In Search of Pure Colour: Pierre Bonnard 1867-1947

Tattooing — "the world's oldest skin game" — is the subject of this iconic documentary. Writer/director Geoff Steven scored a major coup by signing Easy Rider legend Peter Fonda as his presenter. Travelling to Aotearoa, Samoa, Japan and the United States, the doco traces key developments in tattooing, including its importance in the Pacific, prison-inspired styles, and the influence of 1960s counterculture. Legendary tattooists feature (including Americans Ed Hardy and Jack Rudy), while the closing credits parade some eye-opening full body tattoos.

Seeing is to painting what listening is to politics. Survival as an artist demands both. Paint Until Dawn is a documentary on art in the life of James Gahagan (1927-1999), who painted all night to push the limits of vision. His life and thought reveal a correlation between art and activism through an interesting angle: the creative process itself.

In Pablo Picasso's career, a blue and pink period gets the attention they deserve. It is between 1901 and 1907 that the seeds of all his future work lie, for it is then that Picasso turned his back on his father's teachings and broke free from academic constraints and himself at the beginning with everything that crossed his path. This documentary takes a look at Picasso's various metamorphoses, shaped by a struggle between zest for life and dark thoughts. A world shared by his friend Jaime Sabartés, who wrote it in a collection of memoirs. Art documentary (2018) by Gaëlle Royer.

Murales

This is the legendary meeting between a young filmmaker and one of the masters of surrealism: the spanish painter Óscar Domínguez, born in La Laguna, Tenerife, in 1906, died in Paris in 1957. In the "Visite," the artist -admirer of Picasso, rebellious disciple of Breton- is presented in solitude, far from the tumult of the exhibitions and parisian circles. An austere approach, almost “povera”, with no audio, nor flashy camera movements, but rarely attractive. Why Resnais could not finish his movie? Hope one of our experts help us to solve the mystery.

Tracing the Future follows In the Wake exhibition artist Naoya Hatakeyama as he photographs the devastated landscape of his hometown of Rikuzentakada after 3/11. Hatakeyama, who represented Japan in the 2001 Venice Biennale and is renowned for meticulous photographs that explore the relationship between humankind and nature, suffered enormous losses on 3/11: his family home was washed away in the tsunami and his mother lost her life. Tracing the Future delves into the artist’s deeply personal response to the disaster and explores his four-year-long mission of documenting the place of his upbringing.

Rutinas

Anton Spielmann (18) and his two younger friends Basti Muxfeldt and Jonas Hinnerkort are living in their family homes with their parents in an idyllic village close to Hamburg. The three of them founded the band 1000 Robota. The band has an ambitious aim: „We want to cause creation not to remind of it”, and they want to live up to their ideals. In a society affected by economic pressure 1000 Robota are questioning themselves and others and they don‘t want to meet other people‘s expectations. In a world of excessive supply they are looking for significance and want to unite with others to create a new way of youth culture. But soon they have to face some serious difficulties.

Michael Palin discovers the story of 17th-century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi. He unearths not only her paintings, but a complex and difficult life.

"What we were trying to do was the ultimate form of architecture, which was predicting how society would use space, land and time." Curtis Schreier, ANT FARM Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm is the first film to consider the work of the renegade 1970s art/architecture collective Ant Farm, best known for its iconic land-art piece Cadillac Ranch. Radical architects, video pioneers, and mordantly funny cultural commentators, the Ant Farmers created a body of deeply subversive multidisciplinary work that questioned the boundaries of architecture and everything else in the process. Incorporating breathtaking archival video, new footage shot over ten years and animation based on zany period sketches, this film is about the joy of creation in a time when there were no limits. —Beth Federici

A short documentary on how people view art and its value in today's society.

Bas Jan Ader rides his bike into a canal in Amsterdam.

This short film is part of a mixed media artwork of the same name, which also included postcards of Ader crying, sent to friends of his, with the title of the work as a caption. The film was initially ten minutes long, and included Ader rubbing his eyes to produce the tears, but was cut down to three and a half minutes. This shorter version captures Ader at his most anguished. His face is framed closely. There is no introduction or conclusion, no reason given and no relief from the anguish that is presented.

Through a poetic language, "White Noise" seeks to reflect on the whitening processes that Brazil suffered for 130 years, after the abolition of slavery. How it affects our offspring and makes it difficult to search for the identity of black people in a historically racist country.

Conceptual visual artist Ján Mančuška died in 2011. However, in his short 39 years of existence, he managed to create a number of remarkable works, many of which have been exhibited in renowned galleries around the world – including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA in New York. In his homeland, however, his work reflecting everyday life, social reality or the meaning of language has never achieved comparable fame. Together with the children of an artist who was not afraid to confront the public with the question of the meaning of art, the director embarks on a journey that aims not only to get closer to Mančuška, but also to reveal him in hitherto unrecognised shades, thus filling in the gaps that are increasingly appearing in the context of the fading memory of his personality.

From tagging to piecing, this controversial documentary chronicles some of L.A.'s hottest graffitti writers and crews. Shot from a graffitti writers perspective, the question of whether it's art or vandalism is left for you to decide. Segments were featured on NBC News/Today Show.

Le grand roman de l'homme

On September 15th 2008, the day of the the collapse of Lehmans, the worst financial news since 1929, Damien Hirst sold over £60 million of his art, in an auction at Sotheby’s that would total £111 million over two days. It was the peak of the contemporary art bubble, the greatest rise in the financial value of art in the history of the world. One art critic and film-maker was banned by Sotheby’s and Hirst from attending this historic auction: Ben Lewis.

Betty reveals her history through the images of her art and shows how she used her creative talent to promote women's sexual pleasure and health. Nearly 200 pieces of original art created over the last 45 years make this film a must see for art and sex lovers alike. Beginning with the early years of self-exploration to the courageous sharing of her own sexual growth, Betty Dodson teaches as she entertains. See this feminist icon as she has never been seen before, the artist, the sexual innovator and humanist all rolled into one dynamic person.

Oswaldo Guayasamín, one of the most renowned Latin American artists, with more than 600 portraits in his pictorial career, (among which are F. Mitterrand, Carolina de Mónaco, Juan Carlos I, Rigoberta Menchu) paints his self-portrait, while he tells us the foundations of his art.