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Before the Fire is a tense and personal portrait of life during a pandemic for our heroine, Ava. It is currently available to rent from the FACETS Virtual Cinema until August 27.  In March, when the COVID-19 induced stay-at-home orders began, two distinct groups of people emerged: those who watched Contagion immediately, and those who avoided it like the plague (pun intended).  Other pandemic films came before it, sure, but Steven Soderbergh’s meticulous 2011 epic seems to have eerily predicted the coronavirus pandemic about a decade in advance, leading to its go-to status for many Americans. It explores the global political implications

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Sunless Shadows shows, in intimate detail, the daily lives and struggles of young Iranian women in a juvenile detention center who have been convicted of murdering older male relatives. You can rent this poignant documentary from the FACETS Virtual Cinema until 8/20. Every young woman’s story in Sunless Shadow has the same heartbreaking cause, domestic violence. Filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei’s deft touch with such sensitive subject matter is handled with the utmost care, as the voyeuristic details that are the bedrock of many crime documentaries are not included.  The film follows the inmates through their daily lives, which often includes video letters to