]Directed by Billy Woodberry | 89 mins | 2015
Assembled from archival footage, new interviews, and readings from such figures as Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, this high-spirited screen portrait of the late African American Beat poet and bon vivant Bob Kaufman is given an appropriately nimble, jazzy f...

Leaving May 1

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 fil...

Directed by RaMell Ross | 76 mins | 2018
The results of five years of living among African American families in rural Hale County, Alabama—also the setting of Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Ross’s debut feature documentary is a lyrical and loving treatment ...

Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis | 101 mins | 2016
Davis’s documentary on the LA Rebellion, a surge of artistically ambitious, far-from-the-mainstream Black-American-directed films that came out of southern California—specifically, out of the UCLA film production program—beginning in the late ’70s...

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 May 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 Book...

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 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 Clio Barnard | 91 mins | 2010
Andrea Dunbar’s first play, "The Arbor"—a grimly autofictional work about a Yorkshire schoolgirl who falls pregnant, named for the council estate where she lived—premiered in London’s West End when she was just 18. By her untimely death at age 29, she’d p...

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...

Directed by Travis Wilkerson | 90 mins | 2017
A particularly lacerating take on the “home movie,” Wilkerson’s film excavates the buried story of his own great-grandfather’s murder of a Black man in c. 1946 Dothan, Alabama, an inquest that puts him in conflict with contemporary residents of the to...

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 Klára Tasovská | 90 mins | 2024
Oft referred to as the Nan Goldin of Czechoslovakia, Libuše Jarcovjáková chronicled after-dark Prague in the 1970s and ’80s, her photographs of let-it-all-hang-out gay clubs, factory hands working the third shift, and clandestine parties giving a pictur...

Directed by Dónal Foreman | 74 mins | 2018
An otherwise impossible conversation between two men of different generations, both filmmakers, is instigated via cinema itself in this probing and achingly personal essay film. Dónal Foreman grew up in Dublin, estranged from his father, the documentaria...

Directed by Nadia Shihab | 88 mins | 2018
“I don’t make art to make pretty things,” Lahib Jaddo tells her daughter, filmmaker Nadia Shihab. “I make it because it helps me understand my life.” In "Jaddoland," Shihab searches for deeper understanding of the diasporic experience of home through the ...

Directed by Lynne Sachs | 74 mins | 2020
One man, Ira Sachs Sr., refracted through a host of familial voices and a variety of film formats, the technology evolving over the course of 25 years of shooting. As one of the numerous children he sired with different women—with not all of his progeny kn...

Directed by Sierra Urich | 100 mins | 2023
Sierra Urich has never been to Iran, nor can she speak Farsi. Her mother Mitra fled her native country in 1979, on the cusp of the revolution, eventually settling in rural Vermont. Mitra’s own mother followed 16 years later; still, she speaks very little...

Directed by Lea Glob | 116 mins | 2022
With her intense gaze and assured manner, the artist who gives Lea Glob’s documentary its title, a French painter born into the Parisian counterculture, is a figure of considerable magnetism. Filmed over the course of 13 years, from Apolonia’s early twenties...

Directed by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan | 90 mins | 2023
Electricity is coming to a tiny village located in Nagaland, in north-eastern India—one of the material impacts of the 2015 Naga Peace Accord, intended to quell the activities of the region’s deep-rooted separatist insurgent moveme...

Directed by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan | 83 mins | 2024
Filmed in the lush, remote forests of the Eastern Himalayas at the India-Bhutan border, Dutta and Srinivasan’s exquisitely crafted documentary immerses the viewer in the hidden nocturnal life of a little-seen corner of the globe, o...