Tender

A big hearted community celebrates life by fronting up to death. Set against the stunning backdrop of the industrial seaside town of Port Kembla, a feisty and resilient community group have determined to take back the responsibility that most of us leave to someone else — to care for their own dead. Scattered throughout are stories that cut to the core revealing why this small band have decided to take on a practice that for most is taboo. As their plans for community-based funerals gather momentum one of their own is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Tender is at once a heartbreakingly beautiful and beautifully funny glimpse of an extraordinary community taking on one of the most essential challenges of human life … its end.

How We Die

Memento Mori is a morbidly beautiful journey into the world of alternative post mortem arrangements and an illuminating meditation on death, dying and our relationship with our bodies once they are no longer ours.

Papa

Filmmaker Jon Alpert turns the camera on his own family in this intimate portrait of his aging father. As illness and declining vitality reshape his life, the film captures a deeply personal struggle with dignity, humor, and the bonds that hold a family together.

Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company

At Baycrest, an old-age home in Toronto, we follow a social worker as she talks to residents, particularly Max, Claire, Ida, and Rachel. The film opens on Claire's birthday, she's 89; Max, a tiny cheerful man, is her close friend. Rachel is lonesome, missing her son, complaining he rarely visits. Ida relies on memory for her solace. Helen has no memory and doesn't recognize her daughter; her moods swing. Murray keeps his cap on and likes women. Staff members bring medication, provide care, and offer small talk. Memory is fleeting: Claire re-experiences the death of a close companion several times, each time without remembering her previous grieving. Lives are circumscribed

De nachtwaker

Janneke has been working as a volunteer in palliative terminal care for over twenty years, both in the hospice and in people's homes. In The Night Watchman we see Janneke both in her daily life and while waking. Scenes in which surprising parallels and paradoxes show Janneke's position in her life and how they seem to embrace death at first sight.

Dignitas - Death on Prescription

Switzerland is the only country in the world that allows foreigners to come and die on its territory. Since its founding in 1998, more than a thousand people have traveled to Zurich to end their lives with the help of the organization Dignitas. "Dignitas - Death on Prescription" is a documentary about an organization that provides people with terminal and incurable illnesses, intense unrelenting pain, and depression with a peaceful death. The organization's founder, lawyer Ludwig Minelli, is often the target of insults, especially from politicians, despite the fact that most Swiss citizens support the option of medically assisted suicide.

Dertien Dagen

The Mirror and the Window

Filmmaker Diego Gutiérrez knows that he is soon to lose two loved ones: his mother Gina Coppe and his best friend Danniel Danniel. Both ask him to film them during this final phase of their lives—Gina in her apartment in Mexico City, Danniel in a Dutch restaurant where he feels at home. What stories do they want to leave behind?

Dying to live

Mirror, Mirror

Portrait of the last year of the life of famous New York drag queen Consuela Cosmetic.

The Barbarian Invasions

In this belated sequel to 'The Decline of the American Empire', middle-aged Montreal college professor, Remy, learns that he is dying of liver cancer. His ex-wife, Louise, asks their estranged son, Sebastian, a successful businessman living in London, to come home. Sebastian makes the impossible happen, using his contacts and disrupting the Canadian healthcare system in every way possible to help his father fight his terminal illness to the bitter end, while reuniting some of Remy's old friends, including Pierre, Alain, Dominique, Diane, and Claude, who return to see their friend before he passes on.

Anxiety

A story about two sisters - Małgorzata, who is single by choice, and her younger sister, Łucja, a mother of two and an assistant in Małgorzata's law firm. The women embark on their first first trip in many years. It quickly turns out that one of them is terminally ill and her destination is Switzerland, where euthanasia is possible.

Splatter Disco

The owner of a fetish club finds out that, along with dealing with his wife who wants to leave him, his dying father, and the city wanting to close his club, he now has to deal with a psycho killer that's offing his employees and patrons.

Children of Men

In 2027, in a chaotic world in which humans can no longer procreate, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea, where her child's birth may help scientists save the future of humankind.

Philadelphia

Two competing lawyers join forces to sue a prestigious law firm for AIDS discrimination. As their unlikely friendship develops, their courage overcomes the prejudice and corruption of their powerful adversaries.

3 Godfathers

Three outlaws on the run discover a dying woman and her baby. They swear to bring the infant to safety across the desert, even at the risk of their own lives.

