An old man comes across a fascinating archive, then meets a woman who introduces him to the life of a banker, patron and philanthropist. A moving essay that is part documentary, part film diary.
Social & External
Mathilde
Rezy
Young Gerard
Nanni Moretti recalls in his diary three slice of life stories characterized by a sharply ironic look: in the first one he wanders through a deserted Rome, in the second he visits a reclusive friend on an island, and in the last he has to grapple with an unknown illness.
IN THE LAND OF GIANT PYGMIES, a diary of Aurelio Rossi's 1925 trek into the immense Belgian Congo, preserves a long-gone-Colonial-era wonder at natural resources, "primitive" tribes, customs and costumes in Europe's cast African possessions, and implies that the "dark continent" could benefit from the "civilizing" influences of home.
A young girl turns into an A-List celebrity over night when her private journal is accidently published and becomes a best-seller.
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Through phone call conversations, an aspiring Ilocano filmmaker relates to his mother working in Italy about his dreams and struggles while documenting the invisible betweenness of their language and distance.
A passionate foodie loses his beloved hawker stalls to corporate pressure, he reluctantly turns to processed food he calls 'trash' in a moment of deep sorrow and disappointment as he grieves the loss of his favourite food stalls.
The untold state of mind dealing with an incurable disease. One is wondering if there's still a dream to achieve in life. One is running as if this free spirit of mine has never been taken away.
Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In these works, which play upon chance and coincidence, hotel rooms are employed as 'found' film sets, where architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events.
Two teen boys living in an isolated house in the mountains contemplate their existence while maintaining a video diary of their daily lives.
Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
In 2022, when the economic crisis in her native country was at its peak, she decided to visit her family there. She turned her short trip into a collage-like diary in which she reflects on her relationship with her homeland, which is in a state of protracted decay. The film is composed of spontaneous snapshots capturing the author's stay, interspersed with inserted captions serving as personal, often poetically formulated comments and observations. As a result, the film does not hide its strongly subjective perspective, but at the same time builds on it to make an important statement that shows the transformation of Lebanese society in everyday details such as the appearance of the city itself or in the intimate sphere of the author's family life.
On January 1st, 1999, Caveh Zahedi started a one-year video diary. The idea was to shoot one minute each day. This is the result.
A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
Drawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.
It has been a year since Juliette’s sister has passed and she hasn’t been doing so well since that day, but she must learn how to be kind to herself.
For years, together with his partners from the production company O Quadro, he has been betting on cinema as a tool to explore the typical issues of youth. In this film, Evandro Scorsin turns the cameras on himself as he deals with the dilemmas of the passing of time and the imposition of adulthood. In an exercise in autofiction where cinema and life merge, the film is also a cinematic love letter to the beloved masters (especially Nicholas Ray). Coming and going between two countries and times, it records the vertigo of displacement and the reinventions inherent to an immigrant experience.
Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.
One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club
A short documentary by Jim McBride.
Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
A drama-documentary presented by Alan Yentob, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role. Every word spoken by the actors in this film is sourced from the letters that Van Gogh sent to his younger brother Theo, and of those around him. What emerges is a complex portrait of a sophisticated, civilised and yet tormented man.
Offbeat documentarian Chris Smith provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Jim Carrey adopted the persona of idiosyncratic comedian Andy Kaufman on the set of Man on the Moon.
Alexander McQueen's rags-to-riches story is a modern-day fairy tale, laced with the gothic. Mirroring the savage beauty, boldness and vivacity of his design, this documentary is an intimate revelation of McQueen's own world, both tortured and inspired, which celebrates a radical and mesmerizing genius of profound influence.
Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.
Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman takes us inside Northeast High School as a fly on the wall to observe the teachers and how they interact with the students.
40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes.
In this genre-bending tale, Errol Morris explores the mysterious death of a U.S. scientist entangled in a secret Cold War program known as MK-Ultra.
A documentary shot by filmmakers all over the world that serves as a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010.
Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.
Henry, a young actor, finds himself involved in a film by cinema superstar, Cédric Rovere. Charmed by his benevolence, feelings hitherto unknown are aroused, while Rovere, intrigued by Henry's dream, lives this shoot as an unexpected gift.
An aspiring young filmmaker gets involved with an eccentric gangster for the financing of his first film.
A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.
When her rather explicit copy is rejected, magazine journalist Kate is asked by her editor to come up with an article on loving relationships instead, and to do so by the end of the day. This gets Kate thinking back over her own various experiences, and to wondering if she is in much of a position to write on the subject.
Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.
From a prolific career in film and television, Anton Yelchin left an indelible legacy as an actor. Through his journals and other writings, his photography, the original music he wrote, and interviews with his family, friends, and colleagues, this film looks not just at Anton's impressive career, but at a broader portrait of the man.
A purely observational non-fiction film that takes viewers into the ethically murky world of end-of-life decision making in a public hospital.
An unprecedented and intimate look at the life, work and enduring legacy of British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993).
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
The incomparable Bruce Springsteen performs his critically acclaimed latest album and muses on life, rock, and the American dream, in this intimate and personal concert film co-directed by Thom Zimny and Springsteen himself.