Talking about our globalized times. SIFF

7 p.m. at Pacific Place (Westlake Station), Marzia, My Friend:

This is a different kind of edge-of-your-seat movie. It’s a tragedy in slow, inexorable motion. You lean forward, hold your head in your hands, mutter, “No.” And so does the director. But intervention is impossible, a feeling embodied by the director, Kirsi Mattila, the Finnish documentarian who follows four years in the life of Marzia, the hopeful Afghan TV journalist. Incremental step by incremental step, Marzia falls deeper and deeper. Her choices narrow. She is threatened with death and acid. She goes from feisty, educated, 19-year-old working woman with a fiancé who supports her drive to work, to unemployed married shut-in with a husband who sometimes hits her (it’s only when he can’t figure out how to express himself, she explains) and a daughter that Marzia knows she won’t be able to do any better for. She may as well be an illiterate woman, she tells Kirsi, because she never leaves home anymore. Every night on TV, she watches her husband. He’s the journalist she wanted to be. Kirsi’s documentary is a love letter to Marzia, with a voiceover script full of sorrow and a rising acknowledgement of outsider naivete. “I don’t understand,” Marzia, a free, working woman, tells Kirsi at one point. It’s an embarrassing admission. There’s nothing to understand, only to mourn. (JEN GRAVES)

This film, by the way, is one of three documentaries in the festival that I think deserve a conversation over drinks. Marzia, My Friend, like the other two films (Presenting Princess Shaw and Sonita), shows how there is much more to globalization than just trade or the movement of money. We now have feelings and experiences that have been globalized. My thinking is that if we on the left are to establish a global democracy that can counter neoliberal globalization, we need to start making sense of and connect the kinds of stories we find in these documentaries. The conversation will begin at 6:30 p.m., end at 8 p.m., and happen tomorrow, June 8, at Vermillion Art Gallery, which is a five-minute walk from Capitol Hill Station. Join me if you can.

9 p.m. at the Ark Lodge Cinema (Columbia Street Station), The Black Hen

Two boys in 2001 Nepal try to find a beloved pet chicken as their life swirls around them, upended by a Maoist insurgency. The film’s centerpiece is the frustration and despair of war as experienced by blameless, uninvolved children. Balancing political depictions and commentary with the innocence of childhood, The Black Hen is an unassuming and powerful drama. (JULIA RABAN)