If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.
I wasn’t told. I wasn’t told it would be so difficult to live together. To keep a family together. To maintain love and happiness. I wasn’t told, and if someone had told me I wouldn’t have listened. I chose to live with my camera in my hand, filming the trajectory of feelings, from the golden age to the lost paradise, from being born to being reborn.
Some people collect family albums. Sarmīte Sīle, an accomplished arts scholar, takes a nude photo of herself every ten years. Behind this unique series of nude photos that span a lifetime, is her story.
Follow Untitled.10 (Tyson Schultz & Levi Sternburg) as they prep for their 4th pop-up art gallery in Sioux Falls, SD.
A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.
After 40 years, Tom Cruise continues to push the envelope in film. Exposing one's heart to the world through their work is not only risky business, as far as Cruise is concerned, it is the only way to achieve an end that feels complete.
On January 1st, 1999, Caveh Zahedi started a one-year video diary. The idea was to shoot one minute each day. This is the result.
Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.
The untold state of mind dealing with an incurable disease. One is wondering if there's still a dream to achieve in life. One is running as if this free spirit of mine has never been taken away.
An intimate glimpse into 3 years of serene moments, compiling video, polaroids and other things that were lying around when editing.
A short documentary by Jim McBride.
Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.
An autobiographical essay film structured as a letter to the director’s young daughter, "Où en êtes-vous, Bertrand Bonello?" weaves clips from Bonello’s films, excerpts from his scripts, pop songs, and snippets of original footage into a lyrical, reflexive cinematic self-portrait. "Où en êtes-vous?" is a collection initiated by Centre Pompidou, who asked directors to make retrospective and introspective films.
"Mestre-espenya" is a self-portrait of Guillermo Amengual where he talks and thinks about his childhood and all the themes that have always been present in his life and films: death, family and innocence.
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.