For me, the film has been a chance to better understand a man and a world that I find complex, tragic and beautiful. It is the story of Mark Hogancamp, who, on April 8, 2000, was beaten nearly to death by five teenagers outside a bar in Kingston, New York. The attack left Mark with brain damage so severe that he was initially unable to talk, walk or eat. Making matters worse, he was left with few memories of his previous life. To begin the process of recovery, Mark built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard and populated it with dolls representing people from his real life. The town — “Marwencol” — helps Mark with his motor skills and allows him to work through his trauma in a safe environment. The photos Mark takes of his town are pure art: stunning displays of fear, rage, longing and love. When I first met Mark, he kept coming back to the same frustration - “No one understands.”

Away from professional stadiums, bright lights and manicured fields, there’s another side of soccer. Tucked away on back alleys and concrete courts, people play in improvised games. Every country has a different word for it. In the United States, we call it “pick-up soccer.” In Trinidad, it's "taking a sweat." In England, it's "having a kick-about." In Brazil, the word is “pelada,” which literally means "naked" — the game stripped down to its core. It’s the version of the game played by anyone, anywhere — and it’s a window into lives all around the world.
 
Pelada is a documentary following Luke and Gwendolyn, two former college soccer stars who didn’t make it to the pros. Missing the game, they quit their jobs and take off, chasing the global phenomenon that spans gender, race, religion and class. From prisoners in Bolivia to moonshine brewers in Kenya, from freestylers in China to women who play in hijab in Iran, “Pelada” is the story of the people who play.

The amount of action in a film with our budget was a constant challenge. We seldom had a stunt coordinator and we never had stunt performers, so it really fell on me and the actors and the camera team to figure out how to portray action truthfully. This can be pretty daunting for an inexperienced crew, but we took our time, shot two cameras to get as much coverage as possible, and really threw ourselves into it. I love the scene in Bobby’s kitchen when he’s just found out Nate lied to him. He reaches for Nate, and gets a hold of his neck before Owen pulls his arms away. This great moment only happened because they understood the stakes and committed entirely to the moment.

One significant benefit of working with students and recent graduates is the whole crew has not yet locked into their set career paths; many people were trying new jobs and having to expand their ability and knowledge, so there was always an energy of expansion and excitement.

In Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio, a design/build education program, students create striking architecture for impoverished communities in Alabama. Guided by frank, passionate interviews with Mockbee, “Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio” shows how a group of students use their creativity, ingenuity and compassion to craft a home for their charismatic, destitute client, Jimmie Lee Matthews. Known within the community as Music Man because of his obsessive passion for soul music, Jimmie Lee maintains a healthy zeal for life, blasting R&B from his collection of used stereos and boasting that he “ain’t never met a stranger!”

In following the progress of Music Man’s house, the film reveals that the Rural Studio is about more than architecture and building. Interviews with Mockbee’s peers and scenes with those he’s influenced infuse the film with a larger discussion of architecture’s role in issues of poverty, class, race, education, citizenship and social change.

The prophet of Jacques Audiard’s new film, “A Prophet” (“Un prophète”), isn’t a religious figure, the director explains. In fact, Audiard used “a” instead of “the” in the title to avoid that very connotation. Rather, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) “is a precursor of a new type of person,” the French director says via translator. “He’s a prototype, and that prototype is somebody who would be multicultural, multilingual, able to adapt to different social areas. A new individual.”

Malik is still a teenager when he’s sentenced to six years in prison. It’s while incarcerated that Malik gets an education and, perversely, makes something of himself, transforming into a criminal mastermind in his own right – one whom, like all of Audiard’s deeply flawed protagonists, we root for.

For this “new individual,” Audiard eschewed the familiar faces he’d worked with before, casting Rahim in his first starring role. “There’s something angelic in his look,” Audiard says of his lead actor.

“I was not prepared for the stonewalling we received from the food industry,” says the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary. “We approached many of the big food companies, often multiple times, asking them to participate in the film. I wanted them to argue the benefits of the industrial system and I wanted to understand their point of view, but, for the most part, the food industry said no. Being turned down, I started to move the film in a different direction. I became intrigued by why companies in the food industry would not speak to me about something as seemingly innocuous as food. What I discovered is that a handful of companies essentially control the food supply and exert tremendous power over what we eat and how much — or how little — we know about it. I was stunned by the lack of transparency, the intimidation of critics and the influence over government.”

The bog, that defining feature of Henrik Ruben Genz’s early years, plays a central role in the film, a character in its own right.

“The landscape, it’s so naked, so where do people hide the secret things?” he says. “You can’t hide anywhere. The things you don’t want to see or don’t want to be in contact with, you have to remove [them], so this bog is becoming a mythological place to put all the dirty things, the strange things, the unknown things – put [them] away down there. It’s a symbol of where we put our bad stuff, the things we don’t want to be confronted with.”

The landscape wasn’t Genz’s only connection to his hometown: The film is based on a book by Erling Jepsen, who lived on the same street as Genz when they were boys. Although both men ended up working in creative fields, it took a while for them to work together.

Chris Columbus couldn’t have tapped a more perfect screenwriter to adapt “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” than Craig Titley. The project, based on Rick Riordan’s bestselling 2005 novel, imagines that the Greek myths are real and sets them in present-day America — a kind of Harry Potter, but with gods instead of witches. Since working with Columbus on “Cheaper by the Dozen,” Titley had gone back to school to earn his Ph.D. in mythology.

Titley immediately responded to the story about a troubled kid (Logan Lerman) who discovers he’s actually the son of Poseidon (Kevin McKidd), god of the sea. When his mortal mother (Catherine Keener) is kidnapped by Hades (Steve Coogan), Percy vows to travel to the Underworld to rescue her. By his side are Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), daughter of Athena, and Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), a satyr charged as Percy’s protector. Meanwhile, Zeus (Sean Bean) discovers that his lightning bolt is missing and accuses Percy of stealing it.

Eight years ago, I found out slavery still exists. There is more slavery today than during the entire 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. I was so rattled by the thought of modern-day slavery that, when I had the opportunity to make a thesis film at USC, I wanted to move audiences just as I was moved; I wanted to make the most of my film by telling a good story, transporting the audience to a different world and raising awareness about an important issue.

After I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2001, I had a brief stint at National Geographic Traveler, where I first learned that slavery still exists. I began teaching at a boarding school in England and often shared with my students the reality of modern-day slavery. It wasn’t until film school that I finally had the chance to bring these statistics and issues to life in the story of a boy in India who just wants to play cricket and go to school but, instead, is forced to make bricks as a modern-day slave.

“Jim [Cameron] demanded and understood the importance of honest design,” says Neville Page, “Avatar” lead creature supervisor.

Page says he found the “Avatar” director to be knowledgeable on theoretical and applied sciences such as aerodynamics and hydrodynamics, and marveled that Cameron had even followed his interest in biology “to the ocean depths to look at bioluminescence.” All of which gave added weight to Cameron’s directive — after designs were bantered about among all the artists and he’d placed the banshee back on Page’s plate — that the final design be well thought-out.

Formidable fangs lining a heavy jawline on a cavernous maw make “Avatar’s” banshee an open-mouthed menace. But it had to make sense with its mouth closed, too. As if it were to be a living organism, Page considered its physical attributes: how it would swallow, perch, walk and fly; what it would eat (to justify its teeth); how it would breathe “in a new way that would be biologically viable.”