Ray's Birds

Soft and Hard

1985

Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville talk about their films, while doing everyday tasks around their house.

A Fuller Life

2013

Friends and admirers of iconoclastic film director Sam Fuller read from his memoirs in this unconventional documentary directed by Fuller's only child, Samantha.

Finding Yingying

2020

Yingying Zhang, a 26-year-old Chinese student, comes to the U.S. to study. In her detailed and beautiful diaries, the aspiring young scientist and teacher is full of optimism, hoping to also be married and a mother someday. Within weeks of her arrival, Yingying disappears from the campus. Through exclusive access to Yingying’s family and boyfriend, Finding Yingying closely follows their journey as they search to unravel the mystery of her disappearance and seek justice for their daughter while navigating a strange, foreign country. But most of all, Finding Yingying is the story of who Yingying was: a talented young woman loved by her family and friends.

Research and Crime: the Reich University of Strasbourg

2018

Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?

Eva Hesse

2016

German American artist Eva Hesse (1936 – 1970) created her innovative art in latex and fiberglass in the whirling aesthetic vortex of 1960s New York. Her flowing forms were in part a reaction to the rigid structures of then-popular minimalism, a male-dominated movement. Hesse’s complicated personal life encompassed not only a chaotic 1930s Germany, but also illness and the immigrant culture of New York in the 1940s. One of the twentieth century’s most intriguing artists, she finally receives her due in this film, an emotionally gripping journey with a gifted woman of great courage.

Rose Street

1956

The minutiae of daily life on Edinburgh's Rose Street in the fifties is presented in this impressionistic documentary piece.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes

2024

Newly discovered interviews with Elizabeth Taylor and unprecedented access to the star’s personal archive reveal the complex inner life and vulnerability of the groundbreaking icon.

Adın sirri və tale. Qurban Səid

2010

A film about the life and work of the Azerbaijani immigrant journalist and writer Mohammad Asad Bey, who emigrated to Germany after the collapse of the Republic of Azerbaijan at the beginning of the 20th century

Pyongyang Diaries

1998

This documentary records Hoaas' personal encounter with the closed society of North Korea. As with her earlier work, Hoaas approaches her film as a cumulation of fragments encompassing different perspectives that together offer a point of entry into a complex society. Her diary-style narration signals her limited personal perspective into this culture, especially given the brief filming period and her difficulty in breaking through the facade of the showcase version of Korea insisted upon by her official guides. Hoaas' restricted visual access, and her reluctance to present over-familiar images of the hardship and depravation informed her decision to use this narrative device to frame her film within the context of the famine crisis that began in 1997 following the failure of crops caused by two consecutive years of heavy flooding.

Hold mig fast. Før jeg forsvinder

2023

Circus Without Borders

2015

Circus Without Borders tells the inspiring story of two youth circuses from remote corners of the world – an Inuit village in Canada, and Guinea in West Africa. The film traces their intersecting journeys as troupe members confront heartrending challenges and become internationally-known performers who return home to transform their communities. We record the troupes’ triumphs and struggles, many of which are the enduring legacy of a history of colonization.

Railway Station

1980

Warsaw's Central Railway Station. 'Someone has fallen asleep, someone's waiting for somebody else. Maybe they'll come, maybe they won't. The film is about people looking for something.

We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân

2011

A documentary about the efforts taken to revitalize the Wampanoag language, which almost died out.

Orquil Burn

1955

Starting from its source, this film tells the story of the Orquil Burn, Orkney.

Red Persimmons

2001

The ostensible subject of this film is the growing, drying, peeling and packaging of persimmons in the tiny Japanese village of Kaminoyama. The inhabitants explain that it is the perfect combination of earth, wind and rain that makes their village’s persimmons superior to those grown anywhere else, including the village just a few miles away. The film’s larger subject, however, is the disappearance of Japan’s traditional culture, the end of a centuries-old way of life.