Directed by Miguel Gomes | 27 mins | 2003
What does Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution have to do with "The Wizard of Oz" (1939)? This is a riddle set up but not exactly answered by this endearingly lo-fi parable about two rich kids who, after getting mugged during a tennis lesson, forge a wind...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 21 mins | 2006
This playful but sincere tribute to St. Francis takes the form of a cinematic triptych. From the present day, in which a guitar-wielding bard ambles through the historic center of Assisi, Gomes jumps back 800 years, reviving the saint himself in a lusciou...

Directed by India Donaldson | 14 mins | 2019
Amy Zimmer and Brenna Palughi give finely calibrated, increasingly squirm-inducing performances in Donaldson’s beguiling, darkly funny two-hander about a woman named Hannah who returns to her apartment one day to discover another woman, also named Hann...

Directed by India Donaldson | 8 mins | 2021
Set in an off-season beach town emptied out for the winter, Donaldson’s by turns unsettling and comic short is a deft character study done in small, precise strokes, following a troubled, lonesome, dog-obsessed woman who decides to take extralegal measu...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 19 mins | 2002
A short as puckish as the kids it depicts, in which a soccer game is rendered absurd by the fact that these self-proclaimed ten-year-olds are played by adults. In place of speech, they just mash their mouths together, with the translation supplied by sile...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 23 mins | 1999
Two decades before "The Tsugua Diaries" (2021), Gomes would make his assured debut with another film that fused summer languor and simmering tensions with expertly deployed pop music cues. The teen love triangle of Meanwhile drifts from rugby training to ...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 1 min | 2004
“Cinema is a game,” Gomes has said—a statement especially true of this briefest of shorts, a machinima that delights in the glitchy rhythms of the celebratory motions made by players in the Playstation game Pro Evolution Soccer.

Directed by Scott Cummings | 30 mins | 2014
Smeared in gaudy face-paint and dedicated as much to the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse as they are to generalized debauchery and destruction, the Juggalo remains one of fan culture’s most enduring—and most derided—outsider figures. In his experimental ...

Directed by Miguel Gomes | 22 mins | 2000
In this early work by the beloved and formally daring Portuguese auteur, the portrayal of a multi-generational Yuletide family gathering gives way to documentation of the season’s chintzy and charming accouterments: tinsel twinkles, baubles bob, and a Spi...

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 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 ...

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 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 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 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 | 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 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 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 | 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...