Hollywood Without Make-Up

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

The story of how Sicilian Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta (1928-2000), the Godfather of Two Worlds, revealed, starting in 1984, the deepest secrets of the organization, thus helping to convict the hundreds of mafiosi who were tried in the trial held in Palermo between 1986 and 1987.

Few amateur films with sound were produced in the 1930s and fewer remain extant. A charming artifact that demonstrates the expressive possibilities and technical limitations of amateur talkies, "The Spider and the Fly" includes a backyard Labor Day gathering, a trip to the Riverview Amusement Park, and a homemade Halloween parade of witches and ghouls.

In 1948, French singer Charles Aznavour (1924-2018) receives a Paillard Bolex, his first camera. Until 1982, he will shoot hours of footage, his filmed diary. Wherever he goes, he carries his camera with him. He films his life and lives as he films: places, moments, friends, loves, misfortunes.

The director Andrés Kaiser combines hundreds of amateur films and photographs from the treasure trove of images belonging to his migrant grandparents creating a cinematic firework of analogies.

Home movies and their unique place in popular culture are the subject of My Father's Camera. Director Karen Shopsowitz weaves the history of home movies together with footage shot by her father--amateur filmmaker Israel Shopsowitz. Equipped with her dad's old Super 8 camera, Karen traces the history of home movies from the 1920s through to the amateur explosion of the '30s and '40s and beyond. She interviews a lively line-up of scholars and collectors, such as early members of the Toronto Film Club, a Japanese-American archivist who sees home movies as an expression of cultural diversity and a collector who hosts popular Webcasts that highlight new acquisitions.

For over 40 years Val Kilmer, one of Hollywood’s most mercurial and/or misunderstood actors has been documenting his own life and craft through film and video. He has amassed thousands of hours of footage, from 16mm home movies made with his brothers, to time spent in iconic roles for blockbuster movies like Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, and Batman Forever. This raw, wildly original and unflinching documentary reveals a life lived to extremes and a heart-filled, sometimes hilarious look at what it means to be an artist and a complex man.

A film exploring the life of “Weird Paul.” After 30 years, 2000 videos, 800 songs, & 42 albums, he’s still not giving up on his dream.

In this home movie collection of gay men, memory serves as an act of hope, power, and above all, resilience.

Memory is a collaboration with musician Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), exploring the relationship between a musician and filmmaker and their personal reflection on memories. From Super 8 home movies and entirely handmade, this film explores familiar memories, the present moment combined with past experiences and how it all seems to evade from our present memory.

La petite maison toujours dans la prairie

A dream walk through the United States of America; a meditation on the thoughts and ideals of its inhabitants, as they are exposed in their silent but eloquent home movies.

This documentary is a record of moments with family, friends, travels, outings, and a passion that Carla inherited from her father. The need to encapsulate time led her to film her daily life with Bahian friends in Barcelona, a city where she lived the best of her youth for eight years. When she decided to return to Brazil, everything took on new significance. It was then that she began the project of making a documentary to immortalize that period. The casual recordings turned into an obsession, and her friends were interviewed, totaling more than 50 hours of filmed memories and a year of editing in Brazil. This process was a painful stagnation in the past, an effort to make sense of material that fed a difficult feeling to overcome: longing. The result is a delicate film that reflects on exile, memory, time, family, change, and life.

Filmmaker Jan Oxenberg narrates her own home videos, commenting on how her views towards lesbianism and femininity have evolved over time.

David Lloyd George tours Germany, escorted by Nazi government officials, while his chauffeurs lark about with an SS Officer. Lloyd George was pro-German from the mid-1920s, and met Adolf Hitler in 1936. However, by 1938 he had become a leading opponent of appeasement with Germany. This film is believed to have been shot by George Ryder, Lloyd George's chauffeur.

The film is a travelogue of sorts. Ostrovsky’s personal family footage meets the archives of Soviet propaganda footage. The result is a kind of Khruschev-era mix with a collage of Soviet music and a voice-over of my reminiscences of the Cold War era.

The diaspora of Filipinos around the globe is driven mostly by the economics of supply and demand. The yearning for something better, stability, and self-validation leads a handful of sojourners from the provinces of the Philippines into the arms of one of its former colonial masters — the USA. But what happens when they finally get what they want? And how? Filmmaker Dennis Empalmado explores the musings of Filipino expatriates and hopeful immigrants in "Naglalakbay" (Travelers).

90's era home videos of a Mexican father starting a new life in the United States

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With the help of the attending hands, the mother expels the placenta. The infant, a baby girl, nurses. We return from time to time to the bath scene. By the end, dad's excited; mother and daughter rest. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

Before he went on to direct "Jawbreaker" and "Sparkler," Darren Stein grew up making videos. Along with his friend Adam Shell and the other neighborhood kids, these young film makers touched on such adult subjects as jealousy, cruelty, and sexuality.