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.
6.5
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.
7.5
Meet Seymour Bernstein: a virtuoso pianist, veteran New Yorker, and true original who gave up a successful concert career to teach music. In this wonderfully warm, witty, and intimate tribute from his friend Ethan Hawke, Seymour shares unforgettable stories from his remarkable life, eye-opening words of wisdom, and his hard-won insights into art, creativity, and the search for fulfillment. A poignant reflection on the dedication, perseverance, and fortitude essential to creating both art and a rewarding life, SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION will leave audiences uplifted and inspired.
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.
7.4
Whether headlining films in Sweden, Italy, or Hollywood, Ingrid Bergman always pierced the screen with a singular soulfulness. With this new documentary, made on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Bergman's birth, director Stig Björkman allows us unprecedented access to her world, culling from the most personal of archival materials, letters, diary entries, photographs, and 8 mm and 16 mm footage Bergman herself shot, and following her from youth to tumultuous married life and motherhood. Intimate and artful, this lovingly assembled portrait, narrated by actor Alicia Vikander, provides luminous insight into the life and career of an undiminished legend.
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.
7.6
Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages and early modern era suffered from the same ills as psychiatric patients diagnosed with hysteria in the film's own time. Far from a dry dissertation on the topic, the film itself is a witches’ brew of the scary, the gross, and the darkly humorous. Christensen’s mix-and-match approach to genre anticipates gothic horror, documentary re-creation, and the essay film, making for an experience unlike anything else in the history of cinema.
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.
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.
5.4
Taking two antiracist and antiauthoritarian liberation movements in South London and Chicago’s South Side as a point of departure, SOUTH presents an expressionistic investigation of the power of individual and collective voice. Interlinked with director Morgan Quaintance’s own biography, the film also considers questions of mortality and the will to transcend a world typified by concrete relations.
7.7
The brief but bright-burning life of influential artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is vividly recounted in this illuminating documentary directed by the superstar painter’s friend Tamra Davis. Set against the vibrant creative backdrop of New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD charts the charismatic Basquiat’s journey—from his early work as a graffiti artist to his close friendship with Andy Warhol to his struggles with heroin addiction and tragic death at age twenty-seven—and brings to life the legendary downtown scene that he embodied.
7.7
An engaging, heartfelt look at one man’s battle to preserve his nation’s cinematic heritage, CELLULOID MAN is an intimate portrait of legendary Indian archivist P. K. Nair, who founded the National Film Archive of India to safeguard his country’s rapidly vanishing film history at a time when film restoration was largely disregarded. Tracing Nair’s profound influence on Indian cinema—from rescuing early silent films to mentoring a new generation of directors—filmmaker-archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur crafts both an inspiring tribute to a tireless cinephile warrior and an urgent call to preserve our moving-image legacy before it is too late.
7.5
Using Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial call to arms “The Wretched of the Earth” as a launching point, director Göran Olsson (THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967–1975) constructs a revelatory assemblage of archival newsreel footage documenting decades of African uprisings, from the Angolan War of Independence to a 1960s miners’ strike in Liberia to the Mozambique Liberation Front and beyond. Set against Fanon’s scorching words, as narrated by Lauryn Hill, the result is a bold and fresh reframing of history.
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.
7.1
Forty years after her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty's landmark of Senegalese cinema TOUKI BOUKI, Mati Diop revisits its lead actor, Magaye Niang, to explore the legacy of a film that continues to loom large.
8.2
An extraordinary, transformative experience, Allan King's DYING AT GRACE is quite simply unprecedented: five terminally ill cancer patients allowed the director access to their final months and days inside the Toronto Grace Health Centre. The result is an unflinching, enormously empathetic contemplation of death, featuring some of the most memorable people ever captured on film.
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.
6.7
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.
7.2
A sublime work of art in its own right, this beautifully shot, endlessly revealing documentary offers unprecedented insight into the life and work of one of the greatest artists of our time. In the spring and summer of 2009, legendary German painter Gerhard Richter granted filmmaker Corinna Belz access to his studio, where he was working on a series of large abstract paintings. In quiet, highly concentrated images, GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the very personal, tension-filled process of artistic creation. Richter is his own worst critic, destroying multiple canvases before his creative spirit takes hold and the astonishing final compositions emerge.
7
HEART OF A DOG marks the first feature film in thirty years by multimedia artist Laurie Anderson. A cinematic tone poem that flows from a sustained meditation on death and other forms of absence, the film seamlessly weaves together thoughts on Tibetan Buddhism, reincarnation, the modern surveillance state, and the artistic lives of dogs, with an elegy for the filmmaker's beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, at its heart. Narrated by Anderson with her characteristic wry wit, and featuring a plaintive, free-form score by the filmmaker, the tender and provocative HEART OF A DOG continues Anderson's four-and-a-half-decade career of imbuing the everyday with a sense of dreamlike wonder.
7.8
In DONT LOOK BACK, D. A. Pennebaker immortalized Bob Dylan’s landmark 1965 British tour with one of the greatest music documentaries of all time. With 65 REVISITED, Pennebaker returned to his trove of archival footage to create an alternate record of that now-legendary tour, assembling outtakes and unused footage for an equally intimate, revealing document of the brilliantly enigmatic singer-songwriter as he bid farewell to his acoustic phase. Devoting more time to the music than the original film, this essential companion piece features Dylan’s enthralling performances of songs like “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” alongside appearances by fellow luminaries like Joan Baez, Nico, and Bob Neuwirth.
7.1
Sing along with the common people in this exuberant, appropriately offbeat tribute to the charmingly cheeky Britpop legends. Though culminating with the farewell concert the band played to thousands of adoring fans in their hometown of Sheffield, England, PULP: A FILM ABOUT LIFE, DEATH & SUPERMARKETS is by no means a traditional concert film or rock doc. As much a testament to the band as it is to the city and inhabitants of Sheffield, the film weaves exclusive concert footage with man-on-the-street interviews and dreamy staged sequences to paint a picture much larger, funnier, and more life-affirming than any music film of recent memory.
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.
7.6
What if you could morph your car into a mobile work of art and drive it down the road for all to see? What would it look like? What would the world think of you? How would you be changed? AUTOMORPHOSIS looks into the minds and hearts of a delightful collection of eccentrics, visionaries, and just plain folks who have transformed their autos into artworks. On a humorous and touching journey, we discover what drives the creative process for these unconventional characters. And in the end, we find that an art car has the power to change us and to alter our view of our increasingly homogeneous world.
