A collaborative work by the filmmakers An van. Dienderen (Belgium), Rosine Mbakam (Cameroon) and Éleonore Yameogo (Burkina Faso) that explores their different perspectives as filmmakers and their different experiences, as a result of their skin color. The film is divided into three parts, each of which is the responsibility of one of the directors, but the dialogue between the trio is made through recordings where they discuss opinions, conclusions and even lighting techniques.
The Soviet pioneer of documentary film presents turbulent episodes of the civil war that followed the Russian revolution of the early 20th century and includes images of historical figures such as Trotsky. This film was considered lost (or reused in other works by the director), but it is finally presented to the public, a century later, given the reconstruction work by the academic Nikolai Izvolov.
Ten strangers wake up on a red-eye from Boston to Los Angeles, discovering, in a panic, that the rest of the passengers and crew have disappeared. So begins a novella by Stephen King, later adapted into a mini-series by Tom Holland, in 1995. Now, it is Holland’s TV show that is transformed and reconstructed through animation and collage techniques in this experimental film that enhances the themes and the actors’ performances. A hypnotic descent into madness.
A film made up of amateur and home movies, made on trips, by women from the 1920s to the 1940s, who also presented them publicly, with their own commentary regarding what was being seen on the big screen. Stephens curates images from private and public archives to build a vision of the female cinematographic gaze and its relation to the very spirit of the traveler.
This is a work made from films that the director collected, anonymous or amateur by nature, and which he now uses to design a look that encompasses his own life, his family stories, as well as a (clear) obsession with cinema (and sex). A portrait between fiction and reality, between the endearing and the narcissistic, haunted by past loves but full of joie de vivre.
The narrator is Sara Driver — filmmaker, producer and wife of Jim Jarmusch — who tells the hilarious story of how she smuggled the only copy of the controversial documentary Cocksucker Blues (a film about a tour of the Rolling Stones… for adult eyes only) to the Rotterdam Festival.
No voice and no text, only the power of image and montage. Francisco Noronha builds a portrait of the surroundings of Lisbon as seen by Portuguese cinema, with images from The Green Years by Paulo Rocha (1963) to O Fim do Mundo by Basil da Cunha (2020). In between, there are images of films by Manuel Mozos, João Salaviza and sprinklings of Italian neorealism.
Wanda Jakubowska is a Polish filmmaker known for her work on the Holocaust, herself a victim of it. This film, one of the earliest depictions of life in concentration camps, is a powerful testimony. Filmed in Auschwitz shortly after the end of the war, it portrays the experience of several women in this camp. A little-known film that is presented in a digital restoration that shows the film in a new light (and sound).
This film started from a singular idea: to illustrate the phrase of the American director Raoul Walsh, who worked in the first half of the 20th century, which gives the film its title, by making a compilation of all the characters that ride horses in his films. But the film grows beyond the compilation film, or even the essay film, to become something bigger and more idiosyncratic, with a hint of a detective story.
Finnish engineer Eric Tigerstedt successfully recorded sound on film using a device of his own invention, the photomagnetophone, ten years before there were any advances in commercial cinema—in 1914. These are the original surviving tests.
Michaela Grill uses a montage of images from silent films, with music by Sophie Trudeau, to portray the feelings of despair that the confinement, caused by the pandemic, brought to the fore.
The textures and colors of soap bubbles made abstract, in a work inspired by the formative and constitutive process of nature.
A trip through Clara Cullen’s family tree and personal archive led, five years ago, to discovery that her great-grandmother was the first female director in Argentina, when she found a box with footage filmed by her.
Lotte Eisner was a journalist, chief curator at the Cinémathèque Française at the time of Henri Langlois, author of the book The Haunted Screen (1952) — analyzing German expressionist cinema — and admired by directors from Fritz Lang to Godard. However, she is still a little-known figure, something that this film wants to change. This mission is accompanied by archival images, film excerpts and interviews with figures such as Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.
Samuel Barbosa, in his first feature film, explores the creative process of Paulo Rocha (Os Verdes Anos) and his films, through his characters, the artists he worked with and other testimonies of his art.
It is with images of Domingos de Oliveira Santos, a surgeon turned filmmaker, that Edgar Pêra composes a mosaic that goes beyond home videos, rushing beyond them.
Film that takes as a starting point the exhibition Pedro Costa: Company — an exhibition dedicated to the Portuguese filmmaker that could also be seen as a collective, given that he was flanked by artists such as Picasso, Bresson, António Reis, John Ford, Jeff Wall, Godard, Rui Chafes or Charlie Chaplin — to continue to create a dialogue between the Portuguese director and the figures that haunt his imagination.
Filip Jan Rymsza, who had already produced The Other Side of the Wind – A Welles film kept in a shelf for 40 years and released in 2018 – returns with this conversation between two magisterial figures of American cinema, filmed in 1970. In the two hours of this visual document unknown until now, the two directors vividly debate, questioning the nature of their work and violence in the United States, among other topics. A historical record.