Movies: Essay film

Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is one of David Lynch’s most enduring obsessions. This documentary goes over the rainbow to explore this Technicolor through-line in Lynch’s work....

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills....

Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writi...

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"How Every Film You Watch Tells You To Love The Rich and What To Do About It" explores the representations of wealth in cinema. It looks into how most beloved characters are subtly more well-off than they should be, how criticisms of the system are c...

The Water Map is an essayistic journey through the ethnography and landscapes of the Region of Murcia. These places are in the process of disappearing due to the increasing and abundant agricultural exploitation. Water has marked the territory and th...

A peculiar portrait of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) drawn by the extravagant and original look of the Spanish writer Fernando Arrabal, who establishes a bold parallelism between Borges' work and opinions and his own creations,...

The fascinating story of the rise to power of dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) in Italy in 1922 and how fascism marked the fate of the entire world in the dark years to come....

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality....

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors....

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira....

A labyrinthine portrait of Czech culture on the brink of a new millennium. Egon Bondy prophesies a capitalist inferno, Jim Čert admits to collaborating with the secret police, Jaroslav Foglar can’t find a bottle-opener, and Ivan Diviš makes observati...

40,000 years in the making: Kogonada's video essay created for The Connected Series....

In the fourth and final instalment of Karel Vachek’s not-so-little Little Capitalist Tetralogy, preparations for an opera performance in the Czech capital’s art-nouveau National Theatre become the occasion for a reflection on rebels, dissidents, and ...

A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, ...

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century....

By the director: "Ar.Co embodies each person’s geography, it escapes normalisation. Each individual’s experience is his own. This film is my experience, our experience. Pieced together from the school’s archive, from recordings of classes by Manuel C...

A video essay where the author presumes motivations and insights in a fictionalized biography regarding Debra Paget, a contract player for 20th-Century Fox whom they groomed and coached for stardom....

A witty, forthright dive into the wonderful world of boobs by singer and filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey - from enhanced boobs to 'free the nipple', bras, Baywatch, and the stars of reality TV....

Clear Skies, Light Breeze, is a 2013 visual essay by Tati expert Stéphane Goudet about the debut of Monsieur Hulot...