A Marble Travelogue

Mined in Greece, prized blocks of marble are sent to China, where they are carved into replicas of historic statues, and back to Europe, which yearns for ancient beauty (on the cheap). Their surprising journey tells the story of a historical-economic pendulum now swinging from West to East.

A Night of Knowing Nothing

L’s letters to her lover, who left her, expose the deep faultlines in Indian society—faultlines students try to skip over on their way to a free and liberated future. A mixture of texts and authentic and staged footage gives this story a dreamlike, surreal, and spellbinding feel.

Beba

Beba is the filmmaker, Rebeca Huntt, a young Afro-Latina from an immigrant family, who grew up in New York, continuously facing issues of race and class, as well as the pain of generational trauma. The four chapters of her film paint a powerful, profound, and unflinchingly sober self-portrait.

Everyman and I

Can one ever truly know an actor who erases his whole being for every part he plays? In the thick of a rocky, heady relationship that runs hot and cold, the filmmaker tries to understand the man before her. Her attempts become a spellbinding personal journal, filmed in lyrical black and white.

Figure-Ground

A compilation of YouTube material brings together two parallel worlds—the beach of Tel Aviv and the hills of the West Bank—in a raw, associatively edited, unorthodox portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Gods of Mexico

On salt flats and in ore mines, on steep cliffs and in desert pits, Mexican laborers work with their hands, with simple tools, painstakingly and slowly—far slower than the pace of modern life. With the labor itself providing the soundtrack, this film offers an almost religious aesthetic and sensory experience.

O, Collecting Eggs Despite the Times

German ornithologist Max Schönwetter collected, categorized, and drew nearly twenty thousand bird eggs with unwavering dedication. In the chaos of war, he and his colleagues held on to this passion as a way to escape a ruined, lost, carpet-bombed Europe into a place where everything made sense like before.

Rewind and Play

An unconventional look behind the scenes of Thelonious Monk’s 1968 interview for a French television show reveals how the media stuffs its interviewees into a cookie-cutter template, forcing them to fit a readymade narrative, even if one of them is a phenomenal pianist.

Ultraviolette and the Blood-Spitters Gang

The passionate secret love affair the director’s grandmother, Emma, had in her youth was discovered only after her death, when letters from her lover, Marcelle, were found among her things. Wild, rebellious, and provocative, Marcelle’s persona is recreated using archive footage, scenes from films, and some very sensuous music.

We Met in Virtual Reality

The pandemic forced them into lockdown, but in the virtual world, they could keep meeting and even fall in love. Filmed entirely in an animated virtual universe, this vérité documentary follows couples who discovered that make-believe avatars could help them find a rare kind of intimacy.