Achieving the Unachievable

The illustrator and author paints scenes from a 70-year-long career, including his work with Roald Dahl. With David Walliams, Joanna Lumley, Peter Capaldi, Ore Oduba and Michael Rosen.

Letter from Tokyo is a documentary film that looks at art, culture and politics in Tokyo, Japan. Shot over three months during the summer of 2018, and with a particular focus on grass roots arts initiatives, the use of public space, and queer politics, the film provides a snapshot of Japan’s capital in the run up to the 2020 olympics.

Chewing gum sculptures, a wealthy gallerist, a notorious murder case, and the segregated south - it's all part of Nellie Mae Rowe's boundless universe. This World Is Not My Own reimagines this self-taught artist's world and her life spanning the 20th century.

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.

During the 1980 exhibition of Burden's monumental kinetic sculpture The Big Wheel at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, Burden and Feldman were interviewed by art critic Willoughby Sharp. Burden articulates the process of creating The Big Wheel, a 6,000-pound, spinning cast-iron flywheel that is initially powered by a motorcycle, and discusses its relation to his earlier performance pieces and sculptural works. Addressing his motivations and the meaning of this potentially dangerous mechanical art object, Burden discusses such topics as the role of the artist in the industrial world, "personal insanity and mass insanity," and "man's propensity towards violence."

A witty and mind-expanding exploration of data, with mathematician Dr Hannah Fry. This high-tech romp reveals what data is and how it is captured, stored, shared and made sense of. Fry tells the story of the engineers of the data age, people most of us have never heard of despite the fact they brought about a technological and philosophical revolution.

"A country without artists is a dead country... I hope we are alive..." It is in this film by Fawzi Sahraoui produced by the RTA in 1985 and filmed a few months before the painter M'hamed Issiakhem 'turns off this sentence is spoken. A very interesting docu-fiction in which Issiakhem delivers himself with finesse, passion and generosity.

Through an interview with Kiarostami in the Aran Islands and interviews with film critics and scholars at Cannes, the director examines Kiarostami's themes and methods. The director also profiles Kiarostami as a poet and a photographer.

Angkor et Les Mystères de L'Empire Khmer

The Mona Lisa Curse is a Grierson award-winning polemic documentary by art critic Robert Hughes that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. With his trademark style, Hughes explores how museums, the production of art and the way we experience it have radically changed in the last 50 years, telling the story of the rise of contemporary art and looking back over a life spent talking and writing about the art he loves, and loathes. In these postmodern days it has been said that there is no more passé a vocation than that of the professional art critic. Perceived as the gate keeper for opinions regarding art and culture, the art critic has supposedly been rendered obsolete by an ever expanding pluralism in the art world, where all practices and disciplines are purported to be equal and valid. Robert Hughes, however, is one art critic who has delivered a message that must not be ignored.

In 1976, the Tate Gallery exhibited an experimental artwork that became a national sensation - Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, or, to its detractors, 120 bricks laid on the floor. This documentary explores the origins of Andre's work and the extraordinary fallout from its exhibition.

In April 2013, a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire submitted a paper to the Annals of Mathematics. Within weeks word spread: a little-known mathematician, with no permanent job, working in complete isolation, had made an important breakthrough toward solving the Twin Prime Conjecture. Yitang Zhang's techniques for bounding the gaps between primes soon led to rapid progress by the Polymath Group, and a further innovation by James Maynard.

An intimate journey through the formative years of David Lynch's life. From his idyllic upbringing in small town America to the dark streets of Philadelphia, we follow Lynch as he traces the events that have helped to shape one of cinema's most enigmatic directors.

Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.

Deeply thoughtful and illuminating, DRAWING A LIFE reveals the details of artist Geoff McFetridge’s life and work while delving further into the universal questions of what makes a fulfilling life and how to live with intention in the limited time we all have.

Stonecutters emigrated from northern Italy to Barre, Vermont, the "Granite Capital of the World." Follow the artisans and their families from quarries, workshops and schools in Italy to granite carving sheds in New England, as they seek their own identities, choosing what to keep and what to cut away from their American and Italian legacies.

At the Vienna Art Academy in 1994, an unidentified person painted over 27 works by Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer. Rainer had become world-famous for his abstract art and, in particular, for his over-layering of photographs and overpainting of his own and other artists’ works. But who painted over the “overpainter”? Speculation rages: Did he attack his works himself? A year later, an unsigned letter surfaces claiming responsibility for the act directed against Rainer – and modern art in general – and accusing the artist of being complicit with “destructive modernism.” At the same time, Austria is shaken by a series of mail bombs by the Bajuwarian Liberation Army, in response to the supposed threat to Austria’s “German identity.” Are there connections between the overpainting event and the mail bombs? Or is this all just a game? A dream? Or perhaps a hallucination?

Jim Dine: A Self-Portrait on the Walls is a 1995 American short documentary film about artist Jim Dine produced by Nancy Dine and Richard Stilwell. The film follows Dine as he produces an exhibition by drawing in charcoal directly on the walls of a German museum. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Milah van Zuilen, visual artist and forest ecologist in training, uses the square to deal with the habit of people to construct nature. Square Fieldwork is filmed in the Bohemian forest in the Czech Republic and the concrete structure of Barendrecht, The Netherlands.

"Too much Picasso kills Picasso?" In France as in a lot of other parts of the world Pablo Picasso's art and life is on exhibition. An episode of Le Figaro's Les Décrypteurs.