A newly-single mother is forced out of her home, as a rival family brutally beats her, and murders her husband. Displaced, she flees to unfamiliar territory, homeless and barely able to watch over her three young children. Her efforts to put food on the table for her family are blocked at every turn by the hulking, scarfaced leader of a band of thugs who like to hang out near the area where she's tried to stake out a hideaway. Meanwhile, that rival family, led by a half-blind silver-eyed matriarch, continues to stalk her and her children, intent on wiping them out entirely. The mother must somehow run all of these gauntlets and either learn to survive on her own or manage to get accepted into that rival family if she has any hope of raising her children.

That may sound like the pitch for a pretty intense crime thriller, or an intimate gangster piece about warring mob families. Believe it or not, it's actually the basic outline of the conservation-minded nature documentary, The Last Lions. more ›

Drama lovers, a word: Here in the lavishly appointed ahr-eee Theater cubicle of DCist’s state-of-the-art underground headquarters, we have what you call an ethos. For us, casting arbitrary, semi-informed judgment on the bustling stage traffic of Our Nation’s Capitol is about a lot more than just getting free tickets to the latest hot offering from reliable companies like Catalyst or Solas Nua or Rorschach. No, here at DCist, we’re all about standing up for the little guy; the scrappy innovator, the lonely torch-bearer of the avant garde, the little-shows-that-could -- and just might! -- if only they can find a sympathetic critic to champion them. more ›

It sounds like — if you’ll pardon the expression — something out of a movie: Junior Middleweight Champion fighter Kassim “The Dream” Ouma escapes the darkest of pasts to find his way from Africa to America, arrives penniless and unable to speak English, and within a year he’s a professional fighter with a surrogate family, money in his pockets, and a smile on his face that makes you like him before you know anything about him. more ›