Each year the legendary Flaherty Film Seminar invites participants to reconsider their understanding of cinema through a rigorous program of thought-provoking, boundary-breaking works organized around a salient theme. Taking the notion of “Opacity”—defined as that which cannot be reduced by the d...

Heralded by Martin Scorsese as “an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet,” Italian director Vittorio De Seta produced a string of extraordinary short documentaries in the 1950s that distill their subjects to pure cinema. Shooting in vivid color in the rural villages of Sicily, Sardin...

In 1994, Marlon Riggs died from AIDS at the tragically young age of thirty-seven. Riggs’s untimely passing robbed the world of an artist of uncommon vision and empathy, but not of his work’s ability to galvanize and inspire future generations. This program comprises a selection of stylistically a...

Themes of teenage rebellion and fraught family dynamics run through these early shorts by groundbreaking directors Sofia Coppola, Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, Jane Campion, and Andrea Arnold.

There was cinema before the French New Wave, and there was cinema after. The explosion of creative innovation that emanated from France in the late 1950s and early ’60s forever altered the course of film history by opening up new avenues of stylistic experimentation and trumpeting the concept of ...

Hailed for her vibrant explorations of culture clash and connection in films like MONSOON WEDDING and MISSISSIPPI MASALA, Indian American auteur Mira Nair has pursued an equally distinguished career as a director of short films that further explore the ways in which deep-rooted cultural tradition...

With her brilliant feature debut, NANNY—winner of the 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize—garnering acclaim, now is the perfect time to discover the smartly stylish short films of writer-director Nikyatu Jusu. By turns irreverent, provocative, powerful, and unsettling, these films—all centered on comp...

Spare a New York minute for these Big Apple–set shorts that unspool in less time than it takes a 1 train to get from the Bronx to Battery Park. Ranging from eyeball-whirling abstract experiments by D. A. Pennebaker (DAYBREAK EXPRESS) and Shirley Clarke (BRIDGES-GO-ROUND) to deeply personal autobi...

The foremost pioneer of silhouette animation, German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger brought enchanting storybook worlds to life through her intricate cutouts and groundbreaking use of a proto-multiplane camera that she developed a decade before the technique was made famous by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks...

The sights and sounds, hustle and bustle of the modern metropolis have long inspired filmmakers to develop a corresponding cinematic language to capture its frenetic energy. From the dizzying head-rush of Manhattan as seen through the kaleidoscopic lenses of D. A. Pennebaker and Hollis Frampton t...