Directed by Abba Makama | 95 mins | 2019
What’s the opposite of Afrofuturism? In Abba Makama’s lively and comedic low-budget fable, Raymond, a disenchanted Lagos security guard, wakes up as a masked mass of shimmying purple raffia: he’s been transformed into a traditional Igbo spirit. No longer a...

Leaving May 1

Directed by Mary Stephen | 20 mins | 2018
Breezy but poignant, this beautifully constructed short contemplates the hardiness of cultural roots from two vantage points: the first, belonging to a filmmaker who returns to her native Hong Kong after decades abroad in order to teach; th...

Directed by Catarina Vasconcelos | 101 mins | 2020
A metaphor-rich magic realist metafiction memoir, Vasconcelos’s hybrid documentary debut feature tells the story of the filmmaker’s family history—in particular, her grandparents’ love affair and her commiseration with her father over the early l...

Leaving May 1

Directed by Peter Greenaway | 126 mins | 1995
Made from animal skins, parchment has been used as a medium for language since ancient times; in Peter Greenaway’s sumptuous, Hong Kong–set fabulation, the human body is the preferred site of expression, and the act of inscription an er...

Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson | 97 mins | 1978
John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, co-directors of Cannes Camera d’Or winner Northern Lights and fellow members of San Francisco’s Cine Manifest film collective, collaborated on this remarkable series of documentaries underwritten by the North Da...

Directed by Marcus Lindeen | 97 mins | 2018
In the summer of 1973, a young international crew of six women and five men embarked together on a most unusual sea voyage—a close-quarters trip across the Atlantic from Spain to Mexico on a free-floating raft christened the Acali, initiated by Mexican ...

Directed by Evelyn Lambart | 8 mins | 1973
Evelyn Lambart, considered the “First Lady of Canadian animation,” illustrates the familiar tale of Jesus’s conception and birth in the luminous and symbol-rich fashion of a medieval manuscript.

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 ...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 162 mins | 1999
“The best way to adapt something for film is to dream it,” quipped Raúl Ruiz. This apparently facetious remark nevertheless captures something of the feeling of the Chilean master’s lauded adaptation of Proust’s seven-volume opus, "In Search of Lost Time" (...

Directed by Henry Jaglom | 92 mins | 1976
Dennis Hopper, in the depths of his decade-long exile from Hollywood, channels his livewire, damaged intensity into the role of Jack Falen, a soldier returned from Vietnam and on a mission to restore the body of his friend to his hometown by way of the Am...

Directed by Shinji Sômai | 115 mins | 1985
Emotionally raw, enormously tender and, finally, tentatively hopeful, Sômai’s breakthrough film—winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival—observes a group of provincial junior high students who find themselves forced to take...

Directed by Amos Poe | 70 mins | 1976
Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character in "Breathless" (1960) thought he was Humphrey Bogart; Duncan Hannah’s character in this proto-No Wave work—a restless poseur slash photographer named Rico—thinks he’s Jean-Paul Belmondo. Released the same year as Poe’s "Blank G...

Directed by Bette Gordon | 100 mins | 1983
A young woman lands a job as a cashier at a downtown porno theater, and soon finds herself inexorably drawn towards what’s happening onscreen—as well as other troubling fantasies. One of the great independent films of the ’80s, featuring a who’s who of t...

Leaving May 1

Directed by Tsai Ming-liang | 118 mins | 1994
Tsai’s second feature is a masterful evocation of urban loneliness and longing, quietly devastating even in its forays into something like slowed-down slapstick. A love triangle takes shape when three people—including a repressed funera...

Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 4 mins | 2011
With its pack of flexing, thrusting figures, cold and white as if carved of marble, some handless or footless but still animated by amorous intentions, this transfixing, techno-set short evokes the surrealist imagery of Giorgio de Chirico.

Directed by Valeska Grisebach | 121 mins | 2017
Tensions rise during a work stoppage when a group of German laborers erecting a hydroelectric plant in rural Bulgaria suddenly find themselves with time to get into trouble in Grisebach’s patient, tonally precise, naturalist drama, which thoughtfull...

Directed by Óliver Laxe | 78 mins | 2010
Born from a filmmaking workshop the director conducted with underprivileged children in Tangier, Laxe’s feature debut takes this real-life scenario as its premise but lights off into uncharted terrain when the pupils, rankling at his oblivious paternalism,...

Leaving March 1

Directed by Lucrecia Martel | 115 mins | 2017
A scruffy bureaucrat for the Spanish crown hopelessly angles for ways to get ahead in this audacious vision of 18th-century colonial empire, adapted from Antonio de Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name. Don Diego’s anti-epic progre...