Motion Pictures are Your Best Entertainment (2025)

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

Stacey on the Front Line: Girls, Guns and Isis

September 2016: Stacey Dooley embeds herself on the frontline with the extraordinary all-female Yazidi battalion, who are fuelled to take revenge against the so-called Islamic State. As the battle to take Mosul from ISIS advances in Northern Iraq, in this extraordinary film for BBC Three, Stacey finds these young women's lives have been transformed by a desire to avenge their loved ones who were murdered by Isis.

Todo Todo Teros

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.

The Look of Silence

An optician grapples with the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966, during which his older brother was exterminated.

Long Live Hunting!

This documentary essay introduces a peculiar trio of men united by their passion for hunting. Each of them conceives of hunting in his own way, luring the viewer to an exotic safari, to an antlered trophy collection or to a sitting in the woods.

PROTOTYPE

As a major storm strikes Texas in 1900, a mysterious televisual device is built and tested. Blake Williams’ experimental 3D sci-fi film immerses us in the aftermath of the Galveston disaster to fashion a haunting treatise on technology, cinema, and the medium’s future.

To Stay Alive: A Method

Iggy Pop reads and recites Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto. The documentary features real people from Houellebecq’s life with the text based on their life stories.

Radical Evil

Das radikal Böse is a German-Austrian documentary that attempted to explore psychological processes and individual decision latitude "normal young men" in the German Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, which in 1941 during the Second World War as part of the Holocaust two million Jewish civilians shot dead in Eastern Europe.

Visions of Europe

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

Elie Wiesel Goes Home

A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?

In the Intense Now

A personal essay which analyses and compares images of the political upheavals of the 1960s. From the military coup in Brazil to China's Cultural Revolution, from the student uprisings in Paris to the end of the Prague Spring.

Locations: Looking for Rusty James

A personal meditation on Rumble Fish, the legendary film directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1983; the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, where it was shot; and its impact on the life of several people from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay related to film industry.

The Green Fog

A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…

Cinnamon

An experimental film that lifts the veil on the world of African American drag racing.

Comandante

Oliver Stone spends three days filming with Fidel Castro in Cuba, discussing an array of subjects with the president such as his rise to power, fellow revolutionary Che Guevara, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the present state of the country.

60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero

An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.

The Water Map

The Water Map is an essayistic journey through the ethnography and landscapes of the Region of Murcia. These places are in the process of disappearing due to the increasing and abundant agricultural exploitation. Water has marked the territory and the culture of the area, and with its disappearance, the memories of four characters fade away.

The Future Tense

Staged as a series of voiceover sessions, written with gloriously off-balanced precision and dipped in the color green, THE FUTURE TENSE unfolds as a poignant tale of tales, exploring the filmmakers’ own experiences in aging, parenting, mental illness, along with the brutal history that lies submerged beneath Ireland’s heavy, moist earth.

Arcadia

A provocative and poetic exploration of how the British people have seen their own land through more than a century of cinema. A hallucinated journey of immense beauty and brutality. A kaleidoscopic essay on how magic and madness have linked human beings to nature since the beginning of time.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?

Ahasverus

Short experimental 16mm film.

Iris Berben - Ein persönliches Porträt

She is the grande dame of German and international cinema, always a bit of a rocker chick, freedom-loving, adventurous and willing to take risks. This portrait unfolds Iris Berben's career, which has spanned more than five decades - between the art of film and television, between rock 'n' roll and political commitment.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

Jazz and decolonization are intertwined in a powerful narrative that recounts one of the tensest episodes of the Cold War. In 1960, the UN became the stage for a political earthquake as the struggle for independence in the Congo put the world on high alert. The newly independent nation faced its first coup d'état, orchestrated by Western forces and Belgium, which were reluctant to relinquish control over their resource-rich former colony. The US tried to divert attention by sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the African continent. In 1961, Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba was brutally assassinated, silencing a key voice in the fight against colonialism; his death was facilitated by Belgian and CIA operatives. Musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach took action, denouncing imperialism and structural racism. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev intensified his criticism of the US, highlighting the racial barriers that characterized American society.

