7.6
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 the Czechoslovak New Wave that he helped forge. Featuring extensive interviews with Menzel and compatriots like Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jan Němec, and Ivan Passer, CZECHMATE is a deeply personal tribute to a singular artist and an illuminating look at the turbulent social and political circumstances that gave rise to one of the most explosive creative movements in all of cinema history.
6.9
A dystopian plunge into an enormous Moroccan dog shelter teeming with hundreds of strays doubles as a haunting commentary on poverty and the plight of refugees.
6.6
Traversing New York City, a dancer seeks freedom and peace through movement.
7.3
When Paul Okpokam arrived in the U.S. in 1968, David Schickele decided to make a film about his Nigerian friend’s experience of coming to teach at San Francisco State College. Entering American society in a time of cultural upheaval and racial tension, Okpokam is seen by others through the prism of American racism and exoticism. Truth is stranger than fiction in BUSHMAN, a rare sort of film portrait, part document, part imagined, and poetic in its approach to real events.
6
A young woman grapples with the declining health of her beloved dog in this film about mortality, cloning, and Barbra Streisand.
7
Yussuf Mume Saleh journeys nightly into the outskirts of the walled city of Harar to bond with his beloved hyenas, a ritual he has practiced for over thirty-five years. Shot in black and white, HAIRAT is a meditation on this uniquely symbiotic relationship between man and wild beast.
6.4
Ghostly images of Colombia’s jungle landscapes are set to radio transmissions sent by family members to their kidnapped loved ones—heartrending messages of grief, support, and, against all odds, hope.
6.8
In the Florida Everglades, rabbit hunting is considered a rite of passage for young men. THE RABBIT HUNT follows seventeen-year-old Chris and his family as they hunt in the fields of the largest industrial sugar farms in the U.S. The film records a tradition by which migrant farm workers in the communities surrounding Lake Okeechobee have been hunting and preparing rabbits since the early 1900s.
6.5
In 2017, Jessica Beshir directed this short film about a portrait painter whose sole subject is his ex-wife.
7.8
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director’s own brilliant career. At once impish and wise, Varda acts as our spirit guide on a free-associative tour through her six-decade artistic journey, shedding new light on her films, photography, and recent installation works while offering her one-of-a-kind reflections on everything from filmmaking to feminism to aging. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved—Jacques Demy, cats, colors, beaches, heart-shaped potatoes—the wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography VARDA BY AGNÈS is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema’s most luminous talents.
6.6
Devils in the outfield! Steeped in occult dread, this experimental documentary uncovers a sinister conspiracy theory surrounding the death of Cleveland baseball player Ray Chapman, who was killed by a ball thrown by Yankees pitcher Carl Mays in 1920.
6.1
An audio-visual collage looking at 100 years of Hollywood representation of Hawai'i.
6.9
In 2016, Jessica Beshir directed this short film about Fred Nelson, a man she met in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park who tap-dances every day on a worn piece of wood.
7.1
This heartfelt tribute to the little studio that could charts the unlikely rise of HandMade Films—the independent producer/distributor that revitalized the 1980s British film industry with its idiosyncratic, auteur-driven ethos—through the eyes of filmmakers, key personnel, and the man who started it all: former Beatle George Harrison. Through unseen archival footage of Harrison and interviews with the artists he championed like Terry Gilliam and Bob Hoskins, AN ACCIDENTAL STUDIO explores HandMade’s baptism by fire, the risks it took in producing uniquely crafted and intelligent films, and the stories that grew up around it.
7.5
This 2019 documentary by Marilyn Ann Moss, based on her book “Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director,” provides an overview of Walsh’s career, from his work as an actor in silent cinema to the over two hundred films he directed, into the 1960s. It includes excerpts from Walsh’s memoir and interviews with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich; actors Illeana Douglas, Jane Russell, and Jack Larson; media historian Norman Klein; and film critic Leonard Maltin.
