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London-based international documentary sales and production outfit Dogwoof has unveiled the trailer for “I Am Martin Parr,” ahead of its world premiere Thursday at the Rome Film Festival.

The documentary, from director Lee Shulman, is a portrait of photographer Martin Parr, who revolutionized contemporary photography by “inventing a political‚ humanist and accessible photographic language,” Dogwoof said.

The film, which features contributors such as artist Grayson Perry and musician Mark Bedford, charts the maverick behind some of the most iconic images of the past century on a road trip across England with Parr.

Commenting on his approach, Parr says: “A good photo is one that tells a story with an energy that attracts the viewer. Being a photographer means knowing how to choose an image. It’s not something that can be theorized. If I had found the perfect formula, perhaps I wouldn’t still be here taking photographs.”

In a statement,...

It’s hard to disregard the “easy living” motif that covers the 10-year-old Furkan Demiri’s bed sheets in Dea Gjinovci’s “Wake Up on Mars.” The heartbreaking irony of the phrase stings, as there is nothing easy about this imaginative child’s life, brought to a halt amid endless immigration machinations in a frosty Swedish town. But citizenship status isn’t the only painful impediment that puts Furkan’s six-member, asylum-seeking Kosavan family in uncertainty.

Gjinovci’s compassionate yet slightly muddled documentary debut lays bare that two of Furkan’s siblings, Ibadeta and Djeneta, have been living in a coma-esque vegetative state for years, after falling ill with a mysterious disease called “the resignation syndrome,” a sleep-like shutdown of the body that apparently affects nearly 200 shell-shocked immigrant children living with fears of deportation each year.

While the tight-knit, caring Demiri family, led by loving parents Muharrem and Nurje, struggles...

Whether it’s Pan’s Labyrinth or Where the Wild Things Are or The Fall, the narrative side of cinema is rich with stories of children escaping a harsh reality through dreaming up a fantastical world in which they are able to conquer fears they are not able to grasp in their day-to-day life. When it comes to the field of documentary, these harsh realities are often only captured for what they are, usually with a sobering immediacy and authentic immersion. Wake Up on Mars, an empathetic, imaginative new refugee documentary from director Dea Gjinovci, seeks to bridge this gap, capturing both a heartbreaking portrait of family and one child’s bold dreams of visiting another world to escape the suffering around him.

In 2007, the Demiri family fled a post-war Kosovo after being attacked for their Romani ethnicity and came to Sweden, only to be deported three years later. They were...

Ten-year-old Furkhan would like to travel to Mars. Pluto, too, but the whip-smart kid knows that’s a bigger gamble: After all, he’d be nearly 100 by the time he arrived on that distant sorta planet. As Furkhan dreams of escaping his current existence — living in a close-knit refugee community in Sweden, his old life in Kosovo never far from his mind or heart — he surreptitiously begins to build a spaceship from spare parts. Eventually, he crafts a dizzying vehicle that looks more like an art installation (and not the sort of thing that even a clever kid like Furkhan could build on his own) and starts dreaming of the red planet, telling his family about red dirt-covered adventures that have already appeared on screen.

It sounds like the makings of a sweet coming-of-age tale, an inventive outing about big imaginations and even bigger dreams, but it’s hardly the whole story.