We Were the Scenery

In 1975, soon after the end of the Vietnam War, Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che fled the country on a small boat. After nine days at sea, they docked in the Philippines, where they were utilized as background extras for “Apocalypse Now.”

Faces of Death

What question has plagued mankind more than the mystery—and terror—of death? This forbidden pursuit has driven Dr. Frances B. Gröss to the brink of madness, but in his obsession, he has amassed a uniquely comprehensive collection of films that depict life in its final, grueling moments. From the savagery of cold-blooded murder to the perverse realities of war, tragic accidents, and the everyday lives of those who collect, dissect, and bury the dead, this descent into morbidity lays bare a truth that all of us will one day face.

Farce of the Penguins

In this spoof of "March of the Penguins," nature footage of penguins near the South Pole gets a soundtrack of human voices. Carl and Jimmy, best friends, walk 70 miles to the mating grounds where the female penguins wait. The huddled masses of females - especially Melissa and Vicki - talk about males, mating, and what might happen this year. Carl, Jimmy, and the other males make the long trek talking about food, fornication and flatulence. Until this year, Carl's sex life has been dismal, but he falls hard for Melissa. She seems to like him. A crisis develops when Jimmy comes upon something soft in the dark. Can friends forgive? Does parenthood await Carl and Melissa?

365 jours

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th

A retrospective documentary about the groundbreaking horror series, Friday the 13th, featuring interviews with cast and crew from the twelve films spanning 3 decades.

State of Bacon

State of Bacon tells the kinda real but mostly fake tale of an oddball group of characters leading up to the annual Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival. Bacon-enthusiasts, Governor Branstad, a bacon queen, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, members of PETA, and an envoy of Icelanders are not excluded from this bacon party and during the course of the film become intertwined with the organizers of the festival to show that bacon diplomacy is not dead.

La caravane du cafard

An intimate portrait of a Belgian family. They seem normal at first, but after a while they show their true colors. They’re a bunch of ruthless and indifferent serial killers without any scruples or morality. You’ll witness their daily slaughter and, as the bodies pile up, see how they’ll come apart at the seams.

The Canadian Conspiracy

A mockumentary illustrating a supposed conspiracy to infiltrate American culture through employing Canadians in the U.S. entertainment industry.

Woman, Life, Freedom: An Iranian Revolution

On September 16, 2022, in Teheran, the murder by police of the young Mahsa Amini, arrested for "wearing a headscarf contrary to the law", sparked off an unprecedented insurrection. Within hours, a spontaneous movement formed around the rallying cry: "Woman, life, freedom". For the first time, women, joined by men and students, took the initiative and removed their veils, the hated symbol of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian population, from all regions and social categories, rose up in protest. Social networks went wild. The diaspora (between 5–8 million Iranians) took up the cause, and the whole world discovered the scale of this mobilization: could the theocratic regime be overthrown this time?

The We Should Game

Fame driven Ken Dean becomes the subject of a documentary when he attempts to start a pornography company. Following the failure of the company, Ken uses his father's religious music to start a Christian rock band but finds himself trapped in a gay conversion cult.

Found Footage Festival Volume 7: Live in Asheville

This special 10th anniversary edition of the Found Footage Festival finds curators Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher in a nostalgic mood, delving deeper--perhaps too deep--into some of their favorite VHS finds from over years. But Volume 7 is also jam packed with newly unearthed treasures, featuring singing rabbis, petulant news anchors, coughing snake handlers, bodybuilding clowns, and two body parts never before seen in the festival! It's a celebration of a decade of Found. Record over and you'll die! Taped live at The Grey Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina.

Sincerely, Ric

Decades after Ric Routledge reshaped the dog show world, a storage unit full of tapes, photographs, and recordings reveals the story he never finished. Built from his own voice and the memories of those closest to him, Sincerely, Ric is a documentary about ambition, authorship, and what a man leaves behind.

Faces of Death II

A face-to-face confrontation with Guerrilla death squads in El Salvador, napalm bombings in Vietnam, the drugging of a monkey, a dolphin slaughter, a train disaster in India, Cambodian lepers, a death museum, a driver high on PCP and a boxer going down for his “final” count.

Faces of Death III

Gory real-life footage of blood and guts on the German Autobahn, drug smugglers getting blown away, a parachutist landing in a crocodile pit, torture and murder in El Salvador, a PCP addict getting stoned, a videotaped rape/murder, a car thief getting ripped apart by two junkyard dogs, and much more.