There Be Dragons

Arising out of the horror of the Spanish Civil War, a candidate for canonization is investigated by a journalist who discovers his own estranged father had a deep, dark and devastating connection to the saint's life.While researching the life of Josemaria Escriva, the controversial founder of Opus Dei, the young journalist Robert uncovers hidden stories of his estranged father Manolo, and is taken on a journey through the dark, terrible secrets of his family’s past.

A SHOT IN THE FOOT

A SHOT IN THE FOOT depects hectic nocturnal routines of a young woman who works as an assassin. She is a quick and innovative killer, efficient at her job. But she grows careless as she parties hard and gives in to the thrill of money, exposing herself to the dangers of LA’s underground. She gets sloppy, but the jobs keep coming, and there is no one except herself to clean up the mess she leaves behind.

Static Moon

When viewed from far away, life on Earth can seem meaningless. But when a star inhabits a dying girl, they experience the tragic beauty found at the moment when the light goes out.

Clouds are Made of Rain

In a hospice, 38-year-old Nadine confronts terminal cancer with raw anger and reluctant acceptance. Struggling to bid farewell to her young son Dexter and a life unfinished, she navigates the weight of mortality. Bonds with fellow patients, like the vibrant Marion, offer solace amid pain and humor. Through fleeting moments of joy and sorrow, Nadine learns to let go, finding peace in life’s fragile beauty. Inspired by real hospice experiences, Benjamin Kramme’s touching debut captures the emotional turbulence of dying and the enduring light of human connection.

Heart of a Dog

Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me

From the heights of her modeling fame to her tragic death, this documentary reveals Anna Nicole Smith through the eyes of the people closest to her.

Birth of the Living Dead

A behind the scenes look into George Romero's groundbreaking horror classic Night of the Living Dead.

No Half Measures: Creating the Final Season of Breaking Bad

A documentary about the making of season five of the acclaimed AMC series Breaking Bad.

Love, Marilyn

Using the book 'Fragments', which collects Marilyn Monroe's poems, notes and letters, and with participation from the Arthur Miller and Truman Capote estates who have contributed more material, each of the actresses will embody the legend at various stages in her life.

Elstree 1976

A documentary about ten very different lives connected by having appeared onscreen wearing masks or helmets in Star Wars.

My Mom Jayne

Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.

I Am Heath Ledger

The life and career of an actor, artist, and icon. His own journey through his own camera.

Listen to Me Marlon

With exclusive access to his extraordinary unseen and unheard personal archive including hundreds of hours of audio recorded over the course of his life, this is the definitive Marlon Brando cinema documentary. Charting his exceptional career as an actor and his extraordinary life away from the stage and screen with Brando himself as your guide, the film will fully explore the complexities of the man by telling the story uniquely from Marlon's perspective, entirely in his own voice. No talking heads, no interviewees, just Brando on Brando and life.

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Alex Gibney explores the charged issue of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, following a trail from the first known protest against clerical sexual abuse in the United States and all way to the Vatican.

Harmontown

A comedic, brutally honest documentary following self-destructive TV writer Dan Harmon as he takes his live podcast on a national tour.

McQueen

Alexander McQueen's rags-to-riches story is a modern-day fairy tale, laced with the gothic. Mirroring the savage beauty, boldness and vivacity of his design, this documentary is an intimate revelation of McQueen's own world, both tortured and inspired, which celebrates a radical and mesmerizing genius of profound influence.

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction

An impressionistic portrait of the iconic actor Harry Dean Stanton comprised of intimate moments, film clips from some of his 250 films and his renditions of American folk songs.

Fuck

A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.

Cameraperson

As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.

Dick Johnson Is Dead

With this inventive portrait, director Kirsten Johnson seeks a way to keep her 86-year-old father alive forever. Utilizing moviemaking magic and her family’s dark humor, she celebrates Dr. Dick Johnson’s last years by staging fantasies of death and beyond. Together, dad and daughter confront the great inevitability awaiting us all.

More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead

Retrospective documentary about the making of the horror cult classic "The Return of the Living Dead."

American Teen

A documentary on seniors at a high school in a small Indiana town and their various cliques.

For the Love of Spock

The life of Mr. Spock, as well as that of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played him for almost fifty years, written and directed by his son: Adam.

Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin

Brilliant, long in-the-works story of the life and art of the world's greatest comedian and the cinema's first genius, Charlie Chaplin. Produced, written and directed by renowned film critic Richard Schickel.