7.3
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 the artist’s lush garden and ornate home, into the martial arts dojo in his backyard and the laboratory in his basement—all just blocks from where he grew up in the housing projects of South Jamaica, Queens. Graves tells stories of discovery, struggle, and survival, ruminates on the essence of “swing,” activates electronic stethoscopes in his basement lab to process the sound of his heart, and travels to Japan to perform at a school for children with autism. Oscillating from present to past and weaving intimate glimpses of the artist’s complex cosmology with blistering performances, MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS is cinema full of fluidity, polyrhythm, and intensity, embodying the essence of Graves’s music.
5.5
A voiceless narrator rehashes details about his mother’s affair as he crosses the United States by train. “Mama has two phone numbers. We do not talk about immigration on her Obama phone. For that we use the other number with no data plan.” The linear train ride moving from Los Angeles to New York diverges into unruly directions of consciousness. A multiplicity of voices share thoughts, dreams and histories evoking images far away from the enclosed spaces of this trains interior. While capturing these landscapes and interiors through his lens, the moving images evidently illustrate an undocumented subjectivity, a site of precarious movement, migration and fugitivism in the US.
8.1
Jimi Hendrix arrived in California virtually unknown. Returning stateside from London, where he had moved to launch his musical career, Hendrix exploded at Monterey, flooring an unsuspecting audience with his maniacal six-string pyrotechnics. JIMI PLAYS MONTEREY features the entire set of this legendary musician, a performance that has entered rock-and-roll mythology.
6.2
The filmmaker travels home to Hawaii to confront the death of his father, and finds peace through the simple act of talking.
6.6
Charting the eight-year run of Shakedown, a peripatetic black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles, director Leilah Weinraub attempts “to portray the before and after of a utopic moment.” Weinraub presents a world unto itself, shaped by the desires and pleasures of its community. Shot with the tenderness of a home movie, SHAKEDOWN captures the propulsive, dreamlike atmosphere of the club and achieves a stunning intimacy with its subjects.
6.5
An Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late American documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig’s decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Drawing on over thirty years of unique and never-before-seen imagery, THE IMAGE YOU MISSED is a documentary essay film that weaves together a history of the Northern Irish Troubles with the story of a son’s search for his father. In the process, the film sets up a candid encounter between two filmmakers born into different political moments, revealing their contrasting experiences of Irish nationalism, the role of images in social struggle, and the competing claims of personal and political responsibility.
6.4
For one month during one summer, director Sofia Bohdanowicz traveled to Paris to live with a woman she had never met—or even spoken with—before, hoping to replace her previous unhappy memories of France with new ones and to document the experience through film. The result is a captivating study of a vibrant personality, Juliane Sellam, a seventy-seven-year-old astrologer who has lived in the same apartment (a Haussmannian perch overflowing with geraniums and personality) in Montmartre for fifty years. As Juliane welcomes Sofia into her light-filled world, a unique connection forms between these two women across generations.
6.6
Thirty years in the making, TINY: THE LIFE OF ERIN BLACKWELL continues to follow one of the most indelible subjects of STREETWISE, a groundbreaking documentary on homeless and runaway teenagers. Erin Blackwell, a.k.a. Tiny, was introduced in filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall's earlier film as a brash fourteen-year-old living precariously on the margins in Seattle. Now a forty-four year-old mother of ten, Blackwell reflects with Mark on the journey they’ve experienced together, from Blackwell’s struggles with addiction to her regrets to her dreams for her own children, even as she sees them being pulled down the same path of drugs and desperation. Interweaving three decades’ worth of Mark’s photographs and footage that includes previously unseen outtakes from STREETWISE, this is a heartrending, deeply empathetic portrait of a family struggling to break free of the cycle of trauma, as well as a summation of the life’s work of Mark, an irreplaceable artistic voice.
7.5
The final film by renowned director and cinema historian Peter Bogdanovich is an affectionate, illuminating celebration of the life, career, and artistry of pioneering filmmaker and comedian Buster Keaton, whose ambition, daring, and technical innovation made him one of the great visionaries of the silent era. Featuring interviews with legends like Mel Brooks, Quentin Tarantino, and Werner Herzog and vividly illustrated with a wealth of archival footage, THE GREAT BUSTER is an essential introduction to a singularly influential artist whose work continues to astonish and thrill.
