Directed by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew | 23 mins | 2021
Vivid interruptions of sound and images fragment the psychic landscape of a 38-year-old woman who becomes obsessed with the social media presence of the young woman who broke up her relationship. The latest entry in Chew and Durand’s ong...

Directed by Johanna Makabi | 4 mins | 2022
Serendipity strikes at a Harlem laundromat where Fatou, a French African woman, meets a handsome stranger, in this homage to the French New Wave tinged with political meditations on American society.

Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 9 mins | 2004
Clapin’s first short is a game of Tetris as much as it is a love story. It centers on a man whose spine bends at a striking right angle: his eyes can gaze only downwards, his hat perched on the back of his head. The appearance of a woman whose back bends ...

Directed by Benjamin Nicolas | 11 mins | 2021
While the opening of this Expressionistic short film—depicting a perfunctory exchange between a rideshare driver and his passenger about Christmas shopping—gives little indication as to the direction it’s headed in, then the ominous title is rather mo...

Directed by Ken Jacobs | 34 mins | 1963
In Blonde Cobra, dubbed “the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema” by Jonas Mekas, Jacobs turns his camera on fellow underground icon Jack Smith. Screening as part of a selection of five experimental shorts from the Brooklyn-born Jacobs, one of the most wildl...

Directed by Carolee Schneemann | 9 mins | 1963
In her first video work, Schneemann crafts an impressionistic portrait of another fearlessly provocative multidisciplinary artist: the eponymous Ruggles, best known for his dissonant, ultramodernist compositions and his lacerating tongue. Blotches of...

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...

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 George Kuchar | 20 mins | 1994
Christmas is here again in this diary of glittering gifts, furry friends, underground movie making, and grotesque greetings. A veneer of good cheer coats the surface like thin ice, so proceed with caution!

Directed by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew | 12 mins | 2019
A teenager lives her life, toggling seamlessly between her physical and digital self. She walks over a bridge at sunrise, follows a stranger through the streets of the city, and meets up with a friend to wander their favorite spots in NY...

Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 6 mins | 2006
News of a gonorrhea infection only briefly sours the mood in this early Kalman and Horn short, which telegraphs a cheerful and occasionally violent beach party set in a winkingly lo-fi future.

Directed by Johanna Makabi | 14 mins | 2022
An 8-year-old girl—and frustrated cheerleader—believes that the sky is no limit as she seeks to join her father in space in Makabi’s wondrous portrait in imaginative self-determination.

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 George Kuchar | 16 mins | 1994
The season sweeps through in a blur of glitches, gulps and sweetened goo, as chimes wring out the old and ring in the new.

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 Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 9 mins | 2007
The decadent gathering of this early Kalman and Horn short does not take place on Christmas but rather New Year's Eve, 1927, nor does it feature any jazz proper—but it does have characters performing a riff on The Strokes’ “New York City Cop...

Directed by Kip Fulbeck | 13 mins | 1996
In this short, a conversation between the California-born artist and his Cantonese-American mother overlays fuzzy, black-and-white footage—shot on PixelVision—of the family Christmas celebration. Here as in his photography, spoken word, and writing, Fulbec...

Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 45 mins | 1994
Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992, re-released in a new restoration by Metrograph Pictures in 2019). Yet these two extraordinary films tell only part of...

Directed by Ken Jacobs | 15 m ins | 1963
A collection of smaller silent segments made between 1956 and ’63. Screening as part of a selection of five experimental shorts from the Brooklyn-born Jacobs, one of the most wildly creative and influential film artists and teachers in the history of the m...

Directed by Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew | 28 mins | 2019
A twenty-something gay man develops a relationship over text messages with a stranger he meets on a dating app. Their exchange becomes increasingly intimate as the protagonist navigates life as an architect in New York City. We catch gli...

Directed by Johanna Makabi | 12 mins | 2021
Mbissine Thérèse Diop, the underrecognized star of Ousmane Sembene’s masterpiece "Black Girl," reflects on the challenges and realities of her role in an epochal moment in cinema, at home in her Paris apartment.

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 Ken Jacobs | 27 mins | 1955
Ken Jacobs documents the tradition of eager haggling and bargain hunting that once took place on the Lower East Side commercial thoroughfare of the title. Screening as part of a selection of five experimental shorts from the Brooklyn-born Jacobs, one of the...

Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 10 mins | 2012
Clapin followed up his acclaimed short "Skhizein" (2008) with this wordless and unsettlingly ambiguous fable about a boy who encounters a scraggly avian creature while duck hunting with his father. It’s a short whose placid surfaces belie a latent, buddi...