The Windmill Movie
All Films
•
1h 20m
Directed by Alexander Olch | 82 mins | 2008
“What if someone else wrote your autobiography?” That is the question posited by Alexander Olch as he tells the life-story of his former Harvard professor, the filmmaker Richard P. Rogers. For twenty years, Rogers worked on an autobiographical portrait that remained incomplete upon his death in 2001. Hours and hours of footage, stored on hard drives in the home Rogers shared with his partner, the acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas, were discovered, and form the foundation of this exploration of the scion of an old New York family who chose the life of the artist. Olch doesn’t tell Rogers’ story as much as creates it, filling in and conjuring what didn’t exist. The Windmill Movie may bear a passing resemblance to the frequently labeled “hybrid-documentary,” but it is in fact completely singular, a film-form unto itself.
Up Next in All Films
-
The Woman Who Ran
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 77 mins | 2020
Hong mines wisdom and wit out of a deftly presented and deceptively simple scenario: a young woman’s visits to three of her friends while her husband’s away. In insightful, unpredictable conversations with people at different points in their lives, Gamhee... -
This Is Not a Film
Directed by Jafar Panahi | 75 mins | 2011
Placed on house arrest by the Iranian government and forbidden from any further filmmaking activity for the following 20 years, Panahi used the slender resources at his command—his own apartment as a “set,” the aide of friends, including credited co-direc... -
This Woman
Directed by Alan Zhang | 91 mins | 2023
Feminist activist and multihyphenate artist Zhang’s directorial debut is a raw, often revelatory docufiction experiment that follows Beibei (Li Hehe), a recently unemployed 35-year-old woman who, in the early months of the pandemic, finds solace from an unf...
