Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” Filmed in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey by activist-turned-filmmaker Bernard Nicolas as his first project at UCLA, this short film poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities. —Allyson Nadia Field
This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
Borrowing its title from an experimental text by Walter Benjamin. Many years ago, the cities by the river were gripped by a contagion. Things started to change and everything slowly became something else. It was not clear if transformation was a symptom of the disease or a way to escape it. The contagion touched everything and everyone: animals and plants, stones and soil, men, women and children, their thoughts, their dreams, their memories. An old woman once told me how all memories turn into trees, I could hardly make out what she was saying. She said she could hear the trees singing: To be a body, to be any body. After the years of contagion ended, the cities appeared untouched. One had to look hard to see the traces of the previous time. If one could listen to the trees, what would they say? A way out, a way out?
Footage shot for Orson Welles' unfinished and unreleased film project, edited into a short documentary.
A large immigration raid in a small Tennessee town leaves emotional fallout as well as far-reaching questions about justice, faith and humanity.
Son and father are driving on the highway. The son keeps asking questions until he finally notices the changes in his father's body. The dialogue in the animation is taken from a recording of a real conversation between the filmmaker and his father.
A young woman of the Tarahumara, well-known for their extraordinary long distance running abilities, wins ultramarathons seemingly out of nowhere despite running in sandals.
A non-narrative voyage round Sedlec Ossuary, which has been constructed from over 50,000 human skeletons (victims of the Black Death).
An agoraphobic man traps himself in an astronaut costume to avoid the disastrous consequences of his condition
Four documentary scenes with subtitles document the year 1917 as the beginning of a new era. In addition to the military situation and the supply situation in Germany, the intervention of the USA and the events in Russia are shown in particular.
Wallace and Gromit have run out of cheese, and this provides an excellent excuse for the duo to take their holiday to the moon, where, as everyone knows, there is ample cheese. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.
The city of Madrid as it appears in the Spanish films of the 1950s. A small tribute to all those who filmed and portrayed Madrid despite the dictatorship, censorship and the critical situation of industry and society.
The film explores the history of the United Order of Tents, a clandestine organization of black women in the 1840s, during the height of the Underground Railroad (a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the US during the early to mid-1800s, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada).
Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Don Bartletti shares heart wrenching stories from his forty year career documenting history as it unfolds. Internationally recognized for his commitment to photographing the migration of Central Americans to the United States, Bartletti’s images reveal the never ending saga of illegal immigration by individuals desperate to improve their lives.
The unfathomable police murder of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020, sparked a global uprising, the epicentered in a Minneapolis neighborhood. An immersive observation of unrest in the five days between the murder of Mr. Floyd and the charges filed against police officer Derek Chauvin.
After the killing of George Floyd, a queer black woman in Los Angeles is determined to capture the spirit of a mass social movement, so she hits the streets, camera in hand.
Coded tells the story of illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, whose legacy laid the foundation for today's out-and-proud LGBTQ advertisements.
The Spanish journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales (1897-1944) was always there where the news broke out: in the fratricidal Spain of 1936, in Bolshevik Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, in occupied Paris or in the bombed London of World War II; because his job was to walk, see and tell stories, and thus fight against tyrants, at a time when it was necessary to take sides in order not to be left alone; but he, a man of integrity to the bitter end, never did so.
During an abortion, 17-year-old Yang gives birth to a live jellyfish in her bathroom.
A beautiful collection of pictures ties Frank Cancian, an elderly photographer and retired professor of anthropology, American with origin from Veneto, to the people of Lacedonia, a small town in southern Italy. Thanks to the rediscovery of the photos taken in 1957 by the young Cancian in that rural village where he had arrived almost by chance, the story resumes there where it was interrupted 60 years earlier. And the thread of memories ties back to people and places, bringing with itself some essential reflections on how photography can become an ethnographic look at small communities.