Alis

In this powerful and sympathetic documentary set at a Bogotán group home for impoverished girls, ten of their residents are asked to invent a classmate their age (named “Alis”) and tell stories about her, hoping it will help them work through their own troubled pasts as well as their hopes for the future. —M.G.

With their families unable to care for them, and with nowhere else to go, a group of female and genderqueer teenagers reside in a shelter in Bogota, Colombia. Asked by the filmmakers to create a backstory for an imaginary classmate, ALIS, each of them are faced with a series of questions about Alis’s life. Although Alis’s story looks a little different based on who the shifting storyteller is, there are heartfelt throughlines of loss, loneliness, hardship, love, and hope. In this moving collective portrait documentary, what begins as an awkward experiment, transforms into a catalyst for these young dreamers to share some very difficult truths, and to imagine a brighter future. —G.S.