Locations: Looking for Rusty James (2013)

The Case of Bruno Lüdke

The incredible story of Bruno Lüdke (1908-44), the alleged worst mass murderer in German criminal history; or actually, a story of forged files and fake news that takes place during the darkest years of the Third Reich, when the principles of criminal justice, subjected to the yoke of a totalitarian system that is beginning to collapse, mean absolutely nothing.

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.

Babenco: Tell Me When I Die

Besieged by cancer and nearing the end, the genius Argentine-Brazilian filmmaker Héctor Babenco (1946-2016) asks Bárbara Paz, his wife, for one last wish: to be the protagonist of his own death.

Andrey Tarkovsky. A Cinema Prayer

An account of the life and work of Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky (1932-86) in his own words: his memories, his vision of art and his reflections on the fate of the artist and the meaning of human existence; through extremely rare audio recordings that allow a complete understanding of his inner life and the mysterious world existing behind his complex cinematic imagery.

Fulci Talks

Rome, Italy, June 1993. Antonietta De Lillo and Marcello Garofalo interview legendary Italian film director Lucio Fulci (1927-96).

Heirs of the Beast

The story of the making and subsequent success of The Day of the Beast, the Spanish cult film directed by Álex de la Iglesia and released in 1995.

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…

Straight to VHS

Act of Violence Upon a Young Journalist is a film shot in 1988 and released on VHS in 1989; a mysterious cult work of Uruguayan cinema surrounded by strange theories about Manuel Lamas, its unknown creator. Until now.

Gena Rowlands: A Life on Film

An intimate portrait of the superb actress Gena Rowlands, icon of independent cinema. Together with her husband, legendary director John Cassavetes (1929-89), she lived an unusual life beyond the dream factory, a life in which reality and fiction were so perfectly intertwined that it made possible films that still today seem incredibly real.

The Sound of Identity

In the spotlight of global media coverage, the first transgender woman ever to perform as Don Giovanni in a professional opera, makes her historic debut in one of the reddest states in the U.S.

Transgender Nuclear Suicide Sojourner

Lies can kill. Transgender Nuclear Suicide Sojourner is an exploration of propaganda, lies, and the overwhelming urge to end it all.

Kim Novak: Hollywood's Golden Age Rebel

Kim Novak never dreamed on being a star, but she became one. Most famous for her enigmatic performance in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the Chicago-born actress never quite fitted into the Hollywood mould and wanted to do things her own way.

Das Boot Revisited: An Underwater Success Story

In 1981, a film about the misadventures of a German U-boat crew in 1941 becomes a worldwide hit almost four decades after the end of the World War II. Millions of viewers worldwide make Das Boot the most internationally successful German film of all time. But due to disputes over the script, accidents on the set, and voices accusing the makers of glorifying the war, the project was many times on the verge of being cancelled.

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.

Visions of Europe

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

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror

An exploration of the cinematic history of the folk horror, from its beginnings in the UK in the late sixties; through its proliferation on British television in the seventies and its many manifestations, culturally specific, in other countries; to its resurgence in the last decade.

Clawing! A Journey Through the Spanish Horror

In the late sixties, Spanish cinema began to produce a huge amount of horror genre films: international markets were opened, the production was continuous, a small star-system was created, as well as a solid group of specialized directors. Although foreign trends were imitated, Spanish horror offered a particular approach to sex, blood and violence. It was an extremely unusual artistic movement in Franco's Spain.

La Cicciolina: Godmother of Scandal

The personal and professional story of Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, is probably unique: she left communist Hungary and moved to Italy, where she found a fertile environment for a life dedicated to scandal.

Hitler's Hollywood

Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)

Ôrí

A look at the Brazilian black movement between 1977 and 1988, going by the relationship between Brazil and Africa.

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.

Mario Camus según el cine

A look at the life and work of Spanish filmmaker Mario Camus (1935-2021).

Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer

Comes one hundred years from the two-day Tulsa Massacre in 1921 that led to the murder of as many as 300 Black people and left as many as 10,000 homeless and displaced.

The Imperial Lullaby

The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.

Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin

The story of French filmmaker Jean Rollin (1938-2010), one of the most singular voices of European cult cinema, deeply misunderstood and widely misrepresented.

The Memory of Cinema: A Film About Fernando Méndez-Leite

A look at the life and work of Spanish filmmaker and film critic Fernando Méndez-Leite, as he writes his memoirs and a novel with autobiographical resonances.

Movies by Machine - AI and Cinema

As artificial intelligence becomes ever more sophisticated, the film industry is split between enthusiasm at what the technology can achieve and concern over the future for human workers in the industry. Will actors and actresses be replaced by machines? An overview on the coming wave of AI in cinema.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Romy Schneider & Alain Delon: An Enduring Passion

Austrian actress Romy Schneider (1938) and French actor Alain Delon (1935), once fervent lovers in the early sixties, maintained a close friendship and a certain working relationship after their breakup until her death in 1984: a universal and eternal love.

Four Years of Solitude

A written testimony by co-director Jin Ryoo on his experience preparing for Korean compulsory military service is juxtaposed with images of an empty UCSD campus, the desolate construction sites sprawling off of it, and the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial.

