Directed by Kaige Chen | 171 mins | 1993
Art and life become inextricably entwined in Chen’s gorgeously arrayed triumph of costume and production design: an epic spanning 50 years of 20th-century Chinese history in the life of a troupe of Peking opera actors based on the 1985 Lilian Lee novel, an...

Directed by Ken Loach | 101 mins | 2012
Hewing closer to the spunky, good-hearted comedy of "The Full Monty" (1997) than one might expect from the director of "Kes" (1967), "The Angels’ Share" is a quaffable blend of Ken Loach’s trademark social critique and an offbeat crime caper. Together with ...

Directed by Roberto Minervini | 88 mins | 2024
Roberto Minervini followed his staggering Deep South missive "What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?" (2018) with this heady time capsule from the American Civil War’s Western front, for which he took home Un Certain Regard’s Best Director prize...

Directed by Birdy Hung | 12 mins | 2024
Giallo meets Edward Yang in Birdy Wei-Ting Hung’s oneiric, gorgeously photographed short, which filters a schoolgirl’s sexual awakening in 1980s Taiwan through a series of potent, cinema-induced daydreams.

Directed by Yuri Illienko | 73 mins | 1965
Though Yuri Illienko completed his feature debut in the same year as Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors—on which he’d served as cinematographer—"A Well for the Thirsty", one of Ukrainian cinema’s most formally audacious films, was not rele...

Directed by LaTajh Simmons-Weaver | 14 mins | 2025
Their easel and paints in tow, Chester roves Oakland in search of a spot to put brush to canvas undisturbed. LaTajh Simmons-Weaver’s vibrant vérité short is a city symphony in miniature and a reflection on an artist’s need for support.

Directed by Alanis Obomsawin | 13 mins | 1971
A legendary figure in First Nations filmmaking, Alanis Obomsawin made her documentary debut with this charming, crayon-drawn portrait of a Cree community at Christmastime, as illustrated and narrated by a number of the local children.

Directed by Jeff Hale, Norman McLaren, Grant Munro, and Gerald Potterton | 9 mins | 1963
A kinetic, cut-out rendition of “Jingle Bells,” a stop-motion face-off between a gaggle of tin wind-up toys, and a hand-drawn quest for the perfect Christmas tree topper: collectively, an upbeat and utterly c...

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 25 mins | 2009
A playful but pointed work of faux-reportage about Recife, in Brazil’s northeast, in which climate change produces an absurdist scenario: locals and tourists alike struggle to adapt when chilly weather, rain, and even penguins descend upon Mendon...

Directed by Oleksandr Dovzhenko | 84 mins | 1930
For nearly a century, Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s final silent feature, which depicts a clash between reactionary landowning kulaks and modernizing muzhiks, has spawned debate: is it a propagandist paean to Stalin’s collectivization project, or, as certa...

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 23 mins | 2005
Afternoon in a middle-class apartment in Recife: the laundry goes round and round in the machine much as a roast chicken does in the microwave. Appliances augment drudgery and relaxation alike in this humorous domestic symphony, which builds to a...

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 16 mins | 2005
Carried across the seas by signals between chunky cell phones, yearning suffuses this sweet and slender, vérité-style story of lovers divided by geography—he in Recife, she in Kyiv.

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 17 mins | 2014
A mother’s gift of a box of old records to her young daughter comes with one proviso: never listen to the green one! Adapted from a Russian folktale, this lo-fi stop-motion short—a Cannes Directors’ Fortnight selection—offers an off-kilter blend ...

Directed by Gayle Thomas | 5 mins | 1974
A rainbow of delicately cut-out snowflakes flash, dance, and subdivide to shimmering steel drum in this delightfully geometrical interlude by Ottawa animator Gayle Thomas.

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 131 mins | 2012
Mendonça Filho’s entrancing debut feature tunes into the anxious frequencies of middle-class residents on a quiet seaside street in sunny Recife, Brazil, where a private security firm has been hired to go on patrol. The community keeps waiting f...

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho | 93 mins | 2023
A film that functions as a kind of memoir/essay film companion piece to "The Secret Agent", with the later film’s loving evocation of the largely disappeared Recife movie palaces remembered from Mendonça Filho’s youth, the diptych "Pictures of Gh...

Directed by Kaitlyn Mikayla | 15 mins | 2025
Photographer and first-time director Kaitlyn Mikayla shoots off the starting line with this vérité-inflected tale of a weekend down at the motocross track, during which an adolescent racer questions her sexuality as well as her relationship to both her...

Directed by Adesola Thomas | 17 mins | 2025
Magical realism ripples through Adesola Thomas’s debut short, a Black Southern gothic tale in which the prospect of an unwanted marriage begets new dimensions in the relationship between two sisters.

Directed by Yuri Illienko | 96 mins | 1990
Released as the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union loomed, this adaptation of stories Sergei Parajanov wrote during his incarceration in the 1970s depicts the increasingly desperate attempts of a prisoner (Viktor Solovyov) to escape his own confineme...

Directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate, Stanley Jackson and Wolf Koenig | 30 mins | 1958
Montreal’s malls, churches, and clubs alike are abuzz with the Yuletide spirit in this beautifully observed short documentary—the inaugural episode of pioneering vérité series “The Candid Eye,” which aired on ...