The daring experimenter Dr. John C. Lilly dedicated his life to radical self-investigation and unlocking the mysteries of consciousness and communication. “My body is my laboratory” was the motto, and his research on the language of dolphins and whales – as well as psychedelics and sensory deprivation – assured his own cult status in 20th-century pop culture as the basis for Ken Russel’s Altered States and Mike Nichols’s The Day of the Dolphin. Directors Michael Almareyda and Courtney Stephens, along with narrator Chloë Sevigny, explore the life of a determined scientist and his experiments into the psychonautical unknown.

In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s sudden death, his daughter inherits his patent for an experimental healing device. Featuring archives from Callie Hernandez's late father, Invention explores the process of grieving a complicated parent, and the filmmaking itself becomes a part of the process.

It’s difficult to imagine now, but a hundred years ago great areas of the world were still terra incognita for most people. Long-distance travel was the exclusive preserve of well-to-do adventurers, most of them male. The arrival of lightweight film cameras unlocked the globe for anyone who could afford a cinema ticket. This stunningly beautiful found-footage film comprises edited scenes shot by inquisitive women who travelled the world in the first half of the last century—women such as Mrs. Dixon, a widow from Philadelphia, crossing into the arctic circle on a pleasure cruise. She shot the crystal-clear footage of lightly dressed people slithering across an icy plain against an imposing backdrop of snow-covered mountains. As part of IDFA onstage, filmmaker Courtney Stephens will perform her accompanying narration live, in the style of an illustrated travel lecture from that time period. In her text, she raises questions about what these filmmakers were actually seeing.

The American Sector is a film about panels of the Berlin Wall scattered across the United States. It captures how monuments to our country's past resonate into the present.