An Idiot's Guide to University (2025)

Sparni

It’s the second semester of junior year for Pierce “Sparni” Sparnroft, a gifted jazz vibraphonist studying at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Sparni’s prospects on the vibes were rejuvenated by their new professor, the world-renowned Steve Nelson, and are to be showcased during a student-driven recital in May 2023. But all the while, Sparni must face a crisis within.

Bloggers and Roads

"Bloggers and Roads" is an honest story of travel in Russia in the format of a travel-vlog. A company of very different bloggers goes on a journey to see what people live in the villages and small towns of our country. Without written cues and a clear plan, they plunge headlong into adventures. Nastya Ivleeva, Eldar Jarakhov, Danya Milokhin, Yulia Gavrilina, Cherocky and Vital Parapatronov disconnected from the bustle of the capital to live in the "here and now" format for a week. They will invite themselves to visit the locals, arrange a village drift, work on the farm and even go on a real hike in the wild! We guarantee-made with the soul.

Last Week

A short documentary film by Ye featuring a series of vignettes: A video game-esqe scene of a hooded masked figure completing tasks in Shibuya, Ye rapping in a car, secretly filmed meetings with brand executives, footage of him watching his daughter's basketball game, and more.

The Great North

Beginning at the industrial revolution of the ‘great north’, Jenn Nkiru draws lines between peoples, cities, countries, buildings, movements, bodies and spaces(s) using a mixture of archive materials and new footage. There is little stillness as we are pushed and pulled through Black histories and communities across the city of Manchester and beyond. Nkiru has termed this filmmaking process “cosmic archeology”, and it is grounded in Afro-surrealism, experimental film and the Black arts movement.

CARMEX

An Evil Entity intrudes on a YouTube Vlog by a group of Queer teenagers.

There We Were, Now Here We Are... The Making of Oasis

A documentary made for television that looks back on the development and rapid rise of Oasis from being a band practicing nightly in the Boardwalk to one the biggest British bands of the last thirty years. Building from the formation of the band (with Liam apparently just fed up waiting for other bands to release records and decides to do something himself), the film uses contributions from key people really well to tell the story in an engaging way.

longseason

In the year of 2022, a late teenager and their friends film moments they would prefer not to forget: their long season.

American Animals

Lexington, Kentucky, 2004. Four young men attempt to execute one of the most audacious art heists in the history of the United States.

Lights Over Tesco Car Park

Basically, Robert reported lights over the Tesco car park. Then he told us an alien was coming to stay in his spare room. With the help of some historical abduction stories, a latex alien mask, and a bucket of flying saucers, we’re working out whether to believe him. Maybe this is a good place to believe him? Maybe you can help?

Occupation

Students seeking greater control over the hiring of faculty occupy the offices of the Political Science Department at McGill University. The film crew lives with the students and follows their action through confusion, argument, dissent, and negotiations with faculty. The result is an intimate view of a student political action.

The Hunting Ground

A startling expose of rape crimes on US campuses, their institutional cover-ups, and the devastating toll they take on students and their families. The film follows the lives of several undergraduate assault survivors as they attempt to pursue—despite incredible push back, harassment and traumatic aftermath—both their education and justice.

vvvamor

A formally free poetic documentary filmed through a summer depression in northern Portugal.

The Great Learning

At Tsinghua University's campus, four people are standing at the intersection of their lives. Among them, there are those who just passed the college entrance examination, the first-generation of post-00 college students who entered their favorite universities with twists and turns , some are leaving their ivory towers, PhD graduates facing difficult choices and some have returned from the United States to enter Tsinghua University. Young teachers are full of "viewing the sky" ideal but face challenges, there are old academicians who still stand behind lectern after their retirement. The film tells the life ideals of the four Tsinghua people and the eternal youth that belongs to this university behind them.

We, Students!

Nestor, Aaron, Benjamin and Rafiki are economics undergraduates at the University of Bangui. Navigating between the overcrowded classrooms, the petty trades that allow students to survive, bribery lurking everywhere, Rafiki shows us what students lives are like in the Central African Republic, a shattered society where the youth keeps dreaming for a brighter future for their country.

Euller Miller Between Two Worlds

Euller Miller is a young native Brazilian of kaiwá ethnicity who leaves his small village just outside of Dourados (MS) to study dentistry at a public university in the crowded capital city of the state of Paraná. The film follows the complex transition between two very different worlds and the search for new horizons without abandoning his indigenous roots.

Research and Crime: the Reich University of Strasbourg

Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?

Playboy: College Girls

Year in, year out, Playboy magazine's college pictorials are a big hit. Now, for the first time ever, our course in collegiate beauty comes to video with some of the most beautiful student bodies in the nation.

Daedalus

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." A 7 day vlog during the summer of 2023, a story of dreamers and drowners.

The Thinnest Line

A fist-person story of the director of the documentary, who talks about the loneliness that entails living with an eating disorder and her vision now thar she is entering into adulthood.

University and Freedom

Our era is marked by the transformation of social institutions, with universities central to Euro-American civilisation’s development. Despite past persecution, universities have become bastions of free thought and knowledge, crucial to democratic culture. However, commercialisation and massification have introduced challenges affecting teaching, research, self-governance, and the system overall. How do universities maintain academic freedoms, and what are the consequences of their failure? Can we identify and address these challenges?

Eric Rushton Won't Die Alone

Fledgling comedian Eric Rushton has never been on a date - until this documentary.

Aberdeen

Explore the growth of Aberdeen’s sparkling streets.

Looking Back Before You Leap

A collection of memories from a tumultuous time at University.

State of Exception

Estado de Excepção is a documentary about CITAC (Coimbra Theater Initiation Circle), a university theater group, revealing history since it was constituted in 1956 until the aftermath of the 1974 revolution. It is the history of the theater group university and, through it, the history of theater in Portugal, revealing two remarkable decades of the History of Portugal. Through the Academy of Coimbra, the documentary reproduces student life, the position of women in society, and the change in mentalities of being and being in the world. It reproduces the existing censorship and the fight against the dictatorship, the resistance to an exhausted regime, as well as the emerging contradictions of the democratic revolution. CITAC has a heritage of 50 years of experience in Coimbra. It carries with it the possibility of the theatrical and civic formation of thinking bodies, constituting a proper ball of a possible model, generation by generation, between studies, theater, and social drama.

Clio Capers

"Clio Capers" is a short film about the Clio Club, the Latin club James Blue belonged to at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon. The film features "Jupiter" and his fellow immortals atop Mt. Olympus looking back through the "Clio scrapbook," actual home movie footage James Blue shot of club activities between 1946-1948. Originally shot on 8mm film. No sound.

the tearoom generation

a short documentary-style film, following the first semester of a kooky group of university students in their third year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXtxXN2e5pw

Voices of Muslim Women from the US South

When one thinks of the American Deep South, the image of veiled Muslim students strolling the University of Alabama campus is the last thing that comes to mind. VOICES OF MUSLIM WOMEN FROM THE US SOUTH is a documentary that explores the Muslim culture through the lens of five University of Alabama Muslim students. The film tackles how Muslim women carve a space for self-expression in the Deep South and how they negotiate their identities in a predominantly Christian society that often has unflattering views about Islam and Muslims. Through interviews with students and faculty at Alabama, this film examines representations and issues of agency by asking: How do Muslim female students carve a space in a culture that thinks of Muslims as terrorists and Muslim women as backward?