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Year
Popular Documentary Movies
The Time We Have Left
If you knew today what our changing climate would do to your family in 30 years, what would you do, right now, while there was still time to act? This short film examines the human experience of survival during a time of transformation destined to be inscribed forever in Earth’s geological record.
O Menino, o Sabiá e o Rato
Dedicated to Robert Bresson, the short film focuses on a man on a wheelchair before TV images. In his mind, quotes from the book Notes on the Cinematographer reverberate.
The Stillness Syndrome
In 2018, a group of filmmakers calling themselves "Los Quietos" set out to make a film essay on a hypothetical syndrome of stillness in the Republic of Colombia. To this end, they invite Colombian documentary master Luis Ospina, presidential candidate Gustavo Petro and writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez to give them clues to delve into the history, geography and idiosyncrasy of Colombia, a country that, paradoxically, has very little of stillness. For unknown reasons, the project remained unfinished.
Glass Life
A dynamic configuration of images and videos overlaid with musings on human existence.
Overworked and Underpaid: Retail Workers in the Pandemic
A documentary short film compiling multiple interviews with young Oregon retail employees who discuss their experiences working in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States throughout 2020 and into 2021.
Open Hearts
Dr. Jeff Kempf from Akron Children’s Hospital (Ohio, USA), and doctors from the USA, Italy, Haiti, and France, demonstrate a new way of helping as they attempt to complete 12 complicated operations while simultaneously challenging conventional wisdom by building up the staff and facilities at St. Damien’s Hospital (Port-au-Prince, Haiti) to become self sufficient. These unprecedented efforts, spearheaded by Gift of Life and Rotary Club, have enabled St. Damien’s to become the first hospital in Haiti capable of treating children with Heart Disease, have allowed Dr. Alexandra Noisette to become the first Haitian pediatric cardiologist, and represents the only collaboration of charities providing heart surgery in Haiti. “Charity” must change, and this bold re-imagination of how charity can work paints a picture of how countries like Haiti can become self sustaining.
Orbital Discourse
Marc Cartwright's "Orbital Discourse" places a myriad of vocal perspectives into – and allegorises them as – a pan of water. Cartwright's single-take film features plurality in close-up: its tensions, cacophonies, brutalities. Bring to the boil, then simmer.
Making Faces
A short film about Mac Miller's life around the time of the release of his mixtape "Faces".
Love Needs Time to Kill
In the last decades, boarding schools of different religious orders have been closing down, and with them, an essential pedagogical system of education and identity has disappeared. As part of their pedagogical method, the schools had an herbarium and a large collection of stuffed animals from the Missions. This film connects identity with the diaspora of the Missions, and the forgotten pedagogical systems with the construction of the exotic and colonial imaginary.
The Performance Has Just Begun: The Story of Fugazi
In 2021, Marillion reflects on the making of their second album with their original singer Fish.
Ieva
Inside a lab, a robot is created. Like a newborn, it analyses its surroundings with the primitive senses and limited knowledge it has. While exploring such fundamental concepts as distance, weight, light and size, the robot tries to perform basic physical tasks that would resemble natural human motion. It fails miserably but keeps on learning. Perhaps a less intelligent life form such as a dog will be less critical when assessing what it means to be human?
Un tipo strano
Amadou is a young Gambian who arrived in Italy after a long journey. After working in the fields, he decides to continue his paths to Rome where he meets three Italians of his age. They sympathize and join a party to dance the night away. The meeting took place and will take them even further, to the border crossing of the Alps.
Phosfate
Filmmaker Erik E. Crown joins local water activists to investigate accelerated cancer rates and other illnesses in central Florida communities, tracing the source to phosphate mining.
Myjing
How to survive the city of tormorrow? An Italian reporter in Beijing, Alessandro lives with his child and wife, alienated by the megalopolis. As he experiences the works of emerging local artists, Alessandro discovers unexpected views on the city, enhancing his own. Myjing is a storytelling in progress, a diary of this experience offering a unique in-depth perspective on today’s China.
Sing, Freetown
Emmy-winning Sierra Leonean filmmaker Sorious Samura has grown tired telling negative stories about Africa. He embarks on a journey with his best friend, Sierra Leone’s most famous playwright, to create an epic work of national theatre – a play to reclaim their country from negative media narratives and the damaging legacy of colonial rule. It doesn’t go as planned.
The Congress
Photographs are dusted, records cleaned, insects removed from books and everything is digitized for eternity. The matter-of-fact shots of fastidious archival work, though, are combined with the voice of a young woman who reports on the collapse of civilization, the fragile artefacts of which she secures as the last human being left in the “Congress”. In the field of tension between image and sound a space for our imagination opens up.
Blue Rose
While many people perceive flowers as a purely decorative phenomenon, the author of this film is confident that studying the world of flowers provides an opportunity to explore the nature of beauty and its commodification in the modern world. Blue Rose is a documentary essay that takes you through an intercontinental flower auction in the Netherlands, Japan's crazy scientific experiments, a pagan celebration in a Spanish town, and the nostalgic Soviet photo archives of the family garden. The Blue Rose reminds us that the ephemeral nature of flowers is deceiving, and a closer look at them can teach an important lesson about the world in which we live.
