7.3
Hollywood has had its fair share of power couples; husband and wife duos that have each enjoyed illustrious careers in the film industry. In France, one of the most noteworthy marital unions occurred when Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda tied the knot in 1962. Distinguished filmmakers in their own right, the couple enjoyed nearly 30 years together until Demy died in 1990. Following his death, Varda constructed a documentary paying tribute to the work of her husband and highlighting his place in the history of film.
7.3
Errol Morris turns his camera on one of the most fascinating men in the world: the pioneering astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, afflicted by a debilitating motor neuron disease that has left him without a voice or the use of his limbs. An adroitly crafted tale of personal adversity, professional triumph, and cosmological inquiry, Morris’s documentary examines the way the collapse of Hawking’s body has been accompanied by the untrammeled broadening of his imagination. Telling the man’s incredible story through the voices of his colleagues and loved ones, while making dynamically accessible some of the theories in Hawking’s best-selling book of the same name, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME is at once as small as a single life and as big as the ever-expanding universe.
7.3
One of the most important documents of the AIDS epidemic, THE AIDS (Artists Involved with Death and Survival) SHOW deals with its impact on the community most affected by the disease: gay men. This unique work, one of the first films to deal with the subject of AIDS, was based on San Francisco’s long-running Theatre Rhinoceros stage production of the same name. It speaks to everyone who has ever thought about AIDS or any terminal disease. Excerpts from the play are combined with interviews with the show’s creators and performers, along with personal narration by the filmmakers—Peter Adair and Rob Epstein—in a powerful hybrid of documentary and drama.
7.3
Errol Morris burst out of the gate with this brilliant debut feature, about two pet cemeteries in Northern California and the people involved with them. Such a description, however, can hardly do justice to the captivating, funny, and enigmatic GATES OF HEAVEN, a film that is about our relationships to our pets, each other, and ourselves. Both sincere and satirical, this is an endlessly surprising study of human nature.
7.3
In this love letter to “the stinking rose,” documentarian Les Blank interviews garlic fanatics of all stripes, from cooks to members of garlic appreciation societies.
7.3
Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly composed shots of Manhattan circa 1976, the filmmaker reads letters sent by her mother years earlier. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule.
7.3
Martin Scorsese spends an evening with larger-than-life raconteur Steven Prince—a former drug addict, road manager for Neil Diamond, and actor who memorably played the gun salesman in TAXI DRIVER—as he recounts stories from his colorful life (one of which later inspired a key scene in PULP FICTION).
7.3
Les Blank offers a vivid immersion into the Texas-Mexican borderlands as seen and heard through the art of the Norteño musicians whose songs reflect a deep-rooted cultural pride and a history of social struggle. Featuring acclaimed artists like Los Alegres de Terán, Flaco Jiménez, Lydia Mendoza, and Narciso Martínez, CHULAS FRONTERAS lovingly captures not only the music but the everyday sights, sounds, landscapes, food, families, and farming communities that are the very soul of Tejano culture.
7.3
Trailblazing filmmaker Martha Coolidge made her feature debut with this unflinchingly personal hybrid of documentary and fiction. Centered on an intense reenactment of Coolidge’s experience of rape in her adolescence, the film casts Michele Manenti (also a survivor) as the director’s younger self, and observes the actor and her castmates as they engage in a profound dialogue about what it means to recreate these traumatic memories, and about their attitudes concerning consent and self-blame. A high-stakes experiment in metacinema that broke new ground with its uncompromising examination of date rape, NOT A PRETTY PICTURE brings a stunning immediacy to questions about the on-screen representation of sexual violence and the limits of artistic catharsis.
7.3
In 1974, Barbet Schroeder went to Uganda to make a film about Idi Amin, the country’s ruthless, charismatic dictator. Three years into a murderous regime that would be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans, Amin prepared a triumphal greeting for the filmmakers, staging rallies, military maneuvers, and cheery displays of national pride, and envisioning the film as an official portrait to adorn his cult of personality. Schroeder, however, had other ideas, emerging with a disquieting, caustically funny brief against Amin, in which the dictator’s own endless stream of testimony—by turns charming, menacing, and nonsensical—serves as the most damning evidence. A revelatory tug-of-war between subject and filmmaker, GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA: A SELF-PORTRAIT is a landmark in the art of documentary and an appalling study of egotism in power.
