21st Century Cinema

21st Century Cinema

126 Episodes

Explore the best of contemporary cinema from around the world.

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21st Century Cinema
  • ABC Africa

    Episode 1

    Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2001 • Iran
    Starring Abbas Kiarostami, Seifollah Samadian

    In 2000, Abbas Kiarostami traveled to Africa at the request of the United Nations to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Uganda, where 1.5 million children had been orphaned by civil war and AIDS. Wo...

  • Masquerade

    Episode 2

    Directed by Olive Nwosu • United Kingdom, Nigeria • 2021
    Starring Teniola Aladese, Sheila Chukwulozie, Loveth Onyemaobi

    Salewa (Sheila Chukwulozie), a young queer woman living with her wife in London, returns to her hometown in Nigeria for her mother’s funeral. There, she confronts her complex f...

  • A New Year

    Episode 3

    Directed by George Sikharulidze • 2018 • Georgia
    Starring Eka Demetradze, Giorgi Bandzeladze, Demetre Gratiashvili

    In this poignantly understated portrait of everyday resilience, a mother and son face a difficult holiday season when the patriarch of the household announces he is leaving to join ...

  • Tattoo

    Episode 4

    Directed by Farhad Delaram • 2019 • Iran
    Starring Behdokht Valian, Alireza Sanifar, Anahita Eghbalnejad

    A young Iranian woman attempting to renew her driver’s license is plunged into a menacing bureaucratic limbo when officials begin questioning her about her tattoos.

  • Poetry

    Episode 5

    Directed by Lee Chang-dong • 2010 • South Korea
    Starring Yoon Jeong-hee, Lee Da-wit, Kim Hee-ra

    Lee Chang-dong’s follow-up to his acclaimed SECRET SUNSHINE is an exquisite story about the power of art to bear witness to both sublime beauty and the violent truths that lie hidden in the hearts of ...

  • All the Crows in the World

    Episode 6

    Directed by Tang Yi • 2021 • Hong Kong
    Starring Chen Xuanyu, Xue Baohe

    Winner of the Palme d’Or for best short film at Cannes, this blissfully bonkers, neon-drenched odyssey follows a teenage girl as she embarks on an irreverent night of adventure—complete with surreal dance numbers and queer ro...

  • Celluloid Man

    Episode 7

    Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur • 2012 • India
    Starring P. K. Nair, Krzysztof Zanussi, Lester James Peries

    An engaging, heartfelt look at one man’s battle to preserve his nation’s cinematic heritage, CELLULOID MAN is an intimate portrait of legendary Indian archivist P. K. Nair, who founde...

  • Bad Night for the Blues

    Episode 8

    Directed by Chris Shepherd • 2010 • United Kingdom

    It’s a holiday to remember—or not—when a young man joins his dotty elderly aunt for a Christmas party at her local Conservative Club, where the wine is flowing, the bingo is heated, and the cracks in the genteel facade start to show.

  • The Headhunter’s Daughter

    Episode 9

    Directed by Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan • 2022 • Philippines
    Starring Ammin Acha-ur, Pablo Quintos

    This sublime winner of the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival follows Lynn (Ammin Acha-ur), who leaves her family’s remote home behind to traverse the harrowing roads o...

  • Volver

    Episode 10

    Directed by Pedro Almodóvar • 2006 • Spain
    Starring Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Yohana Cobo

    Pedro Almodóvar’s VOLVER is set in Madrid’s lively working-class neighborhoods, where three generations of women survive wind, fire, and even death, thanks to goodness, audacity, and a limitless vital...

  • The Fog of War

    Episode 11

    Directed by Errol Morris • 2003 • United States
    Starring Robert S. McNamara

    This Oscar-winning documentary is a twentieth-century fable, the story of an American dreamer who rose from humble origins to the heights of political power. Robert S. McNamara was both witness to and participant in many...

  • My Architect

    Episode 12

    Directed by Nathaniel Kahn • 2003 • United States

    Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974, was one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, but he left behind an illegitimate son, Nathaniel, and a personal life of secrets and broken promises. MY ARCHITECT takes us on a heartbreaking yet humo...

  • Gramercy Stories

    Episode 13

    Directed by Joyce Chopra • 2008 • United States

    GRAMERCY STORIES is an inspiring look inside a unique residence in Manhattan that provides a safe home for twenty-five gay and transgender teenagers who have experienced violence at home and on the streets. Told from their candid, often witty persp...

  • Take Out

    Episode 14

    Directed by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou • 2004 • United States
    Starring Charles Jang, Jeng-Hua Yu, Wang-Thye Lee

    The American dream has rarely seemed so far away as in Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s raw, vérité TAKE OUT, an immersion in the life of an undocumented Chinese immigrant struggli...

  • Mysterious Object at Noon

    Episode 15

    Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul • 2000 • Thailand
    Starring Duangjai Hiransri, Somsri Pinyopol, Kannikar Narong

    Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimentation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homel...

  • Porto of My Childhood

    Episode 16

    Directed by Manoel de Oliveira • 2001 • France, Portugal
    Starring Jorge Trêpa, Ricardo Trêpa, Maria de Medeiros

    With the freedom and rigor that were his trademarks, Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira returned to Porto, the city where he had been born ninety-three years before, for this sublime...

  • This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

    Episode 17

    Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • 2019 • Lesotho, South Africa
    Starring Mary Twala, Makhaola Ndebele, Jerry Mofokeng

    With a poet’s eye for place, light, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday existence, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese crafts a meditation on the concept of homeland and a transcen...

  • 24 Frames

    Episode 18

    Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 2017 • Iran

    For what would prove to be his final film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami gave himself a challenge: to create a dialogue between his work as a filmmaker and his work as a photographer, bridging the two art forms to which he had dedicated his life. ...

  • Code Unknown

    Episode 19

    Directed by Michael Haneke • 2000 • France
    Starring Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Alexandre Hamidi

    One of the world’s most influential and provocative filmmakers, the Oscar–winning Austrian director Michael Haneke diagnoses the social maladies of contemporary Europe with devastating precisio...

  • Yi Yi

    Episode 20

    Directed by Edward Yang • 2000 • Taiwan, Japan
    Starring Nianzhen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata

    The extraordinary, internationally embraced YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO . . .), directed by the late Taiwanese master Edward Yang, follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginnin...

  • The Piano Teacher

    Episode 21

    Directed by Michael Haneke • 2001 • France
    Starring Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel

    In this riveting study of the dynamics of control, Academy Award–winning director Michael Haneke takes on Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel about perverse female sexuality and the world ...

  • Old Joy

    Episode 22

    Directed by Kelly Reichardt • 2006 • United States
    Starring Daniel London, Will Oldham

    Two old friends reunite for a quietly revelatory overnight camping trip in this breakout feature from Kelly Reichardt, a microbudget study of character and masculinity that introduced many viewers to one of co...

  • Frances Ha

    Episode 23

    Directed by Noah Baumbach • 2013 • United States
    Starring Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner

    Greta Gerwig is radiant as Frances, a woman in her late twenties in contemporary New York trying to sort out her ambitions, her finances, and, above all, her intimate but shifting bond with her best friend, Sop...

  • George Washington

    Episode 24

    Directed by David Gordon Green • 2000 • United States
    Starring Candace Evanofski, Donald Holden, Damien Jewan Lee

    Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the decaying rural South must confront a tangle of difficult choices. An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed med...