7.2
Roberto Rossellini interviews Chilean politician Salvador Allende.
7.2
In feminist filmmaker Joyce Chopra’s JOYCE AT 34 (codirected with Claudia Weill, who would later direct the great unsung GIRLFRIENDS), Chopra examines the demands of juggling a baby and a professional career.
7.2
Best known for his avant-garde meta-documentary SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM, William Greaves was also the director of over one hundred documentary films, the majority focused on African American history, politics, and culture. NATIONTIME is a report on the National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana, in 1972, a historic event that gathered Black voices from across the political spectrum, among them Jesse Jackson, Dick Gregory, Coretta Scott King, Dr. Betty Shabazz, Richard Hatcher, Amiri Baraka, Charles Diggs, Isaac Hayes, Richard Roundtree, and H. Carl McCall. Narrated by Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, the film was considered too militant for television broadcast at the time and has since circulated only in an edited fifty-eight-minute version. This new restoration from IndieCollect returns an essential cultural document to its original eighty-minute length and visual quality.
7.2
This portrait of Cuba’s storied Isla de la Juventud (then known as Isla de Pinos)—the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and the site of Fidel Castro’s imprisonment by Batista—examines its rich history and culture.
7.2
Documentary and narrative merge in Roberto Rossellini’s miraculous, poetic portrait of India. Commissioned by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, INDIA: MATRI BHUMI takes us beyond the bustling streets of the cities and into the country’s rural villages, where humans, nature, and animals coexist even as the forces of industrial modernization encroach. This unique blend of neorealist travelogue and scripted vignettes was cited by Rossellini as a personal favorite among his own works.
7.2
Nominated for an Academy Award, this live-action short film by director Shirley Clarke playfully chronicles the construction of the Tishman Building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Clarke referred to this work as a musical comedy.
7.2
Vittorio De Seta travels to a remote province in southern Italy to capture a unique celebration known as the “Feast of Silver.”
7.2
This 1956 short film by Jacques Demy documents a week in the life of a clog maker in the Loire Valley.
7.2
This prize-winning short is a poetic portrait of life on the coast of Sicily before, during, and following a volcanic eruption.
7.2
Vittorio De Seta’s rhythmic editing adds drama to this chronicle of a Sicilian spearfishing expedition.
7.2
Jean Painlevé’s classic underwater short THE SEA HORSE uses dreamlike imagery to detail the lives of the titular upright-swimming creatures.
7
Made up of intimate, revelatory footage of the singular author and poet filmed over the course of five years, Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary about William S. Burroughs was for decades mainly the stuff of legend; that changed when Aaron Brookner, the late director’s nephew, discovered a print of it in 2011 and spearheaded a restoration. Now viewers can enjoy the invigorating candidness of BURROUGHS: THE MOVIE, a one-of-a-kind nonfiction portrait that was brought to life with the help of a remarkable crew of friends, including Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, and that features on-screen appearances by fellow artists of Burroughs’s including Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Patti Smith, and Terry Southern.
7
Vernon is a town in the Florida panhandle surrounded by swamps. Here, Errol Morris found the quietly fascinating subjects for the follow-up to his galvanizing debut, GATES OF HEAVEN. As ever humane yet sharply focused, Morris lets his camera subjects pontificate and perambulate the environs of this seemingly unremarkable little community. The result is a strangely philosophical work that cemented its director’s standing as an important figure in American film.
7.1
When filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the record store he worked at as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his youth slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. FLIPSIDE documents his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years. In the process, Wilcha captures “This American Life” host Ira Glass in the midst of a creative rebirth, discovers the origin story of David Bowie’s ode to a local New Jersey cable-television hero, and uncovers the unlikely connection between jazz photographer Herman Leonard and TV writer David Milch. This disparate collection of stories coheres into something strange and expansive—a moving meditation on music, work, and the sacrifices and satisfaction of trying to live a creative life.
7.1
An existential journey with the filmmaker’s parents as its human yardstick and the primordial forces of the earth looming in the bedrock.
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.
7.1
Get to know the siblings whose films have captured the frenetic pulse of New York’s city streets. An original documentary featuring footage from the making of their new thriller, GOOD TIME, along with several of the brothers’ early shorts.
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.
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.
7.1
Filmed over sixteen years, this obsessively made documentary explores the creative life and adventures of the eccentric artist and entrepreneur Harrod Blank. Chronicling everything from his youth growing up in the woods with chickens and working as a camera assistant for his father, the venerable filmmaker Les Blank, to the creation of his first attention-getting art car, to his current multifaceted career as creator and head of a nationwide art-car movement, this engaging portrait is an appropriately offbeat ode to a true original defiantly pursuing his own form of nonconformity.
7.1
Join noted tea guru and importer David Lee Hoffman as he scours China for the finest teas in the world. Following Hoffman as he travels to local tea farms deep in the Chinese countryside, extols the virtues of organic farming and the fertilizing benefits of the humble earthworm, and talks tea with none other than Werner Herzog, director Les Blank (shooting digitally for the first time) crafts a portrait of a man driven by an all-consuming passion and an ode to the myriad pleasures of an ancient beverage.
7.1
Agnès Varda’s lifelong interest in still portraiture informs this record of a provocative Munich exhibition by the artist Ydessa Hendeles that contemplates our need for nostalgia and comfort in a violent world through an assemblage of hundreds of antique photographs of people and their teddy bears.
7.1
Agnès Varda’s charming follow-up to her acclaimed documentary THE GLEANERS AND I is a deceptively unassuming grace note that takes us deeper into the world of those who find purpose and beauty in the refuse of society. Revisiting many of the original film’s subjects to explore the often unexpected effects that their participation in the project has had on their lives, this wonderfully warm and human epilogue once again takes gleaning as the starting point from which to explore what most interests Varda: the richness, complexity, and poignancy of life outside the mainstream. What emerges is a crazy-quilt tapestry of the personal, the political, and the esoteric that celebrates the spirit and creativity of those who forge their own path.
