Discover Movies

A collection of fleeting observations that document the passage of time through intimate encounters with friends and family captured between 1999 to 2018.

Dagnis suffered in a serious accident that took place almost 30 years ago. He's had to learn to live with his disability and also his insomnia and loneliness, as he feels people are afraid of him. Now Dagnis has other worries: he's got a video camera in his hands for the first time of his life, and he has to make a film. He walks around the village of Vaidava, films and comments on everything he sees and hears. We have the opportunity to look at the life of a small Latvian village through Dagnis’s eyes. What does Dagnis think about the environment around him, the society and its ability to accept others?

A young Calabrian woman just back from Gorizia tells a friend about her trip: what prompted her to go to Friuli-Venezia Giulia was her discovery of the poems and novels by one Carlo Michelstaedter, an author and philosopher who had died young, in 1910. What was the reason for his tragic death? And that odd yet familiar figure glimpsed on the beach, at the end of the trip, as the woman told it: who did it belong to?

Carlos Ghosn – the former CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, charged with financial crimes – stunned the world with his escape from Japan to Lebanon. What triggered Ghosn’s spectacular downfall from industry leader to international fugitive? Is there any truth to Ghosn’s claims of a corporate conspiracy? Nick Green’s documentary sheds light on this multilayered story, drawing out a portrait of a fascinating character.

Do you look back on the optimism of the 1997-2001 era as a lost golden age, or do you see it as a period of naïvety, delusion and folly? There’s a lot of nostalgia for the nineties at the moment, especially from people too young to remember it who see the decade as a simpler, pre-internet time. Modern nostalgia often draws on corporate American-90s mall culture, but what about British culture? With I’ve Been Trying To Tell You – made to accompany the Saint Etienne album of the same name – director Alasdair McLellan evokes the era through the fog of memory. The resulting film, shot in locations from Grangemouth to Portmeirion to Southampton, is both beautiful and enveloping.

What if we had stories to tell of audacious citizens who, with a strong desire for people of different beliefs to live together in harmony, have found ways of reinventing family, education, social relations, culture, and work...?

An Ohio woman's COVID story is revealed.

Unveils how the company LuLaRoe exploited the full power of social media and the psychological techniques used by multi-level marketers to onboard a massive pool of retailers.

In order to thank God for favoring their Struggle, the fighters of 1821 dedicated multiple icons and loots to churches and monasteries across Greece. But the great Pledge of the Nation remains unfulfilled to this day...

In Sam Firth's essay film "Field Notes On Love" a romantic relationship between a filmmaker and an ecologist interweaves explorations of categorisation, individuality, and a collective 'us'. Human and nonhuman entanglements are enticingly allegorised amidst a lush Scottish woodland.

Lost Course chronicles a grassroots democratic movement in the southern Chinese village of Wukan. The villagers protest against the corrupt local officials before ousting them and organising elections of their own. However, after taking control of their destiny, the villagers find themselves beset by the same corruption and cynicism endemic. Following three main characters, Li reveals the complexities of their struggles, triumphs and setbacks from the inside.

Philoxenia is a short documentary highlighting the synergy between the Greek notion of philoxenia ("friend of the stranger") and Southern hospitality, as expressed through Birmingham, Alabama's Greek-owned restaurants. The film features six local favorite restaurants, two historians and, of course, a lot of mouthwatering dishes.

A documentary dedicated to the one-hundredth anniversary of Giorgio Strehler’s birth: an unusual and intimate journey, reconstructed in previously unreleased or rarely heard interviews, with a poetic and personal touch.

Melissa Lucio was the first Hispanic woman sentenced to death in Texas. For ten years she has been awaiting her fate, and now faces her last appeal.

Vinyl record sellers talk about their audience. A documentary about music lovers in the era of streaming platforms. Owners of famous St. Petersburg music stores share stories of triumph and failure. Who buys and who needs vinyl in the streaming era? 10 heroes of different generations, views and tastes talk about how they are trying to save a rare business in a crisis.

This horror short film reveals the fate of four teens to previously stumbled upon a mystery of the Eraser Man. No one knows of its existence, and the Eraser Man will do everything in its power to meet it that way.

