Basil Tsiokos is a Senior Programmer for the Sundance Film Festival, focusing on nonfiction features. He was most recently with DOC NYC for nearly a decade, where he served as Director of Programming since 2014, and with the Nantucket Film Festival as its Film Program Director. Prior to those positions, Basil was the longtime Artistic and Executive Director of NewFest. He has been affiliated with Sundance since 2005 as a Programming Associate. Basil serves on the feature nominating committees for the International Documentary Association Awards and Cinema Eye Honors. He has written about documentaries daily since 2010 on what (not) to doc. Basil holds a Masters degree from New York University and two undergraduate degrees from Stanford University.
About: An exploration of the history of the Black cultural renaissance that existed in the Greenwood district of Tulsa OK, and the race massacre of late May and June 1921 that that left an indelible, though too-long ignored, stain on American history.
World Premiere: Human Rights Watch online preview (April-May 2021)
About: An examination of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on the 100th anniversary of the crime and in the context of other racial massacres and police killings.
About: An exploration of the complexity of the immigration debate through the stories of an undocumented Guatemalan teenager and a Cuban-American ICE agent.
The film screened as part of DOC NYC, for which our program notes read: After making the dangerous journey from his native Guatemala to New York City, 15-year-old Luis struggles to balance attending school and finding work to support his family back home. Meanwhile, Judy, a Cuban-American ICE agent, faces her own internal conflict with the shifting enforcement priorities of her longtime career, from targeting criminals to nonviolent undocumented individuals. As these two worlds near a collision, their parallel tales present a complex and nuanced take on both immigration and civic duty.
Select Festivals: New York, IDFA, Thessaloniki Doc, Docs Against Gravity, Busan, San Diego Asian
About: Three prominent Chinese authors create a tapestry of testimonies about the drastic changes in Chinese life and culture that began with the social revolution of the 1950s.