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.
7.8
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.
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.
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.
6.6
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.
6.6
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.
6.6
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.
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.
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.
5.8
This 2016 documentary, directed by Valentina Agostinis on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of BLOW-UP, features the film's dialogue assistant, Piers Haggard, model Jill Kennington, former Yardbirds manager Simon Napier-Bell, photographer David Montgomery, historian Philippe Garner, art historian David Alan Mellor, and several others. The documentary returns to a few key locations and explores director Michelangelo Antonioni's meticulous approach to art and photography.
6.6
Restored by the IOC and in 2016 edited into an absorbing chronicle, THE GAMES OF THE V OLYMPIAD STOCKHOLM, 1912 presents not just individual events but also the ceremonial ones before, during, and after the Games, which offer a vivid impression of Swedish society prior to World War I.
7.4
A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film CAMERAPERSON, a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career as a documentary cinematographer. Through a series of episodic juxtapositions, Johnson explores the relationships between image makers and their subjects, the tension between the objectivity and intervention of the camera, and the complex interaction of unfiltered reality with crafted narrative. A work that combines documentary, autobiography, and ethical inquiry, CAMERAPERSON is a moving glimpse into one filmmaker’s personal journey and a thoughtful examination of what it means to train a camera on the world.
7.9
Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka, as they embark on an unprecedented uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing their community to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories. Through wrenching interviews with the victims whose lives have been shattered by the agonizing effects of asbestosis, SENNAN ASBESTOS DISASTER paints a damning portrait of how decades of negligence exacted a devastating human toll while revealing the ways in which the tragedy is deeply entwined with issues of class and anti-Korean discrimination. It’s also a galvanizing look at the power of collective action and what happens when ordinary people take on their own government—going up against an unfeeling, often maddeningly slow-moving bureaucracy in their unceasing fight for justice.
6.7
Visionary cinema historian Mark Cousins (THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY) charts the unknown territory of the imagination of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary artists. Granted unprecedented access to hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings by Orson Welles—tantalizing, never-before-seen glimpses into the filmmaker’s rich inner life—Cousins sheds new light on the experiences, dreams, desires, and obsessions that fueled his creativity and inspired his masterpieces. Playful, profound, and as daringly iconoclastic as its subject, THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES is a one-of-a-kind work of visual archaeology, a fresh way of looking at a cinematic giant whose singular worldview—fiercely humanist, defiantly antiauthoritarian—resonates now more urgently than ever.
5.6
The films of Kevin Jerome Everson are rigorously crafted, thoughtfully illuminating records of Black American working-class life that bring into focus the often invisible routines of work and labor. In Tonsler Park, Everson trains his black-and-white 16 mm camera on the activity around voting precincts in Charlottesville, Virginia (future site of the infamous white supremacist Unite the Right rally), on Election Day, November 8, 2016—a day that would prove pivotal in the course of American democracy. Capturing, in detail, the vital work of mostly Black civil servants and citizens engaging in the democratic process, Everson pointedly centers their participation in a system that has long sought to disenfranchise them.
6.4
An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, RaMell Ross’s HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. Collins attends college in search of opportunity while Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son in an open-ended, poetic chronicle that privileges the patiently observed interstices of their lives. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and the monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. These moments combine to communicate the region’s deep culture and provide glimpses of the complex ways that the African American community’s collective image is integrated into America’s visual imagination.
An exercise in visual abstraction, these montages by director Shirley Clarke examine the bridges of New York City. This version features a jazz score by Teo Macero.
7.2
This 2015 short film by Kirsten Johnson was commissioned by Field of Vision, a filmmaker-driven visual journalism unit that pairs directors with developing stories around the globe. In THE ABOVE, a U.S. military surveillance balloon floats on a tether high about Kabul, Afghanistan. Its capacities are highly classified and deeply mysterious.
6.7
In 1964, author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, untitled avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, would not live to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award–winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the birth of cinema and encompasses our very understanding of human consciousness. NOTFILM is the feature-length movie on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications, utilizing additional outtakes, never-before-heard audio recordings of the production meetings, and other rare archival elements.
6.6
Legendary Beat visionary Bob Kaufman considered poetry a key to human survival, an idea made all the more legitimate by the longevity it is granted: the things he saw, heard, tasted, felt, and, most of all, thought were preserved in his work. Embodying the spirit of those efforts, director Billy Woodberry’s first feature since his 1983 LA Rebellion landmark BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS is perhaps the closest we can come to knowing the man and his time. Both dense and nimble in its assemblage of archival footage and photos, interviews with contemporaries, and readings from the likes of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, AND WHEN I DIE looks back at a familiar era with new eyes, thanks in no small part to the honest assessment provided by many figures of New York’s Beat generation some half-century removed.
6.1
In fifteen linked chapters shot in locations ranging from Moscow to New York to Istanbul, Jem Cohen merges city symphony, diary film, and personal/political essay to create a vivid portrait of contemporary life. Perhaps the most personal of Cohen's films, COUNTING measures street life, light, and time, noting not only surveillance and overdevelopment but resistance and its phantoms as manifested in music, animals, and everyday magic.
6.7
One of the pioneers of Direct Cinema, filmmaker Richard Leacock helped revolutionize the art of documentary filmmaking using handheld cameras and microphones to create a sense of vérité, fly-on-the-wall immediacy. In this portrait of a true original, Les Blank and codirector Gina Leibrecht visit Leacock at his rustic farm in Normandy, France, where Leacock expounds upon his legendary career and cinematic philosophy while sharing his passion for food and cooking.
6.3
FIELD NOTES is an experimental portrait of the ghosts embedded in the culture of Trinidad and Tobago. Structured as a visual and aural field guide to the spirits, jumbies, shapeshifters, and bloodsuckers that inhabit the island’s lore, it focuses on the places where the natural and supernatural collide.
7.1
Calling on a wide range of her father's collaborators and fellow travelers, from James Franco to William Friedkin, to read from his autobiography, the filmmaker Samantha Fuller evokes the inimitable voice and spirit of her father, the legendary writer-director Sam Fuller. Shot entirely within "The Shack," as Fuller called the backyard writing refuge he filled with notes for future projects, the film follows Fuller on his path from New York tabloid journalist to Hollywood hyphenate including his formative experiences as an infantryman in World War II.
