The first woman from Burkina Faso to direct a narrative film, Fanta Régina Nacro addresses complex social issues with a gently subversive, lightly comic touch. Tackling everything from AIDS and sexual health to gender roles and relations to the evolving place of tradition within the modern world,...

Delve deeper into the labyrinthine psyche of surrealist nightmare-weaver David Lynch with these unsettling, hallucinatory shorts that reflect the origins and evolution of his singular style. Spanning the early experimental and painterly works that laid the foundation for his cult sensation ERASER...

Deepa Dhanraj’s films are decolonial feminism in action. A filmmaker whose intersectional view of gender oppression and collaborative approach to documentary were far ahead of their time, Dhanraj has dealt frankly with issues of class, caste, labor, patriarchy, and state violence over the course ...

Coined in 1994 by critic Mark Dery, the term “Afrofuturism” has become an essential framework for art about imagined and alternative Black experiences. As the author Ytasha Womack writes, “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocen...

A cross section of the last seven decades of international cinema, this lineup of past winners of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film includes masterpieces by titans like Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Luis Buñuel; high-water marks of the Czechoslovak New Wave;...

Founded in 2005 by pioneering nonfiction filmmaker Albert Maysles, the Harlem-based Maysles Documentary Center has fostered an incredible sense of community through its diverse, thought-provoking, and often challenging programming; classes that teach the fundamentals of documentary storytelling t...

Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund—who has made waves in recent years with his art-house sensations FORCE MAJEURE and the Palme d’Or–winning THE SQUARE—began his career with these three fearlessly unflinching studies of uneasy social dynamics, codes of masculinity, and the tension between the grou...

Long before he became one of the most renowned artists in world cinema, the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami began his cinematic career at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (a.k.a. Kanoon) in Tehran, where he honed his distinctive style and themes and...

In the seventeen years between his first two theatrical features (1971’s BLEAK MOMENTS and 1988’s HIGH HOPES), Mike Leigh, the great humanist of British cinema, sharpened his distinctive voice and famously improvisatory process at the BBC, where he directed a string of striking, bittersweet slice...

A fearlessly transgressive, long-overlooked pioneer of feminist cinema, Swedish actor turned director Mai Zetterling ruffled the feathers of the patriarchal establishment with a string of bracingly modern, sexually frank, and politically incendiary films focused on female agency and the turbulent...

With her brilliant feature debut, NANNY—winner of the 2022 Sundance Grand Jury Prize—garnering acclaim, now is the perfect time to discover the smartly stylish short films of writer-director Nikyatu Jusu. By turns irreverent, provocative, powerful, and unsettling, these films—all centered on comp...

Focused on pivotal moments in the lives of women, the films of trailblazing feminist director Joyce Chopra were among the first in American cinema to give authentic expression to the intimate experiences of female adolescence, sexual awakening, and motherhood. Presented in conjunction with the re...

A unique and blazing talent, Bob Hoskins was one of the most versatile and consistently riveting actors Britain ever produced. “Five-foot-six cubic” in his own words, Hoskins combined a brawny physicality with a vast emotional range, leading to a series of indelible performances: as a beleaguered...

Each year the legendary Flaherty Film Seminar invites participants to reconsider their understanding of cinema through a rigorous program of thought-provoking, boundary-breaking works organized around a salient theme. Taking the notion of “Opacity”—defined as that which cannot be reduced by the d...

Fear comes in all forms in this selection of dread-inducing shorts. Featuring unsettling early works by masters of menace like David Lynch (THE ALPHABET) and Guillermo del Toro (GEOMETRIA) as well as innovative contemporary films that use horror to confront issues such as racism (HAIR WOLF) and c...

Celebrating its sixtieth edition this fall, the New York Film Festival is a cornerstone of American film culture, introducing U.S. audiences to some of the most exciting films from around the world for six decades running. This selection of some of the festival’s greatest hits stretches back to i...

One of the world’s oldest art forms meets one of the youngest in this suite of shorts that showcase the beauty, grace, grit, and endless innovation of dance in its myriad forms. Including boundary-breaking works by directors like Shirley Clarke (DANCE IN THE SUN, A MOMENT IN LOVE), Julie Dash (FO...

Utilizing fractured editing, cacophonous sound design, and a whole lot of (possibly imaginary) cats, Lori Felker’s DISCONTINUITY brilliantly evokes the rapidly escalating pileup of interruptions, incongruities, and absurdities that arise when a long-term couple reunite after an extended separatio...

In 1979, poet Adrienne Rich observed that “one of the most powerful social and political catalysts of the past decade has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets, the comparing of wounds and sharing of words.” Curated by guest programmer Nellie Killian, Tell Me cel...

Many of the rigorously intelligent and slyly playful films of singular Canadian auteur Sofia Bohdanowicz play out like offbeat detective stories, with her own family history as the mystery to be solved. The inspector, as it were, is Bohdanowicz’s frequent collaborator and on-screen alter ego Dera...

Dedicated to supporting documentary storytellers whose voices have long been marginalized within the film industry, IF/Then Shorts breaks down barriers to access, exposure, and funding in the media landscape. To date, IF/Then has been instrumental in bringing more than fifty projects from across ...

Intense, handsome, and gifted with a rare capacity for conveying inner turmoil and doubt, Jean-Louis Trintignant was one of the greatest actors of European art-house cinema, bringing intelligence and passion to carefully crafted performances in a number of all-time classics. After early success a...