Heralded by Martin Scorsese as “an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet,” Italian director Vittorio De Seta produced a string of extraordinary short documentaries in the 1950s that distill their subjects to pure cinema. Shooting in vivid color in the rural villages of Sicily, Sardin...

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...

Key works of the media-making movement that gave centrality to the voices and experiences of African American women during the late 1970s and early ’80s, these revelatory, newly restored shorts by trailblazing filmmaker Fronza Woods are no less impactful today. In KILLING TIME, Woods offers a wry...

In 1994, Marlon Riggs died from AIDS at the tragically young age of thirty-seven. Riggs’s untimely passing robbed the world of an artist of uncommon vision and empathy, but not of his work’s ability to galvanize and inspire future generations. This program comprises a selection of stylistically a...

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, ...

Overlooked for too long, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) should be seen as one of the most important and influential figures in the development of African cinema. Born in Benin and later based in Senegal, Vieyra was one of the first Black Africans to direct a film, AFRICA ON THE SEINE, a movin...

Themes of teenage rebellion and fraught family dynamics run through these early shorts by groundbreaking directors Sofia Coppola, Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, Jane Campion, and Andrea Arnold.

There was cinema before the French New Wave, and there was cinema after. The explosion of creative innovation that emanated from France in the late 1950s and early ’60s forever altered the course of film history by opening up new avenues of stylistic experimentation and trumpeting the concept of ...

Hailed for her vibrant explorations of culture clash and connection in films like MONSOON WEDDING and MISSISSIPPI MASALA, Indian American auteur Mira Nair has pursued an equally distinguished career as a director of short films that further explore the ways in which deep-rooted cultural tradition...

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...

Spare a New York minute for these Big Apple–set shorts that unspool in less time than it takes a 1 train to get from the Bronx to Battery Park. Ranging from eyeball-whirling abstract experiments by D. A. Pennebaker (DAYBREAK EXPRESS) and Shirley Clarke (BRIDGES-GO-ROUND) to deeply personal autobi...

The foremost pioneer of silhouette animation, German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger brought enchanting storybook worlds to life through her intricate cutouts and groundbreaking use of a proto-multiplane camera that she developed a decade before the technique was made famous by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks...

The director of the audacious festival hit LEMON and the critically acclaimed ZOLA, Janicza Bravo cultivates the unsettling, the absurd, and the hilariously warped. This selection of four of her brilliantly outré shorts—including the award-winning dark comedy GREGORY GO BOOM, starring Michael Cer...

The sights and sounds, hustle and bustle of the modern metropolis have long inspired filmmakers to develop a corresponding cinematic language to capture its frenetic energy. From the dizzying head-rush of Manhattan as seen through the kaleidoscopic lenses of D. A. Pennebaker and Hollis Frampton t...