Chursin
Artist Alexander Chursin creates portraits of rappers of the caliber of Notorious B.I.G. and Earl Sweatshirt in the spirit of paintings by old masters, giving the stars of hip-hop images of icons. Observations of his work and Chursin's arguments about the Renaissance, the relevance of painting and the spirit of the 90s-in the film, which was shot for almost a year against the backdrop of post-apocalyptic landscapes of Eastern Europe.
Ticketed for What?
Ticketed for What? is a short documentary about Toronto's homeless community being unfairly ticketed under the Ontario Safe Streets Act.
Tia Iracy Futebol Clube
Maria Iracy, better known popularly and affectionately as TIA IRACY, mainly by the players of her soccer team, is a strong and at the same time delicate woman, who made her life a soccer match and who, despite having everything to lose the championships of life, he had many more victories than defeats. A film that talks about youthfulness in the best age, about affection and, above all, his love for a phenomenon so imposed on being male (football), in the view of a woman who, because she is so maternal, becomes the greatest reference of delicacy and femininity in the life of her transsexual daughter.
Third Nature
The essay perceives algorithms as a “living” species and gives them the space to co-create their own space, evoking reflections on naturalness and artificiality, the nature of habitus, and the border between fiction and documentation, in the scenery of a lyrical film shot within the computer games Grand Theft Auto 5 and theHunter: Call of the Wild.
Plant Heist
California’s fight to protect valuable native succulents from an international poaching ring. When suspicious packages are found in a small town in northern California, Game Warden Pat Freeling, gets a tip about the peculiar activity. After further investigation he exposes a vast network of illegal plant poachers. These smugglers ravage the landscape as they rip thousands of the native succulent, Dudleya Farinosa, from their natural habitat. This small unassuming plant carries a hefty bounty on its head internationally, where a single succulent boasts a price tag in the thousands. With the help of volunteers, native plant biologists, and local government, they fight to stop this ecological destruction.
Sacred Solitude
A seventy-year-old man who lives alone off the grid in the mountains of Central Italy–after having spent his life with hippies, abused drugs, and wandered around the world–has to find a way to survive when he runs out of water.
No River Protects me from Myself
Based on the mysterious theft of footage filmed in the jungle of the Congo Basin in the Central African Republic, the film reflects on the foundations of identity through a constellation of narratives and states of mind that, far from telling a linear story, are reflected, questioned, overlapped or self-determined through their position in a precise time and space.
Young And Afraid
In 2017 Petter (24) decides to end his life, but at the very last moment, is stopped by the police. His best friend and fellow film student Sverre is determined to help and suggests making a film to keep Petter busy and focused on getting better. Equipped with a camera, they search the streets of Oslo to find out how other troubled souls deal with their lives. With a naive and spontaneous approach, they end up in dramatic and unpredictable situations. They meet Monica, whose past has led her to self-injurious behavior. Oliver and Cornelia, both escaping their demons with alcohol and drugs, and Emma, who is transsexual, lesbian, and proud of who she is. They also meet Miriam, who becomes Petter's girlfriend. By getting to know their destructive patterns, Petter becomes aware of his own. He sets off on a bumpy therapeutic journey, that eventually brings light into his darkness. Young and Afraid is an authentic and raw documentary about choosing to live.
Art Class
Art Class (2020, 49 mins) is a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The film tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances.
Macchina Infinita
During a workshop, the LABA students together with Giulia Mazzone and Giuseppe Spina discover the collection of cinema machines kept by the Museo dell’Industria del Lavoro in Brescia. This visit becomes the leitmotif of a series of thoughts on technological development and on the imaginary of the infinite machine.
Cùntami
A road movie around Sicily in a red van loaded with "pupi", in search of new oral narrators to tell the other Sicily, the one that awakens through the universal force of popular stories.
Unheard Sounds
A documentary detailing a small section of the Avant Garde music scene in Perth, Western Australia.
Ultramarine
The audio-visual poem tells the story of the Scottish mythological figure - the selkie - driven from the depths of the ocean to land, from which she longs to return and merge once again with the sea. The juxtaposition of simple 2D animation, a digitally generated 3D world, an ambient soundtrack, and a mysterious voice-over creates an oppressive experience with a philosophical overlay dealing with the loss of identity and the impossibility of returning to nature.
A Valley Divided
In the nation’s fruit basket, Latino community organizers and farmworkers are finding their voice and demanding equal representation at the ballot box.
Tao Po
From several immersion trips and in-depth interviews conducted by performance artist-activist Mae Paner and playwright Maynard Manansala emerge four characters, four monologues that each give a human face to the issue of extrajudicial killings (EJK). A photojournalist transformed by the brutality he witnesses while covering the tokhang beat; a Zumba instructor haunted by her husband and son, both victims of summary killings; a cop who lives the double life of law enforcer and lawless hitman; and a young girl lighting candles in the “Tokhang Wall” of a Manila cemetery as she reminisces about acquaintances and loved ones, EJK victims all.
Uncertain Path
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costa, Manoel de Oliveira y and the film's director, with their own personal views, share that thin line that links life with cinema.
Cheating Is Good for You
A wife who has cheated on her husband for 40 years reflects on her behaviour and the benefits she has reaped.