Directed by Alain Kassanda | 89 mins | 2022
“How do you make a film from the oppressor’s archives?” In Kassanda’s documentary, familial bonds anchor a historical investigation: the Kinshasa-born, Paris-based director probes the colonial history of Congo and its journey to independence, interweavi...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alice Diop | 65 mins | 2011
Skillfully illustrating the persistence of racialized stereotyping and its impact on the individual, Diop’s documentary follows the professional struggles of a young Black actor from Aulnay-sous-bois, a disadvantaged community on the outs...

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. A film of unpreceden...

Directed by Deborah Stratman | 49 mins | 2023
In the artist and experimental film essayist Deborah Stratman’s scintillating latest work, life on earth—all the way through to its projected extinction—is envisioned from the perspective of rocks. Fusing hard science with speculative and poetic modes...

Directed by Hsiu-Chiung Chiang and Pun-Leung Kwan | 86 mins | 2009
A tender documentary portrait of the renowned cinematographer for Hou Hsiao-hsien as well as films by Wong Kar Wai ("In the Mood for Love"), Hirokazu Kore-eda ("Air Doll"), and Tran Anh Hung ("The Vertical Ray of the Sun"). A mast...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Jeff Malmberg | 82 mins | 2010
In Malmberg’s mesmerizing, multi-award-winning portrait of healing and obsession, Mark Hogencamp recovers from a brutal assault and alcoholism by building and tending to a miniature plywood town in his backyard. Populating the diorama ...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alice Diop | 97 mins | 2016
At the end of one of the corridors of the Avicennes Hospital in Bobigny, just outside of Paris, is a medical clinic for refugees: one of just a few in France, and the no-frills setting of this bracing piece of direct cinema. The dispassio...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 85 mins | 1985
“Discovering the work of filmmaker and the Film-Makers' Cooperative co-founder, Shirley Clarke made me aware of the wide range of cinema’s possibilities. This 1985 documentary shot in collaboration with the late Ornette Coleman, using a diverse array of...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 147 mins | 2008
Gomes’s magical mystery tour through the rich pageant of summertime Portugal blurs fiction and documentary as it chronicles a traveling family pop band, interviews with an array of folks in the country, and a fragile fictional love story. Gomes’s second ...

Directed by Penny Lane | 85 mins | 2013
Using an array of archival materials including television interviews, Nixon’s secretly recorded White House tapes, and more than 500 reels of long-out-of-circulation Super 8 home movies by presidential aides Dwight Chapin, John Ehrlichman, and H.R. Haldeman...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 107 mins | 1967
A distillation of a single 12-hour interview in a room at the Chelsea Hotel with the charismatic Jason Holliday (“real” name Aaron Payne), a gay, African American cabaret dancer, part-time hustler, and full-time raconteur, Portrait of Jason grows from ...

Directed by Claire Simon | 121 mins | 2016
The Competition begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals and accepting only 40 students per year from hundreds of...

Directed by Shirley Clarke | 110 mins | 1961
“Shirley Clarke’s The Connection based on and adapted by Jack Gelber is a film way ahead of its time. Arguably the first film to use the “found footage” trope to tell a fictional story. This film blew my mind when I first saw it, the direction and the ...

Directed by Peter Greenaway | 239 mins | 1980
Greenaway’s first feature, an epic mock documentary in 92 parts that catalogs the aftermath of a mysterious “Violent Unknown Event” that has killed many people, and left survivors suffering from symptoms including strange dreams and mutations into bir...

Directed by William Klein | 130 mins | 1982
“For me, this film encapsulates everything I loved and love about the tennis of that moment; and in the hands of the great and singular William Klein, it is at once a gripping sports page, a fascinating piece of reportage, and a work of art.”

—Wes Ande...

Leaving November 1

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 84 mins | 2019
A cinematic collage, an esoteric essay film, a wide-reaching, freewheeling ontological history of the moving image, and a sorrowful survey of the fallen world at the beginning of the 21st century, Special Palme d’Or winner The Image...

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 Abel Ferrara | 81 mins | 2019
Ferrara’s fond, often funny portrait of Nicolas “Nick” Nicolaou, a Cypriot immigrant who got his start in movie houses working in the Times Square porno theaters in the 1970s and has held on into the 21st century as an independent exhibitor in spite of ov...

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 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 ...

Leaving January 1

Directed by Alice Diop | 40 mins | 2016
Four young men from the Parisian banlieues discourse on sex and love in this up-close and confessional, César-winning exploration of the contemporary male gaze. As in "Danton’s Death" (2011), the filmmaker Alice Diop is present in the fil...

Directed by Sierra Pettengill and Jamila Wignot | 75 mins | 2013
Getting at the political through the personal, this documentary set in the lead-up to the 2012 election is a portrait of two Tea Party agitators in the battleground state of Pennsylvania: Katy, new to politics, and John, who has pre...