Directed by Carl Elsaesser • 2021 • United States

“Stretching and blurring the boundaries of video essay, experimental film, and home movie, traces of a 1950s homemade melodrama by amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin intermingle with a mournful homage to the author’s grandmother and her vacat...

Directed by Rajee Samarasinghe • 2022 • Sri Lanka, United States

“This footage was shot shortly after the civil war in Sri Lanka on the occasion of my mother’s long-delayed reunion with Kamala, the aunt she lived with as a child. Kamala was living a life of solitude at this point and has now sin...

Directed by blackANDwhite • 2007 • United States
Starring David Lynch

This 2007 feature-length film by blackANDwhite, the makers of DAVID LYNCH: THE ART LIFE, was made over the course of two years during the filming of INLAND EMPIRE.

Directed by Younes Ben Slimane • 2021 • France, Tunisia

At night, a stranger digs graves, buries the dead, and watches over them. In the dark, he reveals the personal belongings of the deceased to us. These objects, separated from their owners, bear their scars and story, while others melt until...

Directed by Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne • 2022 • United States
Starring Zakaria Almoutlak

A portrait of Zakaria Almoutlak, a sculptor and media activist from Homs, Syria, who fled the civil war in 2015.

Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • 2019 • Germany, Lesotho

Part poetic essay, part documentary, this rapturous film by director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION) analyzes the complexities of his relationship to his native country of Lesotho from his new hom...

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2001 • Iran
Starring Abbas Kiarostami, Seifollah Samadian

In 2000, Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS. Wo...

Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur • 2012 • India
Starring P. K. Nair, Krzysztof Zanussi, Lester James Peries

An engaging, heartfelt look at one man’s battle to preserve his nation’s cinematic heritage, CELLULOID MAN is an intimate portrait of legendary Indian archivist P. K. Nair, who founde...

Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur • 2018 • India
Starring Jiří Menzel, Antonín Máša, Dušan Hanák

This epic, indispensable work of cinema scholarship from archivist and filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is a remarkable, in-depth portrait of director Jiří Menzel (CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS) and ...

Directed by Nathaniel Kahn • 2003 • United States

Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974, was one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, but he left behind an illegitimate son, Nathaniel, and a personal life of secrets and broken promises. MY ARCHITECT takes us on a heartbreaking yet humo...

Directed by Jake Meginsky with Neil Young • 2018 • United States
Starring Milford Graves

This portrait of renowned percussionist and founding pioneer of avant-garde jazz Milford Graves finds him exploring his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity. The film draws the viewer through th...

Directed by Edward Bland • 1959 • United States
Starring George Waller, Dorothea Horton, Melinda Dillon

Featuring music by Sun Ra and his Arkestra, this landmark semi-documentary explores—via a heated conversation between a group of Black and white jazz aficionados—the relationship between jazz ...

Directed by Joyce Chopra • 1980 • United States
Starring Félix Blaska, Martha Clarke, Philip Grausman

Joyce Chopra traces one year in the artistic evolution of celebrated choreographer Martha Clarke, offering an intimate window into Clarke’s creative process as she sets out to redefine the bound...

Directed by Ed Lachman • 1990 • United Kingdom, United States
Starring Lou Reed, John Cale

Newly restored, this elegiac concert documentary captures the extraordinary 1990 reunion of estranged Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed and John Cale. The occasion for this landmark event was a live pe...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 1970 • United States

Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive sho...

Directed by Ira Deutchman • 2019 • United States
Starring Donald S. Rugoff, Elyce Bonnell, Peter Broderick

This illuminating, unexpected slice of forgotten film history tells the story of Donald Rugoff, who was the crazy genius behind Cinema 5, the groundbreaking midcentury theater chain and fil...

Directed by D. A. Pennebaker • 1970 • United States
Starring Stephen Sondheim, Elaine Stritch, Donna McKechnie

This legendary, long-unavailable documentary from Direct Cinema pioneer D. A. Pennebaker captures the behind-the-scenes drama that went into the making of a classic Broadway recording. ...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...

Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer • 1975 • United States

Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive relatives of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampt...

Directed by Martin Bell • 1984 • United States

Seattle, 1983. Taking their camera to the streets of what was supposedly America’s most livable city, filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall set out to tell the stories of those society had left behind: hom...

Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1985 • United States
Starring Ornette Coleman

This freewheeling documentary captures Ornette Coleman’s evolution over three decades. Documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music-video-style segments ever made chronicle his boyhood in segregated T...

Directed by Howard Brookner • 1983 • United States

Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs was for decades mainly the stuff of legend; that changed when Aaron Brook...

Directed by Barbara Kopple • 1976 • United States

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning HARLAN COUNTY USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikeb...

Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin • 1969 • United States

This radically influential portrait of American dreams and disillusionment from Direct Cinema pioneers David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin captures, with indelible humanity, the worlds of four ...