Nick Cave: Straight To You - A Portrait

A 1993 portrait of rock singer and poet Nick Cave, a versatile artist who gained importance over the years. Jacobson also wrote the scenario that was built around a long conversation with the singer. From Australia and his work with the Birthday Party to his current city, Berlin, with The Bad Seeds.

The Mysteries of Hieronymus Bosch

Nicholas Baum goes on a journey to Den Bosch, Hieronymus Bosch's town, and gives his explanation about what he thinks the painter's works originally meant.

My Indiana Muse

Vacation slides are as much the butt of jokes as airline food, VCR clocks, and glamour shots. Americana artist Robert Townsend would disagree. With an interest in vernacular photography—in which amateur photographers shoot everyday images—Robert finds some vacation slides and becomes creatively smitten with one lady who appears in numerous photos, whom he thinks has a “superstar quality.” As he immortalizes her world in paintings that are outsized celebrations of the mid-century era, Townsend finds himself picking up clues and setting upon a quest to learn more about this happy mystery woman and her Kodacolor life. It’s a gorgeous and fascinating film celebrating an incredibly talented artist and his middle-American muse in cat-eye glasses.

Picasso's Last Stand

Biographer Sir John Richardson and Picasso’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, are the star witnesses in a documentary that reassesses the artist’s output in the years before his death in 1973. The story is of a creative spirit finding new impetus in response to both death’s approach and the censure of contemporaries and critics. Those who were members of Picasso’s private inner circle – gossip about his lifestyle also helped to fire him back up – put the later work forward as some of his frankest, wittiest and most profound.

Kurara: The Dazzling Life of Hokusai's Daughter

Oei, later known as Katsushika Oi, was born the third daughter of Edo’s talented painter Katsushika Hokusai and his second wife Koto. Although Oei became the wife of a town painter for a time, her love of the paintbrush more than her husband spelt disaster and she comes back home to Hokusai from the family she had married into. This is how Oei starts to help her father out in his painting of the “insurmountable high wall”. Meanwhile, Oei can only talk to the painter Ikeda Zenjiro, who is her father’s student, about her pain and worries. Zenjiro has taken Edo by storm as Keisai Eisen, the master of ukiyo-e portraying beautiful women. He visits regularly because he admires Hokusai and secretly likes Oei although their relationship is like childhood friends. Oei respects her father whose paintings fascinated her and continues to work as a painter who supports him behind the scenes. When Hokusai’s masterpiece Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji was completed, she was also by his side.

Van Gogh: Of Wheat Fields and Clouded Skies

A new look at Van Gogh, through the legacy of the largest private collector of artworks by the Dutch painter: Helene Kröller-Müller (1869-1939), who, in the early 20th Century, ended up buying nearly 300 of his works, paintings and drawings included.

Bolero: A Global Hit

Bolero is played every 15 minutes in the world. This film tries to answer how this famous melody inspired and influenced the world pop-culture? It explores the complexity and the richness of a piece so simple in appearance: the emotions it triggers, vertigo it creates, the words it inspires.

The Writer Who Hated the Swedish Language

A documentary about Antti Jalava, a Swedish-Finnish writer who was among the first to write about the immigrant experience in Sweden.

Vincent Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing

Delving deep into the fascinating and sometimes deeply troubled world of Vincent van Gogh who, perhaps more than any other artist, has long captured the imagination of storytellers.

Lee Scratch Perry's Vision of Paradise

Lee Scratch Perry's Vision of Paradise is a unique project in many ways. It is the life story of the legendary musician, but it is not a biography, it is a fairytale documentary! The director followed Lee Perry for thirteen years and discovered an unbelievable story, a revelation, told about and with one of the major protagonists of contemporary music, the other half of the story that has never been told. The movie can be seen as a guide for how to change the world with music, with a positive attitude, mindset or, as Lee Perry calls it, vibration.

Generation A: Portraits of Autism and the Arts

A documentary about young people with autism, and how arts and creative therapies help them to lead fuller lives.

Minted

A fascinating look at the intersection of art, commerce, and digital ownership through the rise and crash of the NFT market.

Balthus through the Looking-Glass

Using rare images of the artist filmed at work in his studio, exclusive interviews with his family and close friends, photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and unpublished artwork, this award-winning feature documentary highlights the painter’s complex creative process. Acclaimed as the definitive film portrait of the master, Balthus through the Looking-Glass was shot on Super 16 over 14 months in Switzerland, Italy, France and the Moors of England by the director of Fellini, I’m a Born Liar. (Arte)

Beuys

The German artist Joseph Beuys is reflecting on his theory of art, being filmed as a kinetic sculpture. In 1981, the film has won the German film critic's award for “Best short film in Germany”.

Hokusai

A documentary about the life and art of wood-block artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Ikebana

The history and art of ikebana, a centuries old Japanese art of flower arrangement and a look inside the Sogetsu School of Ikebana, where the director's father Sofu Teshigahara worked as the grand master of the school.

Pelle vegetale. Un'intervista

Underground and Emigrants

In this film, outspokenly homosexual filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim has documented his encounters with friends in the New York "underground" arts movement, the better-known of whom are William Burroughs (who says nothing for the camera), Andy Warhol (seen in the distance) and Fernando Arrabal (who is interviewed in Spanish). The emigrants named in the title are notable Germans who left the country before World War II, such as Greta Keller and Grete Mosheim. Reviewers at the time of the film's release considered it to have been a sort of paid vacation for the filmmaker rather than a serious effort. (Clarke Fountain, Rovi)

Salvador Dalí: In Search of Immortality

The documentary proposes an exhaustive journey through the life and work of Salvador Dalí, and also of Gala, his muse and collaborator. It starts in 1929, a crucial year in Dalí's career and life, as he joined the surrealist group and met Gala, and advances until the year of the artist's death in 1989.

The Macondian Hollywood

Functions without theaters, murals without walls, clothes without fabrics and students without schools says the necessary about the state abandonment and but also talent and creativity of Colombians, which it has nothing to lose. The documentary tells the story of the beginnings and resilience of several artist from Barranquilla in different disciplines in continuing to maintain and diversify the living culture, that remain to exist.