Dick Johnson is Dead
Every day we get older. We can’t stop time and beat death, but we can change the way we react. In the face of losing her father, Dick, to dementia, Kirsten Johnson takes her dad’s death into her own hands. Through a series of hilarious, heart-wrenching fake fatal accidents, action stunts, and macabre special effects, […]
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library
Frederick Wiseman has described his documentaries as “reality fictions” and frequently compares his art to novel writing. Now, after 50 years of training his camera on institutions, he finally channels his passion for books to get inside the New York Public Library. Its photogenic Fifth Avenue main branch has served as a backdrop in numerous […]
Faces Places
In Faces Places, 88-year-old nouvelle vague legend Agnès Varda teams up with 33-year- old French photographer and muralist JR to create an enchanting travelogue/road movie. Sharing a lifelong passion for images and the means by which they are created, displayed and shared, the duo hits the road to travel through France’s small villages, meeting locals, […]
Faya Dayi
In her hypnotic documentary feature, Ethiopian-Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents. Though a deeply personal project—Beshir was forced to leave her hometown of Harar with her family as a teenager due to growing political strife—the film she returned to make about the city, its rural Oromo community […]
Fire at Sea
Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary observes Europe’s migrant crisis from the vantage point of a Mediterranean island where hundreds of thousands of refugees, fleeing war and poverty, have landed in recent decades. Rosi shows the harrowing work of rescue operations but devotes most of the film […]
Flee
FLEE tells the story of Amin Nawabi as he grapples with a painful secret he has kept hidden for 20 years, one that threatens to derail the life he has built for himself and his soon to be husband. Recounted mostly through animation to director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, he tells for the first time the […]
Gunda
Experiential cinema in its purest form, GUNDA chronicles the unfiltered lives of a mother pig, a flock of chickens, and a herd of cows with masterful intimacy. Using stark, transcendent black and white cinematography and the farm’s ambient soundtrack, director Victor Kossakowsky invites the audience to slow down and experience life as his subjects do, […]
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
An inspired, lyrical and intimate portrait of a place and its people, award-winning photographer Ross’s directorial debut follows two young African American men from rural Alabama over the course of five years. Capturing the mundane and monumental in the center of the historic Black Belt region, HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING offers a new […]
Honeyland
Nestled in an isolated mountain region deep within the Balkans, Hatidze Muratova lives with her ailing mother in a village without roads, electricity or running water. She’s the last in a long line of Macedonian wild beekeepers, eking out a living farming honey in small batches to be sold in the closest city – a […]
The Hottest August
A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, The Hottest August gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is one city over one month: New York City, including its outer boroughs, during August 2017. It’s a month heavy with the tension of a new President, […]