In Memory

Scum Manifesto

1976

Delphine Seyrig reads passages from a Valerie Solanas’s SCUM manifesto.

Em Busca de Lélia

2017

Larisa

1980

Elem Klimov's documentary ode to his wife, director Larisa Shepitko, who was killed in an auto wreck.

Brasilia, Contradictions of a New City

1968

In 1967, de Andrade was invited by the Italian company Olivetti to produce a documentary on the new Brazilian capital city of Brasília. Constructed during the latter half of the 1950s and founded in 1960, the city was part of an effort to populate Brazil’s vast interior region and was to be the embodiment of democratic urban planning, free from the class divisions and inequalities that characterize so many metropolises. Unsurprisingly, Brasília, Contradições de uma Cidade Nova (Brasília, Contradictions of a New City, 1968) revealed Brasília to be utopic only for the wealthy, replicating the same social problems present in every Brazilian city. (Senses of Cinema)

Land Without Bread

1933

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.

This Is How a Child Becomes a Poet

2023

The last day of Patrizia Cavalli’s home. Before it’s all gone.

Where Do You Stand Now, João Pedro Rodrigues?

2016

João Pedro Rodrigues answers the question from the title with an autobiographical short-film.

Bad Boy of Bonsai

2022

Bad Boy of Bonsai is an experimental art-house documentary that focuses on Guy Guidry, a Louisiana local, and his passion for bonsai.

Water

2011

A Tibetan woman collects water near her family's yak farm and brings it back home 80-pounds full, in a ritual that takes her an hour to complete. A selection from Peabody Award-winning documentarian Bari Pearlman’s Nangchen Shorts series.

Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth

2013

The compelling story of an extraordinary woman's journey from her birth in a paper thin shack in the cotton fields of Georgia to her recognition as a key writer of the twentieth Century.Walker made history as the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her groundbreaking novel, The Color Purple.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory

1895

Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

1896

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Night and Fog

1959

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

Sonata for Hitler

1989

As with so many early films by Sokurov, this film has two dates: the first is the date of its creation (the film was then banned), the second is the date of the final edition and legal public screening. The film consists of German and Soviet archive footage of the World War II — to be exact, from the end of the war. An attempt to make a large–scale documentary on this subject had been undertaken in the Soviet cinema of the 1960s: the film — “Ordinary Fascism” — by the outstanding Soviet film–maker Mikhail Romm had become a classic retrospective investigation of fascism. But Sokurov uses the expressive power of the documentary image in an absolutely different way. He does not amass materials for a large–scale picture of Nazi crimes.

A Night at the Garden

2017

Archival footage of an American Nazi rally that attracted 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.