A pair of mesmerizing nonfiction films derive visual poetry from the relationship between the group and the individual. Filmed near the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China, Iyabo Kwayana’s short PRACTICE transforms a portrait of students engaged in martial arts training into an immersive, dazzlingly k...
The big city becomes a playground of imagination for two spirited girls in a pair of gently whimsical fantasias bursting with anarchic charm. With her trusted teddy bear in tow, a pint-sized pirate sets out to conquer the island of Manhattan in Josephine Decker’s enchantingly inventive DIY fairy ...
The macabre visual imagination of Spanish painter Francisco Goya provides the inspiration for two disturbing journeys into the nightmare realm. First, Jonathan Glazer takes viewers down a deep, dark, dizzying well in THE FALL, a frighteningly surreal vision of fascistic violence that was influenc...
Through evocatively grainy 16 mm visuals and unsettling sound design, Ashley McKenzie’s haunting short STRAY viscerally evokes the restless aimlessness of a young girl as she roams her desolate neighborhood in search of a feral cat. Its vérité vision of female alienation against a bleak industria...
The enduring fascination with Japanese samurai mythology extends across genres and borders in a katana-swinging classic and an innovative homage. Set in a dystopian future ravaged by climate change, French-Burkinabe director Cédric Ido’s HASAKI YA SUDA puts a fresh, Afrofuturist spin on the samur...
Two visions of love and longing among military men unfold amid lush, senses-stunning landscapes in these ravishing cinematic hallucinations. An island overrun by hydrangeas whose rich purple color seems to drip from each frame is the dreamily apocalyptic setting for a romance between two soldiers...
Let your imagination swim in the waters of two aqueous odysseys set in magical floating worlds. Inspired by the true story of the 1950 Red River flood that devastated much of Winnipeg, Canada, and its surroundings, Matthew Rankin’s short TABULA RASA envisions a town’s surreal resurrection through...
Mariama Diallo’s fiendishly subversive short HAIR WOLF blends horror and Blaxploitation tropes to satirize racism, gentrification, and cultural appropriation via the story of employees at a Black hair salon confronting a strange new monster: white women intent on literally sucking the lifeblood f...
Unravel the mysterious fates of two women whose road trips lead to unexpected destinations. Something of a blueprint for his acclaimed feature MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE, Sean Durkin’s enigmatic short MARY LAST SEEN follows a couple whose journey through upstate New York assumes increasingly sinist...
Traveling salesmen reckon with the void of contemporary existence in a supremely sinister short and a groundbreaking vérité documentary. Starring Michael Cera as a door-to-door knife salesman, Janicza Bravo’s MAN ROTS FROM THE HEAD follows its hapless protagonist through a series of increasingly ...
One cinematic dream weaver pays homage to another in these shimmering, fantastical journeys through the unconscious mind. With his meta-cinematic landmark 8½, Federico Fellini fully embraced a delirious, stream-of-consciousness style in the autobiographical tale of a creatively frustrated film di...
One of Ingmar Bergman’s most maligned films gets a playful, gender-swapped update courtesy of exuberant experimentalist Marie Losier. A box-office disaster upon its release, the Swedish titan’s first English-language feature THE TOUCH has been on a steady path to critical rehabilitation ever sinc...
Chance meetings between strangers spiral out of control in two chilling visions of racial violence and communication breakdown. First, a misunderstanding between three juveniles and an unstable man escalates past the point of no return in Montreal-based Ivorian-Ghananian filmmaker Will Niava’s in...
The life, music, and legend of Jimi Hendrix lives on in these tributes to his once-in-a-generation genius. Cosmic surrealist Terence Nance lets his imagination run riot in JIMI COULD HAVE FALLEN FROM THE SKY, a playful remythologizing of Hendrix’s origin story that adds a surprising sci-fi twist ...
Grab a pint and raise a glass to two intoxicating tales of alcoholic abandon set on the seamy side of British life. A bar in London’s Camden Town morphs into a den of iniquity in THE PUB, a shape-shifting nightmare animated in an expressionistic scrawl by Joseph Pierce. It’s a perfect aperitif to...
Intense, complex relationships between women play out against the dramatic landscapes of the Alps in these multilayered explorations of power dynamics and female intimacy. Isolated in a snowbound chalet, a teenage girl and her babysitter test the boundaries of their relationship in Mati Diop’s ps...
There’s no place like home for the holidays as two singularly imaginative auteurs capture the comedy and chaos of Christmastime family gatherings. First, Portuguese spellbinder Miguel Gomes takes a kaleidoscopic, kid’s-eye view of a rambunctious yuletide get-together in his delightfully cozy holi...
Experience some of the many dimensions of life in the Caribbean in two immersive voyages through its islands. DADLI, the 16 mm debut short from acclaimed cinematographer Shabier Kirchner (SMALL AXE), is a richly textured, observational portrait of street life in Antigua, the island where he grew ...
Life imitates art as a rising auteur pays homage to a landmark work by her uncle in this snapshot of Senegalese cinema past and present. In 1973, Djibril Diop Mambéty made a splash with TOUKI BOUKI, a brash, stylistically freewheeling tale of two young lovers attempting to scheme their way from D...
Two nuanced, emotionally raw queer romances get real about the intricacies of love, sex, and relationships. In Matthew Puccini’s sensitively observed, award-winning short DIRTY, a young couple’s relationship is put to the test as they navigate intimacy together for the first time. Its tender yet ...
These darkly atmospheric fairy tales stray into the forest to explore some of the primal anxieties of parents and children. Polish filmmaker Katarzyna Gondek’s hauntingly atmospheric DEER BOY tells the tale of a boy born with antlers, a misfortune that causes his mother and father feelings of sha...
Two jazz-inflected riffs by legendary American independent filmmakers make sweet music together in this double feature in double time. Charles Burnett’s charming short WHEN IT RAINS follows a trumpeter on a New Year’s Eve odyssey through Los Angeles as he attempts to save a mother from eviction, ...
Two fearless filmmakers turn the camera on themselves to explore loneliness, solitude, identity, sexuality, and the gaze within self-engineered confines of their own making. In THE AMATEURIST, Miranda July sets up an unsettling relationship between viewer and subject via an increasingly disturbin...
Radical minimalism is wielded with extraordinary power in the hands of two cinematic ascetics. Told entirely without spoken dialogue and exclusively though close-ups of its main character’s hands, Kazik Radwanski’s CUTAWAY uses the simplest of means to crate a piercing portrait of a construction ...