7.3
ARAB ISRAELI DIALOGUE is the passionate final documentary from trailblazing filmmaker Lionel Rogosin, in which Palestinian poet Rashed Hussein and Israeli writer Amos Kenan engage in a frank, sometimes bruising conversation on the conflict between their peoples. Rogosin provides an open forum for two formidable intellects to discuss the fates of their nations, and the ever-receding possibility of peace.
7.3
Ethnographer of the offbeat and hyper-regional Les Blank offers a rich, fragrant look at the vitality of the Cajun lifestyle, paying special attention to the food, music (including legendary figures like the Balfa Brothers, Marc Savoy, and Nathan Abshire), and humor of the culture. Infused with the filmmaker’s zest for life and people, this is a joyous immersion into a culture steeped in tradition and an unshakeable sense of community.
7.3
This poignant tale of beauty, identity, and a dress is considered a classic of documentary filmmaking. It was the first independent film of the women’s movement to explore the issues of body image, self-worth, and appearance in American society. In this unconventional documentary, Betty tells her story of the search for the “perfect dress” twice—first as a humorous anecdote and again as her underlying feelings emerge. The contrast between the two stories is haunting.
7.3
An intimate portrait of President John F. Kennedy's funeral in November of 1963, this short work crafted by documentarian Robert Drew captures one of the most solemn moments in U.S. history.
7.3
Jean Vigo was twenty-five when he made this, his debut film, a silent cinematic poem that reveals, through a thrilling and ironic use of montage, the economic reality hidden behind the facade of the Mediterranean resort town of Nice. The first of Vigo’s several collaborations with cinematographer Boris Kaufman (Dziga Vertov’s brother and a future Oscar winner), À PROPOS DE NICE is both a scathing and invigorating look at 1930 French culture.
7.3
THE WHITE STADIUM (Das Weisse Stadion), the film of the II Olympic Winter Games St. Moritz 1928 in Switzerland, holds particular interest because it was directed by Arnold Fanck, a geologist turned filmmaker known for his sumptuous outdoor cinematography and his aesthete's eye for filming natural landscapes. On a technical level, THE WHITE STADIUM exemplifies the rapid progress in Olympic films where cameras and montage are concerned.
7.2
In ANSELM, Wim Wenders creates a hypnotic portrait of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most innovative and important painters and sculptors of our time. Shot in 6K resolution—and released theatrically in 3D—the film presents an immersive cinematic experience of the German artist’s work, which explores the overawing beauty of human existence, landscape, and myth, and confronts the horrors of his country’s history, seeking to undo the postwar silence in which Kiefer came of age. Through archival footage, reenactment, and direct access to his subject at work in the massive installation in Southern France where he now lives amid his creations, Wenders traces the arc of Kiefer’s career, provoking an engagement with creativity through the senses, intellect, and spirit.
7.2
In Japan, there is a special way to grieve after having an abortion. Inspired by these Buddhist rituals, MIZUKO is an intimate look at how a half-Japanese American woman reevaluates the controversial drawing of “the line” in abortion ethics when she becomes pregnant herself.
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.
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.
7.2
GRAMERCY STORIES is an inspiring look inside a unique residence in Manhattan that provides a safe home for twenty-five gay and transgender teenagers who have experienced violence at home and on the streets. Told from their candid, often witty perspective, the film follows these courageous kids as they strive to remake their lives.
7.2
The 1976 cinema vérité classic GREY GARDENS, which captured in remarkable close-up the lives of the eccentric East Hampton recluses Big and Little Edie Beale, has spawned everything from a midnight-movie cult following to a Broadway musical, to an upcoming Hollywood adaptation. The filmmakers then went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, THE BEALES OF GREY GARDENS, a tribute both to these indomitable women and to the original landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them American counterculture icons.
7.2
Inspired by his work at Kanoon and his own sons’ schooling, the first of Abbas Kiarostami’s two documentary features about education looks in on a schoolyard of chanting, playful boys but mainly transpires in the office of a supervisor who has to deal with latecomers and discipline problems. You can almost see the boys’ personalities forming in their first encounters with authorities and peers outside the home.
