Miami International Film Festival from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

With the foundation’s roots in journalism, Knight believes in the power of storytelling to bring communities together. Over the past few years, we’ve watched independent filmmakers in the communities where we work engage audiences across the globe. Their stories are told in voices that could only come from their corner of the world, and yet these narratives speak to audiences thousands of miles away. Therein lies the power of cinema, where a story told authentically can resonate universally.

Knight supports the Miami International Film Festival for this very reason. By giving a platform to filmmakers from around the world, the festival brings Miami audiences the stories that connect them to their own community and to each other. This connection is echoed in the films nominated for the festival’s Knight Competition and Knight Documentary awards.

The festival has announced a powerhouse line-up of ten films competing in the Knight Competition, which consists of dramatic works from Latin America, Spain and Portugal, as well as Latino-themed works produced in the U.S.  The list includes  “To Kill a Man” – which took home the Grand Jury Prize for Best World Drama at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The Knight Documentary Competition boasts its own compelling line-up, including the North American Premiere of “The Art Rush,” a critical look at the contemporary art market that features Miami art collectors Don and Mera Rubell. The full list is below.

The 2014 festival takes place March 7-16. We hope you get a chance to see and enjoy these great films.

By Nicole Chipi, arts associate at Knight Foundation

Knight Competition

All About the Feathers (Costa Rica): A loner security guard buys a fighting rooster so he can enter illegal cockfights, though the feathered pal attracts an assortment of oddball characters in this comedy of fate and friendship.

Asteroid (Mexico): After seven years, Cristina returns to her childhood home – left to her older brother Mauricio by their deceased parents. The siblings struggle to find their footing and someone they can each count on.

Club Sandwich (Mexico): Droll comedy of a single mother whose 15-year-old son is her best friend and must face his inevitable departure from the nest when a girl his own age piques his interest.

The Man of the Crowd (Brazil): Both Juvenal and Margo live in a state of isolation, despite residing in a bustling urban center. Each manages to find comfort in peculiar ways, in this adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story.

Memories of the Desert (Brazil, Chile): Antonio, a 28-year-old novelist in Rio, hitchhikes to Chile’s Atacama desert to write an erotic tale and inadvertently becomes “involved” in a murder.

Natural Sciences (Argentina): Twelve-year-old Lila enlists her boarding school teacher as a companion on an emotional journey to track down the biological father she has never known.

Septimo (Spain, Argentina): A tense, classical kidnapping thriller that exposes Buenos Aires’ edgy crime underbelly.

To Kill a Man (Chile, France): Jorge, a middle-class family man, is the target of menacing street thugs in this rugged thriller, where the law of human instinct stands in sharp contrast to man-made laws of right and wrong.

We All Want What’s Best for Her (Spain): A car crash leaves Geni disillusioned with her domestic and professional world in Catalonia, causing her to rethink everything she thought she wanted from life.

A Wolf at the Door (Brazil): A complicated love triangle, police intrigue, shocking drama and edge-of-your-seat suspense are intermingled in this fact-based story of the disappearance of a young girl in suburban Rio.

Knight Documentary Competition

The Art Rush (France): As the contemporary art market is dominated by speculative billionaire collectors, long-view professionals such as Don and Mera Rubell hold steady to a sense of artistic merit.

The Dog (USA): Forty years after the attempted Brooklyn bank heist that inspired the film Dog Day Afternoon, John “The Dog” Wojtowicz sheds new light on his “romantic” reasons behind the crime.

Supermensch – the Leg – End of Shep Gordon (USA): Marking his directorial debut, Mike Myers takes us behind the scenes into the fast-lane life of legendary impresario Shep Gordon, who influenced the careers of many celebrities.

Europe in 8 Bits (Spain): Party your way through the world of chip music, a new electronic musical trend which reuses outdated technology from ’80s videogame hardware in amazingly creative ways.

Finding Vivian Maier (USA): The secret life of the late Vivian Maier, a career nanny whose unknown cache of 100,000 pictures earned her posthumous recognition as one of America’s most proficient and insightful street photographers.

Ivory Tower (USA) A debate on the cost and value of higher education in the U.S. that asks: Is college really worth it?

Locations: Looking for Rusty James (Chile): A cinephile essay on the enormous impact of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film Rumble Fish has on a generation in Latin America, exploring their inspirations and effects of a particular cultural phenomenon.

The Notorious Mr. Bout (USA, Russia): Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in a U.S. prison, portrayed as a serious villain, but unprecedented new footage reveals a family and businessman with a more complex story.

The Overnighters (USA): Pastor Jay Reinke opens his church to a group of men living under the hopeless shadow of recession – an act of compassion that risks his livelihood and brings heavy consequences.

Whitey: United States of America V. James J. Bulger (USA): Shocking expose of the FBI’s possible complicity in allowing infamous gangster James “Whitey” Bulger to control a criminal empire for decades.