Do you remember the last time you picked up a newspaper? Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those articles slapping you on the wrist for your avid internet-searching abilities and addiction to Twitter over reading a newspaper. Instead, think of the very first thing you focus on when you happen to pass a newsstand, coffee in hand. Is it the graphics? Or maybe you notice the text and name of the paper?

“I’m not really into wasting people’s time,” says director Brent Green, and he clearly proves it with Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, a film/live performance telling a couple of dreamers’ life back in the ’70s. This production, unique of its kind, takes the audience in another dimension, way beyond the usual borders of the world of documentary movies, where boredom and platitude remain unknown.

Someone in Sderot has something to say. Luckily Israeli director Robby Elmaliah decided to bring the message to the rest of the world with the film Hula & Natan. Like a bitter-sweet tale, Hula and Natan’s everyday routine takes us away from ours for a little while.

In 1987, two guys fresh out of college travel to San Francisco to begin the rest of their lives. Shortly after arriving in the city, Edward Guerriero and Mitch Deprey move into a pink, ramshackle apartment building that they promptly dub “The Pepto Bismol Palace”. Their shady new digs resemble a cheap motel, made out of “snot and cardboard.” They soon find out that their apartment isn’t the only thing that’s shady; their fellow tenants-next-door are men of questionable character.

The topic is trite: Write your own destiny. Insisting that people are the authors of their own future has been done — but not like this. To Be Heard presents three teenagers, who make up a slam poetry group, then peels back, layer-by-layer, exposing their innermost struggles and hardships through poetry. There is triumph, heartbreak and an underlying story of willpower and courage to control their own fates. The audience takes an emotional journey alongside the teenagers. Their battles are open wounds. The trio followed in this film deem themselves a tripod, and that is exactly the emotional connection their performance conveys.

Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, those cryptic words are a window into a life pleading for recognition yet thriving on anonymity.

When the two French filmmakers Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye first saw a group of paraplegics passionately playing and singing in the streets of Congo, they didn’t know the life-changing journey they were about to embark on. Five years later they are ready to tell their story, and the Missouri Theatre was the chosen place to unfold it in the United States for the first time.

This is not your typical director-grills-the-subject kind of documentary, and don’t expect to have the characters all figured out after watching Eric Brach’s Habana Muda. Brach, a self-proclaimed true documentary filmmaker, chose to leave the story of a contorted love triangle ambiguous to even the most insightful.

Cell phones are undoubtedly today’s primary means of technological communication, but they serve another, less acknowledged function too: funding the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They’ve become so engrained into daily life that they’re hardly given a second thought, but not for Frank Poulsen, director of Blood in the Mobile. Poulsen scrupulously explores every inch of the true basis of cellular communication: blood minerals.