Michel Gondry: Do It Yourself

A portrait of French filmmaker Michel Gondry, creator, for three decades, of an imperfect, astonishing, fascinating, damaged and poetic work.

Parallel Lives

Born June 8, 1964, Frank Matter films four "twins", born the same day as him, but in other latitudes. Interweaving their life stories with rich archival material, the filmmaker links these Parallel Lives with elements from his own biography, to compose a fascinating fresco where intimate trajectories are part of the advent of the global village.

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.

The Critic

A portrait of film critic Carlos Boyero, one of the most followed and feared figures in Spanish cinema, surrounded by controversy and both love and hate.

100 Years of the UFA

The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.

Communism and the Net, or the End of Representative Democracy

The six-hour essay in four parts examines the history of regimes and revolutions, leaders and martyrs, from a philosophical perspective. The collage of personal memories, staged scenes and archives of collective memory compares the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution and shows the exposure, conflict, crisis, and catharsis of the post-communist society.

Searching for Oscar

Óscar Peyrou is a veteran Spanish film critic who writes his reviews according to a very peculiar method: in his opinion, it is not really necessary to watch the films since it is possible to judge them simply by looking at their promotional poster.

Deep Throat: When Porn Makes Its Premiere

Deep Throat, a pornographic film directed by Gerard Damiano, a film-loving hairdresser, and starring Linda Lovelace, a shy girl manipulated by a controlling husband, was released in 1972 and divided audiences, who began to talk openly about sex, desire and female pleasure; but also about violence and abuse; and about pornography, until then an almost clandestine industry, as a revolutionary cultural phenomenon.

Dark Glamour: The Blood and Guts of Hammer Productions

The greatness, fall and renaissance of Hammer, the flagship company of British popular cinema, mainly from 1955 to 1968. Tortured women and sadistic monsters populated oppressive scenarios in provocative productions that shocked censorship and disgusted critics but fascinated the public. Movies in which horror was shown in offensive colors: dreadful stories, told without prejudices, that offered fear, blood, sex and stunning performances.

Becoming Marilyn

The story of how Norma Jeane Mortenson became Marilyn Monroe (1926-62), a lucid path of self-discovery, from anonymity to stardom: the painful birth of a myth.

Wild Session

A walk through the golden age of Spanish exploitation cinema, from the sixties to the eighties; a low-budget cinema and great popular acceptance that exploited cinematographic fashions: westerns, horror movies, erotic comedies and thrillers about petty criminals.

The Incredible Mr. Piccoli

A captivating portrait of French actor Michel Piccoli, who has worked with the greatest filmmakers of his time and has built a dazzling career of remarkable merit and success, focusing on his work during the 1970s and his professional relationship with Claude Sautet, Romy Schneider, Marco Ferreri and Luis Buñuel.

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.

[REC]: Horror Without Pause

The horror film [REC] — directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, and released in 2007 — was an unprecedented triumph for Spanish fantasy cinema. Fifteen years later, those responsible for the creation and worldwide success of this cinematic milestone decode its keys and resurrect the myth.

The Concavenator Valley

Three researchers work on a paleontological project focusing on two dinosaurs: one fictional, the one created by special effects genius Ray Harryhausen for the film The Valley of Gwangi (1969); the other real, the Concavenator corcovatus, whose remains were discovered in 2003 at the Las Hoyas site, in the province of Cuenca (Spain), very close to where the filming took place.

Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street

This documentary celebrates the Black cultural renaissance that existed in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, OK, and investigates the 100-year-old race massacre that left an indelible, though hidden stain on American history.

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.

The Dawn of Kaiju Eiga

Japan, 1954. A legend emerges from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastated by atomic bombs in 1945. The creature's name is Godzilla. The film that tells its story is the first of kaiju eiga, the giant monster movies.

Tippi Hedren: The Birds and Other Wild Animals

Tippi Hedren, the unforgettable actress who starred in The Birds (1963), made in her memoirs a relentless portrait of its director, the genius British filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), the same one who, despite his disturbing personality and questionable working methods, made her a Hollywood star. From Minnesota to Hollywood, the true story of a unique performer and a free woman.

The Tulsa Lynching of 1921: A Hidden Story

Documents the race riot of 1921 and the destruction of the African-American community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With testimony by eyewitnesses and background accounts by historians.

Casablanca revisitada

A lyrical and nostalgic analysis of how Casablanca, the mythical film directed by Michael Curtiz in 1942, has influenced both film history and pop culture.

The Blade Runner Phenomenon

Ridley Scott's cult film Blade Runner, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick and released in 1982, is one of the most influential science fiction films ever made. Its depiction of Los Angeles in the year 2019 is oppressively prophetic: climate catastrophe, increasing public surveillance, powerful monopolistic corporations, highly evolved artificial intelligence; a fantastic vision of the future world that has become a frightening reality.

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

A hilarious introduction, using as examples some of the best films ever made, to some of Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek's most exciting ideas on personal subjectivity, fantasy and reality, desire and sexuality.

We Were Once Kids

In the early nineties, before the massive gentrification of many of New York's then slums, several young people from very disparate backgrounds left their broken homes and ventured onto the brutal streets of the city. United by their love of skateboarding, they formed a family and built a unique lifestyle that eventually inspired Kids, a groundbreaking and outrageous film directed by photographer Larry Clark and released in 1995.