In Alaska's last native reserve, two cousins lead their local basketball team to its first state championship in more than thirty years. That quest is the only thing that will bring life back to a remote island that has been rocked by tragedy.

In Honduras, the most dangerous place in the world to be a land defender, the Lenca and Garífuna people are not backing down. They are fighting to uphold their spirituality and Indigenous ways of life in the face of state backed mega-projects and narco-traffickers who seek to assassinate them, destroy their lands, and erase their existence.

Flora, 30, is a French geneticist. She analyzes what is transmitted or not between generations. She lost her parents who were fervent Maoists within the proletarian Left from the end of the 1960s. She must now sort through her parents' apartment: what to choose to keep or not from their memory?

An immersive and experimental short film documenting the strange and tense atmosphere in Washington D.C. on January 20th, 2021.

A short film documenting Ethiopian musician Hailu Mergia's life as the leader of the Walias Band in the 1970, his immigration to the United States and his subsequent re-emergence as a performer in 2014.

Batory is a Trans Man and inmate at the Warszawa-Grochów Detention Center in Poland. Truly a film inspired by the cinema-verité movement, Batory navigates having difficult conversations with his significant other and parents upon his release - showing us a unique perspective on the lives of those in other worlds.

In this endless pandemic area, where our sexuality has sometimes had to evolve, has been tested, women from different backgrounds offer their intimate testimonies, addressing their desires and pleasures alone.

..at large under the sun... is a new short film, a lyrical post-apocalyptic diary movie for 2020 imbued with an irrepressible chthonic joyfulness that erupts from broken stone and broken birds. The soundtrack boasts an atmospheric sonic contribution by Declan Synnott.

Their documentary is the result of an ethnographic audiovisual research. How to research the theme woman and all the themes that surround it, respecting the place of speech of each one? Based on an interview with eighteen women cultural makers from the interior of São Paulo, we open the way to listening and dialogue on macro-themes permeated by their trajectories. The stories are theirs, but they're ours. Expand the debate about being a woman, about feminism and about our pains and delights, about our contradictions and dreams. The documentary is then a research, an open process of listening, reinterpreting and giving voice to them.

This film creates a real-life epic of boyhood and manhood that follows the same individual over 20 years, living in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. When we first meet Mir, he is a mischievous boy of seven living in a cave in central Afghanistan alongside the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two statues that were recently destroyed. For two decades, the film follows the adventures of his life, until, as an adult with a family of his own, he decides to pursue his own career as a news cameraman in Kabul. More than just a personal journey, My Childhood, My Country is an powerful examination of what has – and has not – been achieved in Afghanistan over the past 20 years.

This experimental short traces the lifespan of the graffiti and murals present at the occupation of NYC’s City Hall in June and July of 2020. The encampment formed to demand the abolishment of the NYPD and the reallocation of its resources to housing, education, and other social programs.

On September 6, 1991, Leningrad was officially renamed St. Petersburg. In the same year, the Soviet Union collapsed and the modern history of Russia began. This film is a thirty-year history of the city and country, filmed on video.

A self-portrait short film by veteran Brazilian filmmaker Sylvio Lanna.

Failed by a system that unfairly tears apart low income, marginalized families, four parents - Anna, Trish, Ernst and Rosa - fight to reunify with their children. But what does it take to get your children back after they’ve been taken by the Child Protective Services? Failure to Protect is an in-depth look at the child welfare system through the forgotten lens of parents, further contextualized by experts in the field to unpack a pressing socioeconomic issue that affects hundreds of thousands of families everyday.

For years strange sightings of an unidentified creature have been reported on the East Norfolk coastline. FACT OR FICTION? investigates these sightings and showcases the stories of those who have encountered it along the coast.

When the media gets wind of Mary Thorn’s story, there’s no stopping them from villainizing her as just another “Florida Man.” Florida Woman is a documentary portrait that peels back the curtain on the media’s portrayal of Mary Thorn, an ex-pro wrestler in Florida battling the state in order to save her pet alligator. Florida Woman ultimately reveals the humanity behind the viral headlines.

