Movies: Essay film

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills....

Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is one of David Lynch’s most enduring obsessions. This documentary goes over the rainbow to explore this Technicolor through-line in Lynch’s work....

Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writi...

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors....

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality....

"How Every Film You Watch Tells You To Love The Rich and What To Do About It" explores the representations of wealth in cinema. It looks into how most beloved characters are subtly more well-off than they should be, how criticisms of the system are c...

A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using ...

The Water Map is an essayistic journey through the ethnography and landscapes of the Region of Murcia. These places are in the process of disappearing due to the increasing and abundant agricultural exploitation. Water has marked the territory and th...

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century....

Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities....

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira....

A youngster writes a letter to his grandmother about his last trip to Donosti (Spain). This city inspires him to ponder about the language of cinema, time, cities, and sharing memories with our loved ones....

CREMASTER 4 (1994) adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three iden...

Lies can kill. Transgender Nuclear Suicide Sojourner is an exploration of propaganda, lies, and the overwhelming urge to end it all....

Staged as a series of voiceover sessions, written with gloriously off-balanced precision and dipped in the color green, THE FUTURE TENSE unfolds as a poignant tale of tales, exploring the filmmakers’ own experiences in aging, parenting, mental illnes...

The surrealist painter René Magritte questions the objective reality and emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relationship between an object, its image and its name: the evocation of mystery consists of images of familiar things gathered or transforme...

Commissioned by French television, this is a short documentary on the neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, predominantly on the walls of buildings, holding up windows, roofs etc....

A peculiar portrait of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) drawn by the extravagant and original look of the Spanish writer Fernando Arrabal, who establishes a bold parallelism between Borges' work and opinions and his own creations,...

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought toge...

The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories....