Maman

Return to Crystal Lake: Making 'Friday the 13th'

October 2003 •English

Daybreak Express

January 1953 •English

Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording "Daybreak Express", this is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City.

Night and Fog

April 1959 •French

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

Jews

February 1984 •English

JEWS excavates a lost world of manners and ritual in home movies shot by several Chicago families from the 1920s through the 1940s. Much as in similar found footage soliloquies by Péter Forgács, Jay Rosenblatt and Ken Jacobs, director Roger Deutsch wrings unexpected pathos from mundane traces of the past. Children mug for the camera with dances of the day, upright mothers march their strollers up the avenue, men smoke, the family gathers around the table to light the candles. The bare title cannot help but raise the specter of contemporaneous events in Europe, lending an extra degree of urgency to the film's meditation on disappearance. - Max Goldberg

The Joys and Sorrows of Young Yuguo

June 2022 •English

16-year-old Yuguo, who has a passion for Eastern European romantic poetry, makes a pilgrimage from his home in China to the foothills of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains.

Grid

October 2021 •Portuguese

A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).

Black Sun

July 2019 •Portuguese

Underscored by French film legend Delphine Seyrig’s evocative recitation of a Henri Michaux poem, Maureen Fazendeiro’s film is a mysterious, multi-textured portrait of eclipse spectators in Portugal.

Quarantine

May 2021 •Spanish

A short film of the first weeks of strict national lockdown, filmed in Barcelona on a classic home video camera Hi8. Narrates the story of three women who share a flat and who create a microworld not only to survive the global pandemic but also to survive themselves.

The Long Shadow of Dirty Harry

July 2008 •English

An in-depth look at Dirty Harry (1971), featuring interviews with such film artists as Michael Madsen, 'Hal Holbrook', John Milius, 'Shane Black' and John Badham.

Quest for the Ring

November 2001 •English

H.P. Lovecraft - Ipotesi di un viaggio in Italia

March 2004 •Italian

A documentary about the possible ties between H.P.LOVECRAFT and the Polesine region (Italy), stimulated by the casual discovery of a mysterious manuscript attributed to the great American horror writer died in 1937.

Echo

September 2023 •English

A reframing of the classic tale of Narcissus, the director draws on snippets of conversation with a trusted friend to muse on gender and identity. Just as shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowable entities, so does the concept of a gendered self feel unknowable except through reflection. Is it Narcissus that Echo truly longs for, or simply the Knowing he possesses when gazing upon himself?

Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream?

August 2019 •Portuguese

Volcanoes erupt from the depths of the boiling earth to the surface of the celluloid film, to create a new abstract cinematographic language.

Goya

October 1950 •Italian

Presents life in 18th century Spain as the painter Francisco de Goya showed it to us.

A 3 Minute Hug

November 2018 •Spanish

As daylight breaks between the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, undocumented migrants and their relatives, divided by a wall, prepare to participate in an activist event. For three minutes, they’ll embrace in no man’s land for the briefest and sweetest of reunions.

Visions of Europe

May 2004 •English

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

Hedda Hopper's Hollywood No. 2

December 1941 •English

Hedda Hopper plays hostess at a party for her (grown) son William (DeWolfe Jr.). Hopper, attends the dedication of the Motion Picture Relief Fund's country home and goes to the Mocambo. There is also a sequence dedicated to the Milwaukee, Wisconsin world premiere of the first short in this series attended by more that a few film stars.

Apache

January 1953 •English

Short about the daily life of the Apaches, including their ceremonies.

Haida Carver

January 1964 •English

On Canada's Pacific coast this film finds a young Haida artist, Robert Davidson, shaping miniature totems from argillite, a jet-like stone. The film follows the artist to the island where he finds the stone, and then shows how he carves it in the manner of his grandfather, who taught him the craft.

The Beauty President

March 2021 •English

In 1992, at the height of the AIDS pandemic, activist Terence Alan Smith made a historic bid for president of the United States as his drag queen persona Joan Jett Blakk. Today, Smith reflects back on his seminal civil rights campaign and its place in American history.