Faces of Death IV

Contains more than 50 separate scenes of blood-chilling horror, none of which have ever been seen by the public, depicting a cremation, an electrocution, a terrorist destroyed by his own bomb, the massacre of a Columbian wedding party, the drawing and quartering of a Russian peasant and a man-eating tiger turning on its trainer.

Faces of Death V

A direct-to-video compilation of the highlights of the earlier films in the Faces of Death series.

Faces of Death VI

A direct-to-video compilation of the highlights of the earlier films in the Faces of Death series.

A Messenger from the Shadows (Notes on Film 06 A/Monologue 01)

Thanks to his myriad film roles, Lon Chaney is known as “the man of a thousand faces,” and you could say that the early horror era never beheld a figure more intriguing. Yet because of his numerous transformations, his face never became as iconic as that of, say, Boris Karloff. Accompanied by a soundtrack from Bernhard Lang, this “re-imagination of shots” taken from Chaney´s forty-six surviving films offers a beguiling excursion into the history of film. The director reveals surprising associations, while highlighting the enduring magic of works which are now more or less forgotten.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resisted all attempts to be captured on film. Exit Through the Gift Shop tells the incredible true story of how an eccentric French shop keeper turned documentary maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner.

"L'Affaire Anna Lisbonne"

Burden of Dreams

The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

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.

Powaqqatsi

An exploration of technologically developing nations and the effect the transition to Western-style modernization has had on them.

Maria by Callas

Told through performances, TV interviews, home movies, family photographs, private letters and unpublished memoirs, the film reveals the essence of an extraordinary woman who rose from humble beginnings in New York City to become a glamorous international superstar and one of the greatest artists of all time.

Lost in La Mancha

Fulton and Pepe's 2000 documentary captures Terry Gilliam's attempt to get The Man Who Killed Don Quixote off the ground. Back injuries, freakish storms, and more zoom in to sabotage the project.

Behind the Planet of the Apes

Roddy McDowall takes you, film by film, from production meetings to make-up sessions, then right onto the movie set to see the actual filming of the science fiction masterpiece. The most comprehensive history of Planet of the Apes ever created, this fascinating 127-minute documentary explores one of the most imaginative and influential series in movie history.

Interstellar: Nolan's Odyssey

A look behind the lens of Christopher Nolan's space epic.

Koyaanisqatsi

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

Naqoyqatsi

A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.

For Sama

A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.

Dawson City: Frozen Time

The true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden

Darwin meets Hitchcock in this documentary. Directors Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine have created a parable about the search for paradise, set in the brutal yet alluring landscape of the Galapagos Islands, which interweaves an unsolved 1930s murder mystery with stories of present day Galapagos pioneers. A gripping tale of idealistic dreams gone awry, featuring voice-over performances by Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger, and Gustaf Skarsgard.

42 Up

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.

The Curious Birth of Benjamin Button

A documentary about the making of David Fincher's 2008 film THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. Virtually every element in the evolution of the Fincher's film is documented here, from the project's attachment to numerous other directors during the 1990s, to its shoot in 2006 and 2007 in New Orleans, to its complex, CGI-intensive postproduction process.

180° South

The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.

Val

For over 40 years Val Kilmer, one of Hollywood’s most mercurial and/or misunderstood actors has been documenting his own life and craft through film and video. He has amassed thousands of hours of footage, from 16mm home movies made with his brothers, to time spent in iconic roles for blockbuster movies like Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, and Batman Forever. This raw, wildly original and unflinching documentary reveals a life lived to extremes and a heart-filled, sometimes hilarious look at what it means to be an artist and a complex man.

Sherman's March

Ross McElwee sets out to make a documentary about the lingering effects of General Sherman's march of destruction through the South during the Civil War, but is continually sidetracked by women who come and go in his life, his recurring dreams of nuclear holocaust, and Burt Reynolds.

My Mom Jayne

Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.

Finders Keepers

In this documentary, recovering addict and amputee John Wood finds himself in a stranger-than-fiction battle to reclaim his mummified leg from Southern entrepreneur Shannon Whisnant, who found it in a grill he bought at an auction and believes it therefore to be his rightful property.

The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes

This documentary explores the mystery surrounding the death of movie icon Marilyn Monroe through previously unheard interviews with her inner circle.