Vanity

The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism

Taking its lead from French artists like Renoir and Monet, the American impressionist movement followed its own path which over a forty-year period reveals as much about America as a nation as it does about its art as a creative power-house. It’s a story closely tied to a love of gardens and a desire to preserve nature in a rapidly urbanizing nation. Travelling to studios, gardens and iconic locations throughout the United States, UK and France, this mesmerising film is a feast for the eyes. The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism features the sell-out exhibition The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920 that began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and ended at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut.

The Mona Lisa Myth

La ruta de don Quijote

A poetic journey through the paths and places of old Castile that were traveled and visited by the melancholic knight Don Quixote of La Mancha and his judicious squire Sancho Panza, the immortal characters of Miguel de Cervantes, which offers a candid depiction of rural life in Spain in the early 1930s and illustrates the first sentence of the first article of the Spanish Constitution of 1931, which proclaims that Spain is a democratic republic of workers of all kind.

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

Raphael: The Lord of the Arts

Raphael: The Lord of the Arts is a documentary about the 15th century Italian Renaissance painter Raphael Sanzio.

Silencio

Sound progression of two opposite landscapes.

Nikola Tesla - the Man from the Future

New York, May 16, 1888. Visionary Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla is about to introduce an innovative AC asynchronous motor. Before the demonstration, wealthy businessman George Westinghouse meets Tesla privately to get him to sell him his patent and go into business with him. Tesla declines the offer but during the demonstration something happens that will change the world forever.

National Gallery

A portrait of the day-to-day operations of the National Gallery of London, that reveals the role of the employees and the experiences of the Gallery's visitors. The film portrays the role of the curators and conservators; the education, scientific, and conservation departments; and the audience of all kinds of people who come to experience it.

Kundun

The Tibetans refer to the Dalai Lama as 'Kundun', which means 'The Presence'. He was forced to escape from his native home, Tibet, when communist China invaded and enforced an oppressive regime upon the peaceful nation. The Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959 and has been living in exile in Dharamsala ever since.

Foster Child

Gil Cardinal searches for his natural family and an understanding of the circumstances that led to his becoming a foster child. An important figure in the history of Canadian Indigenous filmmaking, Gil Cardinal was born to a Métis mother but raised by a non-Indigenous foster family, and with this auto-biographical documentary he charts his efforts to find his biological mother and to understand why he was removed from her. Considered a milestone in documentary cinema, it addressed the country’s internal colonialism in a profoundly personal manner, winning a Special Jury Prize at Banff and multiple international awards.

Semi Colin

Challenging all notions of genre, Semi Colin is a living, breathing art installation. Part performance, part art, part social comment, Colin philosophizes on his life's obsessive work as an erotic artist.

Aapje Aram

Achtung Staatsgrenze

Short film about the GDR state border

Meiner ist bei den Soldaten

East German short film

Jungle Bound

A tour of the ancient Cambodian temples of Angkor Wat and Bayon

Somos animales

Tania and Cocteau, a cat that comes from the not too distant future, tell the story of the passage of animals through the world and their relationship with humans.

Our Marriages

Documentary about four Chinese lesbian women who seek contract marriages with gay men, and form of their lesbian and gay community and fulfill their desires.

Jews

JEWS excavates a lost world of manners and ritual in home movies shot by several Chicago families from the 1920s through the 1940s. Much as in similar found footage soliloquies by Péter Forgács, Jay Rosenblatt and Ken Jacobs, director Roger Deutsch wrings unexpected pathos from mundane traces of the past. Children mug for the camera with dances of the day, upright mothers march their strollers up the avenue, men smoke, the family gathers around the table to light the candles. The bare title cannot help but raise the specter of contemporaneous events in Europe, lending an extra degree of urgency to the film's meditation on disappearance. - Max Goldberg

Crónica de un galgódromo

Gardeners, veterinarians and breeders. And some imposing mammals capable of running at seventy kilometers per hour: the baths in the sun, the runway before the confrontation. And the money, the bets and the runners speed around a dizzying track.