La Garoupe, a beach in Antibes, in 1937. For one summer, the painter and photographer Man Ray films his friends Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, as well as Lee Miller. During these few weeks, love, friendship, poetry, photography and painting are still mixed in the carefree and the creativity specific to the artistic movements of the interwar period.
In this documentary about low-budget filmmaking in upstate New York, you'll learn how affordable digital-video technology has changed the lives of the artists behind action flicks, monster movies, nonfiction stories, and comedies. "Every Pixel Tells a Story" introduces viewers to a wide range of independent filmmakers, all of whom prove that with a little ingenuity, access to the right technology, and plenty of tenacity, filmmakers can still practice their craft 3,000 miles from Hollywood. In fact, "Every Pixel Tells a Story" is an example of what can be accomplished on digital video. Producer-director Peter Hanson shot and edited the movie in a matter of weeks using a camcorder, a computer editing system, and a $30 microphone from Radio Shack, all while spending a fraction of what the documentary would have cost had it been shot on film.
Primary is a documentary film about the primary elections between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Primary is the first documentary to use light equipment in order to follow their subjects in a more intimate filmmaking style. This unconventional way of filming created a new look for documentary films where the camera’s lens was right in the middle of what ever drama was occurring. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1998.
Eight hundred German filmmakers (cast and crew) fled the Nazis in the 1930s. The film uses voice-overs, archival footage, and film clips to examine Berlin's vital filmmaking in the 1920s; then it follows a producer, directors, composers, editors, writers, and actors to Hollywood: some succeeded and many found no work. Among those profiled are Erich Pommer, Joseph May, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Peter Lorre. Once in Hollywood, these exiles helped each other, housed new arrivals, and raised money so others could escape. Some worked on anti-Nazi films, like Casablanca. The themes and lighting of German Expressionism gave rise in Hollywood to film noir.
Hawaii, May 1977. After the success of Star Wars, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg meet to find a new project to work on together, the former as producer, the latter as director. The story of how the charismatic archaeologist Indiana Jones was born and how his first adventure, released in 1981, triumphed at box offices around the world.
Get the scoop on the legendary actor-director-New Yorker John Cassavetes straight from the mouth of his friend, peer and co-star Peter Falk (Columbo) in Paul Joyce’s documentary, Out of the Shadows: The Films of John Cassavetes. Falk lays bare the quirks and gifts of the director of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and A Woman Under the Influence, and star of De Palma’s The Fury and Tarantino favourite Mikey and Nicky, in this outright and honest interview.
NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM -- its author Samuel Beckett, its star Buster Keaton, its production and its philosophical implications -- utilizing additional outtakes, never before heard audio recordings of the production meetings, and other rare archival elements.
A film about the career and methods of the master silent comedy filmmaker.
A look at the daily business of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, with a focus on some of the political issues he faces six weeks into his term. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.
This documentary revisits the making of Gone with the Wind via archival footage, screen tests, insightful interviews and rare film footage.
A documentary about the comedy director and producer Judd Apatow.
In 1981, iconic Turkish film director escapes jail to France, his last work re-creating with other exiles the prison lives they left behind.
Expedition China invites you on location in some of the world's most intense, hard-to-reach environments with the filmmakers of Disneynature's big-screen adventure Born in China.
A portrait of a street corner in flux.
In the film we find some scrap of slow motion they see a Monica Vitti trying to cry, a meeting between Antonioni and Grifi, a film shot in the concentration camp of Auschwitz with a survivor who recounts those awful moments, a glimpse of Palestine today, Grifi's reflections on the prison.
A behind-the-scenes look at the eleven-year process it took to make The Painted Bird. The narratives of director Václav Marhoul and actor Petr Kotlár weave their way through the various stages of the film's creation, offering their subjective views from the beginning to the last flap of a year-and-a-half long shoot.
(Always) Next to Me is a 16mm film that pairs abstract sequences of plants developed directly on the film emulsion with intertitles briefly describing what was going on for me personally at the moment the plants were collected. I started the film at the beginning of the pandemic, just after I found out I was pregnant for the first time in April 2020 and finished it just before the birth of my baby in December of the same year.
Barry Barclay was a New Zealand/Aotearoa director of documentaries and feature films. He is regarded as one of the world's first, and very influential, Indigenous film makers. The film The Camera on The Shore is a feature length introduction to Barry, and to his film making.
Interview-based documentary looking back on the making and reception of Nobuhiko Ōbayashi's 1977 film House.
In the mountains of Córdoba hides a historical scar. In 1575, hundreds of Hênia-Kâmîare women, children and elders jumped off in order to avoid slavery. A free, poetic view at the very place where the largest mass suicide in the history of the territory known today as Argentina took place. The film is a phantasmagoric trip within this geographical extension, taking it as a vast, green cemetery.