Leaving September 1

Directed by Maureen Blackwood | 41 mins | 1992
Founding member of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective Maureen Blackwood crafts a poignant multi-generational portrait of a Black family with deep roots in Scotland: early in the 20th century, well before the post-World War II ...

Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 2005
After an unsatisfactory attempt to make a film about the numerous mentally ill people who filled the streets of Dakar back in 1994, Sylla, in her own words “fell ill and crossed to the other side, seeing what others don’t see.” Now “living the experience f...

Directed by Khady Sylla and Mariama Sylla | 63 mins | 2014
Begun by Sylla and completed by her sister, Mariama, after Khady’s death in 2013, "A Single Word" connects the essay film to the oral historical tradition of the griots—West African storytellers, musicians, and poets who act as repositori...

Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 1999
Losing ground to more modern forms of transit today, the colorfully painted “car rapide” minibuses that criss-cross the crowded streets and avenues of Dakar at breakneck speed carrying passengers and merchandise have been icons of the city since first appe...

Directed by Camille Billops and James Hatch | 55 mins | 1991
An affecting yet unsentimental portrait of motherhood, Camille Billops’s collaboration with husband James Hatch captures her reunion with the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption in 1961, combining candid interviews and archi...

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 Rea Tajiri | 32 mins | 1991
A groundbreaking, highly influential work by the Chicago-born visual artist and filmmaker Rea Tajiri, this poetic tapestry of the personal and the political reckons with the internment of some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, amo...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Gurinder Chadha | 30 mins | 1990
The vivacious, Bhangra-infused debut of "Bend it Like Beckham" (2002) writer-director Gurinder Chadha takes an expansive look at what it means to be British through the eyes of second-generation migrants from Asia. From the partici...

Directed by Thom Andersen | 173 mins | 2003
Los Angeles, so the story goes, became the nation’s movie capital in part because of its proximity to a variety of different landscapes, easily re-cast as other, far-flung places. But how has the city represented itself on screen? Thom Anderson’s semina...

Directed by Werner Herzog | 99 mins | 1999
Amidst insults hurled, tantrums thrown, and some literal shots fired, Herzog’s collaboration with the notoriously explosive Klaus Kinski produced five indelible films, from 1972’s "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" to 1987’s "Cobra Verde". “Every gray hair on m...

Directed by Penny Lane | 79 mins | 2016
Thanks to a preternatural knack for self-promotion and a commitment to the medical possibilities of goat testicles, John Romulus Brinkley, born into poverty in 1885, acquired fame and fortune and very nearly become the governor of Kansas. Director Penny Lan...

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 Sepideh Farsi | 83 mins | 2009
Facing strict restrictions placed on filming by the Iranian government but eager nevertheless to capture the tense atmosphere in the streets of Tehran in the months before the controversial 2009 elections, Farsi began shooting with her Nokia cameraphone ...

Leaving September 1

Directed by Carol Morley | 50 mins | 2000
The opening of the Haçienda in 1982 begat a pop culture boom in Manchester, and Carol Morley, then just 16 years old, quickly became one of the club’s legendary party people. But Morley herself barely remembers those drink-drenched ye...

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 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 September 1

Directed by Molly Dineen | 39 mins | 1989
Molly Dineen's acclaimed documentary follows 48 hours in the life of London’s Angel tube station in the days before its refurbishment.

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 Book is a labyrinth...

Directed by Penny Lane | 71 mins | 2018
Taking Leslie Jamison’s 2013 Harper’s essay on Morgellons disease as a jumping off point, Penny Lane here assembles clips of YouTube vloggers claiming to suffer from the controversial disease purposefully and with great care. She draws her title from Susan ...

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...

Leaving February 1

Directed by Frank Simon | 68 mins | 1968
Welcome to the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, held at New York’s Town Hall! Simon’s essential document of queer history takes us backstage to rehearsals and dressing rooms at a drag competition organized by Flawless Sabrina...

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 Khady Sylla | 45 mins | 2008
Khady Sylla’s docudrama inquiry into the lives—inner and exterior—of Dakar’s female domestics, which employs scenes of improvised street theater, direct-address freestyle screeds, candid interviews, and inner monologue musings with the end of allowing its ...

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 ...