A Queer Refugee’s Suitcase

When a documentary filmmaker returns to his native Kurdistan to document the refugees fleeing ISIS, he happens upon an abandoned 11-year-old girl lying in pain in the scorching heat and makes a fateful decision, which ends up shaping both their lives.

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Between the French La Nouvelle Vague and the Italian Neorealismo, Europe had been undergoing a continuous cinema transformation since the 1950s, while the ailing American studio system groaned under its own weight and inertia. New Hollywood had arrived with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, and already by 1968 it was changing how Hollywood thought and acted. The student film scene was getting ready to explode, and it knew it.

Shortly after German reunification, three residents of a quiet area north of Berlin talk about their plans and attempts at new economic beginnings amid the changes brought by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

No Jewish divorce is complete without the man literally giving the woman her freedom back. With Israel having neither civil marriage nor divorce, women can get trapped. The film follows several such "chained" women together with Batya, a religious lawyer, who embarks on a struggle against the rabbinical courts.

Employing experimental techniques, Emshwiller magically moved through a collection of objects and artifacts in order to capture the spirit of George Dumpson and his backyard museum.

German writer Uwe Johnson lived for several years in the 1960s on Manhattan’s Upper Westside where he got to know his neighborhood very well, observing the goings-on in the streets, cafeterias, and parks. In 1968 German Television agreed to co-produce a film for broadcast featuring interviews with various neighborhood characters.

Hansjürgen Pohland's short documentary is an audiovisual study that captures events and people on the streets on film. The special feature of the work is that the people and objects are portrayed exclusively through their shadows.

Papel de Parede

Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough-- His challenge was to make the politics human.

A prefabricated estate in Moscow is meant as a transit stop for four queer Cuban exiles – until Russia’s attack on Ukraine radically shifts their outlook. Moving telephone calls back home provide the structure of Luís Alejandro Yero’s debut work.

The short film follows Endika, a director who, in the midst of a clash with his reality, transforms a documentary about paternal absence into a personal quest for reconciliation with his own father.

Three arrested and detained undocumented immigrants must navigate the system to fight impending deportation.

A farming community gathers on a plateau on the border of three regions for the funeral of traditional agriculture. It’s a film to ward off the disappearance of a millenary culture.

Footage of Québec City locations and the artwork of well-known Quebec animator Frédéric Back are used to tell the tale of Champlain’s life in New France – from his first explorations and settlement to his death in 1635.

Short documentary presents a high-tension soccer match from the perspective of an ever-vigilant referee.

Las cosas simples

This extraordinary film interweaves the stories of three close lesbian friends: Joyce Fulton, who died over the course of two years from a brain tumor; Mary Bell Wilson, who, with indefatigable courage, faces up to her own losing battle with lymphoma; and Nan Golub, a black-leather-jacketed, platinum-dyed New York city artist, very much alive. Liberty demystifies death, dispels misinformation about age and sexual orientation and reminds us that life is worth living, even worth celebrating.

This 5-part series is the most intimate, comprehensive biography ever made on John and Paul. Told almost entirely through their own words and music, with information culled from a variety of direct sources and compiled in a way that has never been done before, it directly challenges many of the dominant narratives in Beatles mythology.

A series of in-depth conversations with Poet Laureate Rita Dove—conducted and recorded by Eduardo Montes-Bradley between September 2012, and October 2013. The film explores the poet's life, exposing fundamental facts of Dove's childhood and formative years growing up in Akron, Ohio in the 1950s and during the turbulent 1960s, supplemented by selections from hundreds of still images and several hours of home movies from the Dove family's collection.