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 ...
From 1960s Paris to contemporary New York City, two women juggle careers, relationships, and personal crises over the course of days in which nothing—and everything—happens. Myna Joseph’s elegantly shot, Big Apple–set short FIT MODEL follows a thirtysomething freelancer who works as everything fr...
Do all dogs go to heaven? Two documentary filmmakers explore mortality and mourning through the experiences of pet owners. In PICKLE, Amy Nicholson profiles a couple of extreme animal lovers, interviewing them about the menagerie they’ve cared for and buried over the years, including paraplegic p...
In the 1930s, Mussolini’s fascist regime attempted to erase queer people from Italian society—but these powerful films have kept their stories alive. Paul Rowley’s award-winning short THE RED TREE unfolds in a wash of haunting, crimson-saturated images as it evokes the experiences of the gay men ...
Two Indian women yearn for fulfillment and struggle against patriarchal inequities in these subversive, visually sublime explorations of traditional gender expectations. Gorgeously attuned to the stirrings of the natural world, Sandhya Suri’s sensuous short THE FIELD immerses the viewer in the wo...
Thirty years after its release, the powerful, antiracist themes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Sirkian masterpiece ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL continue to resonate in an at once hard-hitting and poetic short. Shot with striking immediacy by a subjective camera, Shahbaz Noshir’s ANGST ISST SEELE AUF as...
These subtly radical tales of feminist awakening explore what it means to be an independent woman in Indian society. Reema Sengupta’s sharply observed short COUNTERFEIT KUNKOO follows a woman who has escaped an abusive marriage only to find herself facing deep-seated social prejudice as she strug...
Two legendary directors explore the human condition through the laughter and tears of a clown. Before he became famous for his minimalist-cool crime dramas, Jean-Pierre Melville made his directorial debut with the short 24 HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A CLOWN, a charming look at the behind-the-scenes wor...
The radical visions of two of modern dance’s most revolutionary choreographers are captured with lightning-in-a-bottle brilliance in this dynamic pairing. In NIGHT JOURNEY, the legendary Martha Graham stages and performs her powerfully physical interpretation of the Oedipus myth, directed by accl...
From Mumbai to Kolkata, filmmakers capture the rich social fabric of life in India’s bustling cities. In the hilariously deadpan short documentary TUNGRUS, an ornery pet rooster terrorizes a family in a cramped Mumbai apartment. It’s followed by Satyajit Ray’s masterful drama THE BIG CITY, which ...
Hit-and-run accidents set off shockwaves of guilt, paranoia, and recrimination in this gripping, psychologically charged pairing. Anna Mantzaris’s stingingly ironic stop-motion short GOOD INTENTIONS bristles with expressionistic unease as it evokes the torment that consumes a woman following a ca...
Drunken nights lead to encounters with the Grim Reaper—and, paradoxically, a chance at rebirth—in these tales of death and transfiguration. In Alan Holly’s animated phantasmagoria CODA, a brush with death begets not terror but a wondrous cosmic journey through the glories of life. Then, Death com...
Queer love and desire smolder behind bars in these unconventional holiday tales. Harry Lighton’s expectation-defying short WREN BOYS spins off in increasingly surprising directions as it unravels the relationships between an incarcerated man, his boyfriend on the outside, and an Irish Catholic pr...
With their emphasis on literate conversation and the romantic complications of the young and urbane, the films of French New Wave titan Eric Rohmer and New York indie darling Whit Stillman share a sophisticated spiritual connection. Starring a very young Jean-Luc Godard, Rohmer’s early short PRES...
Images of wonder and terror swirl beneath the Mexican sun in these delirious, alcohol-fueled fever dreams. Suzan Pitt’s wildly surreal animated short EL DOCTOR is an alternately morbid and miraculous magical-realist tour through a boozehound Mexican doctor’s last moments on earth, featuring a gar...
Something witchy this way comes in these sinister brews of satanism, black magic, and . . . baseball? Sean McCoy’s eerie occult exposé THE BEANING finds a diabolical conspiracy in the 1920 death-by-fastball of Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman. It casts its unholy spell in part through the ...
A pair of identical twins break away from each other in Lucy Knox’s character study, then Carlos Saura’s 1976 masterpiece double-casts Geraldine Chaplin in an allegorical drama about two generations of sisters.
Francisca Alegría’s award-winning short and Lucrecia Martel’s astonishing debut weave their mysteries in remote corners of Chile and Argentina, combining provincial lore with visionary technique.
In Adrian Sitaru's provocative satire, two filmmakers cite Nagisa Oshima's taboo-shattering classic as they try to convince a mother to let her daughter take the role of a sexually abused child.
Together again: Suzan Pitt’s psychosexual fantasia and David Lynch’s otherworldly debut were paired as a cult-favorite double bill on the midnight-movie circuit in 1979.
Norman McLaren’s hand-painted short film joins Oscar Peterson for a jam session, then Miles Davis lends Louis Malle’s proto–New Wave crime film an effortlessly cool counterpoint.
Caroline Monnet and Daniel Watchorn’s hallucinatory short uncovers the horrifying history of a Canadian infirmary for Native American children, and Carl Theodor Dreyer conjures a seventeenth-century town consumed by fear of witchcraft.
An experimental short film and a prescient blackmail drama offer stirring indictments of a shameful time in British history when the law forbade homosexuality.
Qiu Yang’s Cannes-award-winning short is inspired by a spate of disappearances in China, and Edward Yang’s sprawling epic draws on a shocking crime that took place in Taiwan.
