Guiding Star

Man of Marble

February 1977 •Polish

A young Polish filmmaker sets out to find out what happened to Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer who became a propaganda hero in the 1950s but later fell out of favor and disappeared.

Hiroshima

August 2005 •English

The documentary recounts the world's first nuclear attack and examines the alarming repercussions. Covering a three-week period from the Trinity test to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the program chronicles America's political gamble and the planning for the momentous event. Archival film, dramatizations, and special effects feature what occurred aboard the Enola Gay (the aircraft that dropped the bomb) and inside the exploding bomb.

Seven Winters in Tehran

March 2023 •Persian

After seven years in prison, a female student in Tehran is hanged for murder. She had acted in self-defence against a rapist. For a pardon, she would have had to retract her testimony. This moving film reopens the case.

Phantasia

March 2024 •

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Mossad L'Histoire Secrète d'Israël

July 2019 •French

Leningrad. Stimmen einer belagerten Stadt

January 2024 •German

It was one of the great crimes of the Second World War: from 1941 to 1944, a total of 872 days, the siege and starvation of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht on Hitler's orders lasted. Over a million people fell victim to the blockade, most of them dying of hunger. Countless of these starving people wrote diaries with the last of their strength, and cameramen filmed in the paralyzed city. Evidence from the hell of the siege, many of the film recordings, but above all the written memories on which this documentary on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation is based, remained under lock and key after the war. The voices of those who had suffered through this terrible time should not be heard by anyone, because they did not fit the pathos of the Leningrad heroic song that was officially sung. Most of the recordings come from women. The writers feared neither the enemy nor the Communist Party or Stalin, who often proved incompetent in providing for the population.

Les Suppliques

July 2022 •French

Since the defeat, the Nazis, who were the masters of the occupied zone, and the French State, which had been ruling the so-called free zone since Vichy, ordered the Jews to take a census. From the spring of 1941, whether they had been French for several generations or naturalized for a few years, foreigners who had taken refuge in France or stateless people who had been driven out of their country, they were put on file, arrested or threatened at any time. Some wrote to the administration, or directly to Marshal Pétain, who seemed to them to be the last resort. These requests are called Suppliques. Men, women, sometimes children, tried as best they could, by all means, to loosen the trap. They address themselves to their executioners, but they do not know it.

Apollo 11: The Untold Story

July 2006 •English

Nearly forty years after the moon landing the men on the mission reveal what really happened. On how close the mission came to disaster.

Arkhé

May 2023 •Spanish

“Archeology” and “Archive” share the same roots. Both words come from “Arkhé”, the Greek word for “origin”. In the ruins of buildings, lost forever by earthquakes, as in the depth of the archives, we dig. What happened the morning of the big earthquake? The morning of September 19th 1985 is fading away in our memories. These recordings have never been seen. Unedited images of the catastrophe dug out by the archaeological adventure of an archivist that suffered with them. He dug and suffered until he could no longer see.

Atlal (Remnants)

Invalid date •English

'Atlal (Remnants)' is a fictional documentary that follows Bassam, a Palestinian man in his fifties, on a journey between the past and present. An abandoned school, the remains of a beach club, and a dusty cinema hold Bassam's cherished memories from his life in Qatar. Through personal archives and interviews with Bassam and his wife, Laila, we get a deeper look into their stories—slowly revealing the dismaying thoughts behind Bassam's nostalgia.

Amédée

June 2024 •French

In 1952, Amédée took his own life by jumping into the Seine. No one knows the reason for this tragic act. His story comes to us in bits and pieces.

The Exact Shape of The Islands

November 2012 •Spanish

For many, the name Malvinas/Falklands evokes an absurd war between England and Argentina in 1982. For Julieta Vitullo, the protagonist of this film, this tragic history becomes deeply personal 25 years later when she suffers a loss associated with her search to uncover that past, unfolding into a life-affirming struggle for renewal and rebirth. This film tells the story of two trips, one made in 2006 and the other in 2010. In the space between one trip and the next, between past and present, between the public and the private, between what can and cannot be told, the movie reflects on the possibilities of conveying extreme life experiences, presenting landscapes and sounds that suggest subtle contours of that shape, 'The Exact Shape of the Islands.'

Apollo 1

March 2025 •English

At the height of the space race, three U.S. astronauts are tapped as the first Apollo crew. With dazzling archival footage and exceptional access, this riveting documentary explores the tragic events that followed, shaking NASA to the core.

One Minute to Zero

September 1952 •English

An idealistic United Nations official learns the harrowing truth about war when she falls in love with an American officer charged with the evacuation of civilians. As hostilities escalate, the officer and his small detachment are left to hold the line until allied forces can be brought into action.

Dallas, une journée particulière

November 2013 •English

November 22, 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Through the perspective of various stakeholders, Patrick Jeudy attempts to trace step by step the progress of this black day in American History.

The Scars

March 2019 •Basque

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

When Forever Dies

August 2020 •English

An archival fiction feature about the eternal battle of the sexes, in which two star-crossed lovers trapped in a kingdom of shadows fight to keep their love alive as they gradually fall in hate. Their names are Forever Man and Forever Woman. They are embodied by actors and actresses from long-gone eras, but also by cartoon characters and puppet animations. Together they narrate the story of the euphoric ups and tragic downs of human existence. When Forever Dies, a virtuoso collage of film fragments from the Eye Filmmuseum archive, is an epic ode to largely unseen cinema anchored in the polarizing world of today.

Enjoy the Silence

June 2023 •Spanish

Haunted by the weight of an unfinished project, an architect battles insomnia by silencing distractions within his home. In the depths of silence, he confronts inner demons, leading to a haunting journey with a destructive outcome.

Manufractur

January 1985 •German

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

Einstein and the Bomb

February 2024 •English

What happened after Einstein fled Nazi Germany? Using archival footage and his own words, this docudrama dives into the mind of a tortured genius.