diary, cinematic references, and modern-day footage to craft not only a portrait of the writer, but a fresh take on how prophetic his work has become.

7.7

I Am Not Your Negro

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States.

6.8

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

7.1

You, the Living

In the Swedish city of Lethe, people from different walks of life take part in a series of short, deadpan vignettes that rush past. Some are just seconds long, none longer than a couple of minutes. A young woman remembers a fantasy honeymoon with a rock guitarist. A man awakes from a dream about bomber planes. A businessman boasts about success while being robbed by a pickpocket, and so on. The absurdist collection is accompanied by Dixieland jazz and similar music.

7.6

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

More than 60,000 of Ernest Cole’s 35mm film negatives were inexplicably discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Most considered these forever lost, especially the thousands of pictures he shot in the U.S. Told through Cole’s own writings, the stories of those closest to him, and the lens of his uncompromising work, the film is a reintroduction of a pivotal Black artist to a new generation and will unravel the mystery of his missing negatives.

6.6

If Only I Could Hibernate

Ulzii, a teenager from a poor neighborhood in Ulaanbaatar, is determined to win a sciences-physics competition to get a scholarship. His illiterate mother finds a job in the countryside, leaving him and his brother and sister in the middle of winter. Ulzii wanders around at night looking for things to burn for heat while preparing for the national competition.

7.2

Silver Dollar Road

The story of the Reels family who are valiantly attempting to protect the land their family bought one generation after slavery. This documentary, based on the 2019 ProPublica article, highlights the covert ways the legal system has been exploited to keep Black land ownership fragile and the racial wealth gap growing.

5.4

Parajanov

Film director Sergei Parajanov creates brilliant films. His nonconformist behavior conflicts with Soviet System. He is committed to prison for being eccentric. His indestructible love for beauty allows him to withstand the years of imprisonment, isolation and oblivion.

7.1

¡Las Sandinistas!

¡Las Sandinistas! uncovers the disappearing stories of women who shattered barriers to lead combat and social reform during Nicaragua’s 1979 Sandinista Revolution, and who continue to lead Nicaragua’s current struggle for democracy and equality.

6.0

Tomorrow Is a Long Time

Life is not the most fulfilling for sixteen-year-old Meng: Lounging at home with his grieving father on a daily basis, being excluded from his family’s past, and forced into bullying other kids at school. Everything changes when he is thrown into a life-altering adventure that propels him into an exciting unfamiliar landscape.

6.3

The Birth of Love

The unhappy love lives of Paul and Marcus, two artists and friends who are neither particularly young nor successful anymore.

6.0

Fatal Assistance

Haitian born filmmaker Raoul Peck takes us on a 2-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory and colossal rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti.

5.9

The Raft

In 1973, five men and six women drifted across the Atlantic on a raft as part of a scientific experiment exploring the origins of violence and sexual attraction. Nobody expected what ultimately took place on that 3-month journey. Through archive material and a reunion of the surviving members of the expedition, this film tells the hidden story of the project.

5.8

Lost in Armenia

Comedian Jean-Paul Bolzec has just performed in Azerbaijan. On the way back to the airport, the taxi breaks down. Bolzec is abandoned on a desert road. He crossed the border with Armenia, in latent war with Azerbaijan for years.

3.9

Murder in Pacot

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, a middle-aged Port-au-Prince couple come face to face with the stark contradictions of Haitian society when they are forced to rent out their villa to a foreign aid worker and his enterprising local girlfriend.

6.9

The Orphanage

A historic drama with musical Bollywood scenes. Kabul in the early 90s. Soviet values rule the country. Women can wear miniskirts, children can go to school and people can go to the cinema, concerts as well as universities. Life in Afghanistan is similar to life in the Western world. 14 years old Qodrat sells cinema tickets on the black market in the streets of Kabul. After selling a ticket to a secret police officer by mistake, he ends up at the Soviet orphanage, where he fakes his identity at the registration, in hope of getting more power. Everyday life for Qodrat is about friendships, falling in love, doing naughty things and going on adventures – just like it is for children in other parts of the world. However, behind the safe walls of the orphanage the world they once knew is drastically changing as the Mujahideens start the civil war.

6.4

Wolf and Sheep

In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.

6.2

Ouaga Girls

A group of young women from Ouagadougou study at a girl school to become auto mechanics. The classmates become their port of safety, joy and sisterhood, all while they are going through the life changing transition into becoming adults in a country boiling with political changes. In a country with youth unemployment at 52 percent, jobs are a hot issue. The young girls at a mechanics school in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou are right in the middle of a crucial point in life when their dreams, hopes and courage are confronted with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be. Using interesting narrative solutions, Theresa Traore Dahlberg depicts their last school years and at the same time succeeds in showing the country’s violent past and present. This is a feature-film debut and coming-of-age film with much warmth, laughs, heartbreak and depth.

6.6

The State Against Mandela and the Others

South Africa, July 11th, 1963. Several members of the African National Congress, an organization declared illegal, are arrested in Rivonia, a country house near Johannesburg. The detainees, along with Nelson Mandela, imprisoned since 1962, are charged with serious crimes for their radical activism against the apartheid regime.