Frida Kahlo

The Mona Lisa Myth

Seemayer Studios presents a new documentary about the American Hotel in downtown Los Angeles and the Arts District that surrounds it. Since 1979, the American Hotel has been the beating heart of a rich community of artists who began moving into the deserted factory buildings between Alameda and the Los Angeles River.

April 1994 in the Lacandona Jungle, Chiapas, México. The Zapatista women talk about the living conditions of Mexican indigenous populations and the life of peasant women. They explain the reasons for their struggle and their uprising.

In the 50 years since he carved his first totem pole, Robert Davidson has come to be regarded as one of the world’s foremost modern artists. Charles Wilkinson (Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World) brings his trademark inquisitiveness and craftsmanship to this revealing portrait of an unassuming living legend. Weaving together engaging interviews with the artist, his offspring, and a host of admirers, Haida Modern extols the sweeping impact of both Davidson’s artwork and the legions it’s inspired.

Claude Lelouch was a Jewish child in occupied France. In this documentary, he talks about the trauma he still feels from that experience, but also how it inspired him to become a filmmaker. The 1940s appear to be a formative period, key to understanding the work and career of this famous director, whose films and life have always been inseparable.

Depero: Rovereto, New York and Other Stories is the first documentary film focused on the artist from Trentino, Fortunato Depero. The film investigates the figure of a man who was able to go beyond the codified circuits of the art world: his work ranges from painting to theater, from set design to photography, the applied arts to opera on radio, publishing and advertising design. Fortunato Depero was rediscovered in the late seventies and re-evaluated in the nineties thanks to the attention dedicated to him by some scholars and the keen interest of his works by French and American audiences who saw in him the most significant artist of the Futurist movement.

A journey into the secret world of 76-year-old Renaldo Kuhler, a scientific illustrator who invented an imaginary country to survive his disaffected youth.

Rosa is a Mexican woman who, at the age of 17, migrated illegally to Austin, Texas. Some years later, she was jailed under suspicion of murder and then taken to trial. This film demonstrates how the judicial process, the verdict, the separation from her family, and the helplessness of being imprisoned in a foreign country make Rosa’s story an example of the hard life of Mexican migrants in the United States.

Working closely with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Sunflowers goes beyond a ‘virtual exhibition’, delving into the rich and complex stories behind each of the paintings to unveil the mysteries of the sunflowers. What did the flowers mean to Van Gogh, and why do they resonate so much with audiences today? With a striking portrayal of the artist by actor Jamie de Courcey and fascinating insights from art historians, botanists and everything in between, the film offers a unique insight into Van Gogh’s life and artwork.

The artist J.M.W. Turner is widely recognised as England’s greatest painter. Tate has the world’s finest and most extensive collection of his work. Turner at Tate explores Turner’s art through many of his best-known canvases and exquisite sketches and watercolours, all newly and exceptionally filmed in HDTV from the original artworks. Incorporating the landscapes and places that inspired the works, the film provides an overview of Turner’s life and - in an accessible and engrossing way - of critical approaches to his art. The film’s focus is Turner and England, and his work is considered against the radical social and political changes of the early nineteenth century. Turner at Tate is a film about ideas and history and landscape, a film about colour and light. Contributors include Tate curators Ian Warrell and David Blayney Brown, and art historians Sam Smiles and Barry Venning. Also featured on the DVD are ten additional short films, each of which considers in detail a major work.

A Brazilian performance artist Vanesa Cardoso living in Newfoundland, Canada explores the figures of her Pochinko clown, discovering a desire to expose the comedy of our deepest vulnerabilities - the very ones that make us human. A creative journey through Richard Pochinko's seven masks and six directions, Vanessa reveals her clown while musing on the personal drive and struggles that inspire her art.

Caravaggio a Roma - Il viaggio del Giubileo

Controversy erupts over a New-Deal-era mural of the namesake of San Francisco’s George Washington High School. The thirteen-panel artwork "The Life of Washington" by Victor Arnautoff offers a view of the Founding Father both celebratory and critical, referencing his involvements in slavery and Native American genocide.

Short documentary about a transexual sex worker.

He was born different, and chose to become unique. Becoming Lucky Love follows how Luc Bruyère turned his “flaw” into strength and his life into an act of creation. Born without his left arm, he faced the violence of people’s gaze from childhood, sinking into shame and self-destruction. “I was born homosexual, without a left arm — I didn’t fit what a man was expected to be: a figure without nuance, categorical,” Luc confides. Instead of giving up, he chose to transform himself and become what he had always dreamed of: a singer and performer. With his angelic face and magnetic presence, nothing seems to resist him — yet his blazing loves and excesses marked him deeply. Now, on the verge of turning 30, he looks back without filters. Becoming Lucky Love paints the portrait of an avant-garde, captivating outsider who proves that destiny can be endlessly reinvented through strength, poetry, and self-invention.

Documentary about belgian illustrator Félicien Rops (1833-1898) whose works combined eroticism and death in a very provocative way.

Obvious, hackers de l'art

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.

Len Lye (1901-1980) was a pioneer of experimental animation, and also of kinetic sculpture. This short film dramatically presents 18 minutes inside the head of the artist as a teenager. The opening scenes are set in New Zealand in the year 1917, on the day when Lye (setting out on his bicycle to deliver newspapers) makes his excited discovery that motion can be the basis for a radically new approach to art.

The inner world of the great painter Max Ernst is the subject of this film. One of the principal founders of Surrealism, Max Ernst explores the nature of materials and the emotional significance of shapes to combine with his collages and netherworld canvases. The director and Ernst together use the film creatively as a medium to explain the artist's own development.