2012: Time for Change

2012: Time For Change is a documentary feature that presents ways to transform our unsustainable society into a regenerative planetary culture. This can be achieved through a personal and global change of consciousness and the systemic implementation of ecological design.

À propos de Nice

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.

imagine… Russell T Davies: The Doctor and Me

imagine... follows celebrated British TV writer Russell T Davies as he prepares to return as the showrunner of Doctor Who – with two Doctors and bigger ambitions.

The Pearl Button

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.

My Enemy's Enemy

Reveals an alternate history of the post-war world. This is a version of history where, in contrast to what we are all told, fascist ideology prevailed. The story of Klaus Barbie, Nazi torturer, American spy, tool of repressive right-wing regimes, is symbolic of the real relationship that the "Western" governments had with fascism and makes us see the world as it is today - and the politicians that inhabit it - in a different way.

The March on Rome

The fascinating story of the rise to power of dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) in Italy in 1922 and how fascism marked the fate of the entire world in the dark years to come.

The Weavers of Nishijin

The Weavers of Nishijin captures the process of traditional textile manufacture in Nishijin.

Dust of America

A dream walk through the United States of America; a meditation on the thoughts and ideals of its inhabitants, as they are exposed in their silent but eloquent home movies.

Hauntology of the Retrodromomania

Hauntology of the Retrodromomania is an essayistic motion picture, a locomotory legwork, a deambulatory non-rural land survey, a casual journeying in a punctual dissertation around the phenomenon of the nostalgic feeling, discoursing on a late capitalistic landscape of social emotions, which are of yore, yet coloured of the postmodern tint of pixelated neo-noir, a socio-philosophical flâneur’s trip in critical theory escorted by the spirits of French post-structuralists. For a Sociology of Nostalgia revisited.

Frank Zappa - Summer '82: When Zappa Came to Sicily

In the feature documentary, Summer 82 - When Zappa Came to Sicily, filmmaker and Zappa fan Salvo Cuccia tells the behind-the-scenes story of Frank Zappa's star-crossed concert in Palermo, Sicily, the wrap-up to a European tour that ended in public disturbances and police intervention. Cuccia had a ticket to the concert but never made it. Thirty years later, collaborating with Zappa's family, he re-creates the events through a combination of rare concert and backstage footage; photographs; anecdotes from family, band members, and concertgoers; and insights from Zappa biographer and friend Massimo Bassoli. The story is also a personal one, as Cuccia interweaves the story of Zappa's trip to Sicily with his own memories from that summer.

The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.

Nostalgia for the Light

In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers peer deep into the cosmos in search for answers concerning the origins of life. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones, dumped unceremoniously by Pinochet's regime.

George: The Story of George Maciunas and Fluxus

In 1961 Lithuanian American artist and impresario George Maciunas established the avant-garde art movement Fluxus. George details the rise of Fluxus following a sensationalized tour of “concerts” in Europe in 1962, and continuing in New York for most of the 1960s and ’70s. During this time Maciunas was converting the dying industrial buildings of Soho into a network of artists’ lofts, creating one of the first official real estate co-ops of artist-owned buildings. Maciunas’s life and legacy—as recounted by artists of his generation, including Yoko Ono and Jonas Mekas—ignited debates that remain pivotal to artists working today.

The Armenian Genocide

Explores the Ottoman Empire killings of more than one million Armenians during World War I. The film describes not only what happened before, during and since World War I, but also takes a direct look at the genocide denial maintained by Turkey to the present day.

End of Summer

A hypnotic and slow-burning journey through the austere landscapes of the island of South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. Shot on black and white super 8 film as a series of mostly static tableaux over a period of 20 days during the waning days of the Antarctic Summer, the film is a startling look at life at the edge of the world.

How the Holocaust Began

Historian James Bulgin reveals the origins of the Holocaust in the German invasion of the Soviet Union, exploring the mass murder, collaboration and experimentation that led to the Final Solution.