The Time Step

Celebrating the splendor and grandeur of the great cinemas of the United States, built when movies were the acme of entertainment and the stories were larger than life, as were the venues designed to show them. The film also tracks the eventual decline of the palaces, through to today’s current preservation efforts. A tribute to America’s great art form and the great monuments created for audiences to enjoy them in.

An undocumented immigrant explores his and his family's immigration trauma while grasping hope through a voicemail.

A collection of 8mm film reels from İlhan Mimaroğlu’s archive—once tucked away in whisky boxes—has found new life through art. Curated by director Serdar Kökçeoğlu and producer Dilek Aydın, the project brings together visual artists and musicians to reimagine these long-lost images. Over thirty artists transformed the footage into fifteen distinct audiovisual pieces, blending experimental soundscapes with contemporary video art. The project concludes with a special highlight: the first-ever screening of Mimaroğlu’s silent short film about a street jazz festival, accompanied by Erdem Helvacıoğlu’s dark jazz score.

A short documentary and character study about a woman's complex relationship with religion and family.

A darkly beautiful visual essay that explores human emotion in response to societal standards. With a lone cello providing the soundtrack, this collage of archival footage from 1950’s-era films is a superb example of manipulation via sound and image (Dorothy Woodend, DOXA Documentary Film Festival)

Filmmaker Erin Hobden travels back to her home town to explore her father's documenting of her childhood.

A documentation and celebration of 13 years of the Horror-on-Sea film festival in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, U.K.

From the Marx Brothers to Schindler's List, this compilation of Jewish film trailers offers a glimpse at the history of Jews in American cinema. A mixture of humor, social commentary, and drama, these original coming attractions trailers offer insight into the relationship between Hollywood's studio marketing departments and the growing visibility of Jews in American life. Trailers Schmailers includes spotlights on Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand, an overview of films about New York Jewish life, a look at the evolution of films about the holocaust, and more.

In Park City, Utah a group of independent filmmakers attend a shoestring film festival and experience the oft-regular disillusionment of the low budget film world. However, they enter the orbit of the one man running the show and decide to come back the following year to help and change what was a beautiful disaster the year before.

Hot Splice is a semi-serious short documentary that highlights how destructive film repairs leave behind raw materials to experiment and play with. In a mixture of archival video, 16mm film scans, inexplicable French narration, and Atlanta trap history, this short takes bits and pieces collected during my time as an archival assistant to make something nouveau.

A cheerful road movie all about Belgian films at Cannes over the past 70 years. Filmmakers from the past converse with those from the present to paint the portrait of a cinema that is both diverse and free. An account of Belgium’s participation in the greatest film festival in the world.

A timeline of transformation, compiled from 8 years' worth of photos by and of transgender actress and filmmaker Robyn Adams.

Film archivist and former director of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Jenni Olson created this fast-paced and often funny, campy 75-minute film comprised entirely of spliced together movie trailers. Some of the segments have themes such as a breezy look back at John Travolta's career that includes trailers from such films as Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive, Grease, Perfect, and Moment by Moment. Other trailers include Mae West in Sextette, the disco camper Thank God It's Friday, Raquel Welch in Kansas City Bomber, Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and the rarely seen Chastity, the serious acting debut of Cher.

Francesca Svampa’s dreamlike portrait of Barcelona, shot in double exposure on reversible 8mm film, is interwoven with Svampa’s intimate, reminiscent telling of her personal micro-memories, as a woman, filmmaker, and immigrant.

A short documentary about a trailer weighing over 300 tons that carries material for the construction of a dam toward Tokyo.

An early experimental film by Toshio Matsumoto. Produced as part of the student riots in Japan at the start of the 1960s, Matsumoto uses collage, archival footage, and impassioned narration to create an expressive, visceral criticism of the US-Japan Security Treaty.

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.

World-renowned director Martin Scorsese narrates this journey through his favorites in Italian cinema.

Beneath the millions of gallons of water that flow into homes across eastern Massachusetts is a story of buried history, scientific discovery, & individual hopes & dreams destroyed in the name of progress. Edward Klekowski, a UMass biology professor with a passion for scuba diving, chronicles an unprecedented search for the remains of four lost towns under the Quabbin Reservoir in Belchertown, MA

Director Robert Kolodny draws parallels between the Harry Houdini's conjuring power of sleight of hand and the creative process of hand crafting works of film. Commissioned for the 2026 True/False Film Festival.