The rhythms, rituals, and richness of life in rural Mexico come into revelatory focus in the meditative, exquisitely observed films of Juan Pablo González. Turning his ever-patient camera on the people and landscapes of his hometown in the state of Jalisco, González works across documentary and n...

In this new program, critic Imogen Sara Smith introduces one of Japanese cinema’s classical masters—a virtuoso of melodrama who specialized in portraying the personal and social struggles of women with supreme sensitivity. In a career that spanned four decades, he directed nearly ninety films, in...

Towering literary lion, fierce social critic, and inimitable cultural icon James Baldwin opened up a new space for the frank discussion of race, sexuality, and identity in American society. He also left behind a dynamic cinematic legacy, as seen in these portraits that capture his electrifying pr...

Spanning fifty-three movies and forty-one editions of the Olympic Games, 100 YEARS OF OLYMPIC FILMS: 1912–2012 is the culmination of a massive, award-winning archival project encompassing dozens of restorations by the International Olympic Committee. The documentaries collected here cast a cinema...

The thrillingly innovative films of Nicolas Roeg are dazzling, chronology-scrambling puzzles that explode the rules of cinema and leave the viewer to piece together the shards. Distinguishing himself first as a cinematographer for directors such as François Truffaut and Roger Corman, Roeg made th...

From garlic to gap-toothed women, no subject was too esoteric to capture the imagination of Les Blank, an uncompromisingly independent spirit who, for nearly fifty years, disappeared with his camera into subcultures rarely seen on-screen. Seemingly off-the-cuff yet poetically constructed, Blank’s...

In the late 1980s, the spirit of punk was alive and well in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (Neza for short), the sprawling, slum-choked municipality on the edge of Mexico City where a fiercely nihilistic youth culture sprang up in response to economic stagnation and urban neglect. Beginning in the 1980s, ...

The oldest known surviving film starring an entirely Black cast, this unfinished 1913 romantic comedy—the footage of which was miraculously recovered from the vaults of the bankrupt Biograph film studio, alongside outtakes and a trove of still images from the production—stars legendary Bahamian-A...

Ever wondered about the sadomasochistic sex lives of snails? Or about the cannibalistic maternal instincts of hamsters? Wonder no more, for the one and only Isabella Rossellini explains it all in these singularly strange and delightful short films that combine science, performance art, and DIY pu...

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he drew from Marxism and Catholicism; and he lived a thoroughly modern, openly gay life while looking to the distant past for inspiration and comfort—was matched by the multifariousness of his artistic output as a fi...

It’s been twenty-five years since cinema bid the twentieth century farewell with an extraordinary batch of films. In retrospect, 1999 was a time of intriguing cross-pollinations between the studios and independents, national and international productions, and high and low culture. Bringing togeth...

One of the most revelatory voices to emerge from the postwar explosion of international art-house cinema, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman was a master storyteller who startled the world with his stark intensity and naked pursuit of the most profound metaphysical and spiritual questions. The struggl...

As if conjured from a distant dream or a faded memory, the films of Haitian-Canadian director Miryam Charles are hushed, ghostly meditations on family, memory, trauma, colonization, and migration. Employing richly evocative sound design and tactile 16 mm texture, her impressionistic shorts and he...

A rhythm-shattering avant-jazz percussionist and a sui generis martial artist, sculptor, herbalist, and all-around cosmic Renaissance man, the late free-jazz shaman Milford Graves lived a life as liberated and unclassifiable as his music. Including the appropriately kaleidoscopic feature document...

Transcending the rigidity and oppressions of the current moment, this program, produced by Multitude Films and inspired by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, taps into joy and dares to imagine radical, emancipated visions of queer life. Four short films explore fat beauty and liberation, gender-a...

Now ninety-six years old, director Michael Roemer was always ahead of his time—and at last, after decades of neglect, the world is catching up to his profoundly humanist, unfailingly truthful vision. A Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germany as a child, Roemer has made only a handful of features,...

Working across narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, and interactive cinema, Ayoka Chenzira brings the inner worlds of Black women—their hopes, dreams, anxieties, and struggles—to life with heart, humor, and insight. An all-around creative force, she made her mark as an animator with a...

Everyday reality slips into surrealist reverie in the uncanny visions of Sara Driver, whose films possess the hallucinatory textures and hypnotic rhythms of a waking dream. A central but often overlooked linchpin of the 1980s downtown New York arts scene, Driver made her directorial debut with YO...

These stylistically radical, bracingly contemporary films offer new ways of seeing Philippine myths, pasts, presents, and futures. Making innovative use of digital technologies, extreme color grading, and unexpected aspect ratios, a new generation of young Philippine filmmakers explodes genre con...

Horses and foxes and snails, oh my! The wide, wild world of animals is on parade in a menagerie of wondrous, playful, affectionate shorts, which span silent and sound, documentary and fiction, live action and animation. From mammals to birds to reptiles to mollusks, creatures great and small, cud...

Revolutionary in both content and form, the films of Lizzie Borden testify to the potential of a politically committed cinema to fight back against prevailing representations of women on-screen. Her first three features—the long-unavailable experimental documentary REGROUPING, the dystopian sci-f...

Working across both documentary and narrative, Cameroonian auteur Rosine Mbakam makes intimate, exquisitely observed portraits of West African women both at home and abroad that illuminate their inner lives with quiet force. In her early shorts DOORS OF THE PAST and YOU WILL BE MY ALLY and in her...

With an undeniable screen presence that’s at once moody, intense, and a bit mysterious, Kristen Stewart continues to fascinate as one of the most unique and consistently surprising actors of her generation. This trio of films from Stewart’s post-blockbuster career reinvention finds her bringing h...

One of the most creative and galvanizing venues for film exhibition to emerge during the pandemic, Prismatic Ground is a festival centered on the intersection between experimental and documentary film. This selection of shorts from its first three editions, in April 2021, May 2022, and May 2023, ...