An observational portrait of the California Chinese community through the eyes of a Chinese restaurant in Monterey Park and an LA-based recent graduate trying to navigate the difficulties of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A journey through 40 years of life of the most important Film Festival in Portugal, through the voice of its President and Director, Mário Dorminsky and Beatriz Pacheco Pereira. Born at a coffee shop table in the "Invicta" - Porto City, with a subsidy of 15 "contos" (75EUR), since 1981 it hasn't stopped bringing us cinema, and given its weight and peculiarity, The project developed and soon became a reality, with the screening of several sessions a day, the realization of retrospectives and, also, in parallel, the promotion of concerts and art exhibitions. It is considered the biggest film festival in Portugal, and internationally recognized as one of the most important worldwide, and is now entering its 40th edition.

The use of digital and analog techniques distort—and ultimately give new meaning to—photographs and film footage of an Iraqi family.

Radical Love explores the subversive political activism and fierce love connection of Michael and Eleanora Kennedy, a husband-wife legal team who represented a who’s who of the politically subversive class in the 1960s and 70s. At the center of the story is their most notorious clients and closest friends, founding members of The Weather Underground Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Now as a widow, Eleanora reflects on a marriage and life in the crosshairs of politic activism, government surveillance, and deep passion.

Combining music and film, this work is based on archival footage from the 1920s captured in Lebanon by Pathé and Gaumont. “Topology of an Absence” proposes a new way to look at this archive, a hundred years after unnamed camera operators filmed the city of Beirut and captured bodies, faces, and eyes.

The indigenous people of the Darién Gap rainforest work with conservationists to use their heritage and traditions to protect the endangered Harpy Eagle and, in turn, protect their community.

A hybrid-documentary film that follows a queer Urdu poet as she traces the connections between quantum physics and political movements in South Asia.

A young man is caught in the cyclical phases of a violent illness.

Zimka and Nazmija are two sisters from a Roma family growing up in Zagreb. Zimka is 17, which makes her older than Nazmija, but she does not act her age. Their relationship is marked by the clash of their characters, but also the strength of their sisterly bond. Before starting high school, together they spend the summer dancing, singing and wandering around the parks and streets of Zagreb. Zimka’s departure to live in a student residence and her relationship with Tin put a new strain on the sisters relationship. The film follows the two sisters during a turbulent time in their lives, raising the question of whether everyone has the right to a carefree adolescence or is that a special privilege.

A beautifully shot exploration of how Puerto Rican coffee farmers struggle to pass on their family traditions in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

The film follows a pioneering team of scientists and psychotherapists, led by Professor David Nutt, Dr Robin Carhart-Harris and Dr Rosalind Watts, as they compare the effects of psilocybin (the active ingredient of magic mushrooms) with an antidepressant (an SSRI called escitalopram) on a small group of participants with clinical depression. This is scientific research at its most cutting edge. With over seven million people being prescribed antidepressants each year in England alone, this drug trial is an important milestone in understanding a completely different treatment for depression.

As he prepares for surgery to restore his vision, Mark Cousins explores the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary imagery across cultures and eras. At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of the human experience, empathy, discovery and thought. He shares the pleasure and pain of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to the other lookers for their vision from lockdown, and he travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.

Make It Or Die Trying: The Frank Warren Story takes viewers on a journey across decades of changing times in British boxing and gives fans an intimate insight into the man behind some of the greatest British athletes in history and how, from humble beginnings, Warren rose to leave a legacy in his wake.

Constructing a solitary reality by imagining what life would be like after the passing of her parents, director Allison Chhorn's intricate docu-fiction chronicles her own process carrying on work in the family's titular 'plastic house'.

Michael, a DVD vendor, spirals down after being kicked out from his own house by his wife due to financial difficulties.

As a wave of anti-boycott legislation has swept through the country, so has a counter-wave in defense of freedom of speech. Everyday Americans are challenging these laws for their constitutionality in a nation-wide battle likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Embark on a dizzying search for handcrafted treasures mixed with love in the public spaces of Mexico City's Historic Center. It stretches from the Isabel la Católica metro station in the south to the Lagunilla metro station in the north, the San Carlos National Museum in the west, and the Merced market in the east.