Always Forward (2021)

Laerte-se

In this film, Laerte conjugates the body in the feminine, and scrutinizes concepts and prejudices. Not in search of an identity, but in search of un-identities. Laerte creates and sends creatures to face reality in the fictional world of comic strips as a vanguard of the self. And, on the streets, the one who becomes the fiction of a real character. Laerte, of all the bodies, and of none, complicates all binaries. In following Laerte, this documentary chooses to clothe the nudity beyond the skin we inhabit.

No Palco

Plot unavailable

The Virginia Tripping Film

Carlo McCormick was invited to curate an East Village Art show at a gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Filmmaker Tessa Hughes-Freeland took filmic evidence of the infamous exhibition that featured downtown artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Marilyn Minter, Luis Frangella and more painting naughty murals while on acid.

Town Destroyer

Controversy erupts over a New-Deal-era mural of the namesake of San Francisco’s George Washington High School. The thirteen-panel artwork "The Life of Washington" by Victor Arnautoff offers a view of the Founding Father both celebratory and critical, referencing his involvements in slavery and Native American genocide.

Carla's Song

A Glasgow man visits war-torn Nicaragua with a refugee tormented by her memories.

Sara

Sara, A positive girl who can't speak(dumb) and A lonely boy without hope in life accidentally meets and talks through a diary.

Elliott Erwitt - Silence Sounds Good

Elliott Erwitt has spent his entire adult life taking photographs, of presidents, popes and movie stars, as well as regular people and their pets. His work is iconic in world culture while his life is largely unknown.

Love, Brooklyn

Roger, a writer, navigates complicated relationships with his ex Casey and his current lover Nicole, a newly-single mother, with the support of his best friend Alan. A modern romance set against the rapidly changing landscape of Brooklyn, New York.

Being Kae Tempest

Poet, rapper, playwright and recording artist Kae Tempest is one of the most viscerally exciting artists working in Britain today. They are the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious Ted Hughes prize and have been nominated for both the Brit and Mercury music awards. Tempest has always found support and respect within the queer art scenes, a place close to their heart. In July 2020, they came out as non-binary, announcing that they would publish and perform under the name Kae. This film delves deep into their creative process and gains rare, intimate insights into Kae’s life throughout a period of profound personal and artistic change.

Les chiens-loups

Plot unavailable

Donatello: Renaissance Genius

Portrait of the Italian sculptor Donatello (1386-1466), a precursor of the High Renaissance who considerably influenced sculptural art with his innovative way of conceiving space. Donatello is already a legend in his own lifetime. The sculptor is the forefather of the High Renaissance and pioneer for artists such as Raphael or Michelangelo. His bronze sculpture of the "David" or the "Pazzi Madonna" in marble are icons of art history and testify to his sculptural power of renewal.

Sarcophagus for a Queen

Bjørn Nørgaard and a team of Czech glass artists in the demanding process of creating a grave monument for Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik of Denmark.

Odvaha

Plot unavailable

Miss Alma Thomas: A Life in Color

Alma W. Thomas lived a life of firsts: the first Fine Arts graduate of Howard University (1924), the first Black woman to mount a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1972), and the first Black woman to have her paintings exhibited in the White House (2009). Yet she did not receive national attention until she was 80.

Andrea

A transgender girl runs away from home and is invited to live with a strange photographer who pushes her to help him pay his debts.

Faces Places

Director Agnès Varda and photographer/muralist JR journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.

ADELANTE

A documentary about the artist Desiderio, directed by Andrea Rotini. With the partecipation of Alessandro Riva, Chiara Canali, Francesco Santaniello. Texts and translations by Gemma Jalenti

The Real Beauty and the Beast

It's a condition known as "hypertrichosis" or "Ambras Syndrome," but in the 1500s it would transform one man into a national sensation and iconic fairy-tale character. His name: Petrus Gonsalvus, more commonly known today as the hairy hero of Beauty and the Beast.

Semi Colin

Challenging all notions of genre, Semi Colin is a living, breathing art installation. Part performance, part art, part social comment, Colin philosophizes on his life's obsessive work as an erotic artist.

Chook Shed

Emerson Hayes is a 60-year-old sculptor who lives in a caravan and works from an old shed in the back corner of her daughter’s coastal egg farm. When she is informed that her most acclaimed and last remaining work on public display is being replaced, she seeks a new home for it with family friend Lena, who curates a prestigious contemporary gallery. Lena, however, demands that Em present a fresh new work if she is to be considered for exhibition. As Em struggles to break out of her artistic rut, she is forced to reckon not only with her place in the art world, but with her entire identity.

Pecker

A Baltimore teenager who picks up a second-hand camera starts snapping his way to stardom, soon turning into a nationwide sensation, with a fateful choice between his life and his art.

Magical Universe

A documentarian strikes up an odd friendship with reclusive 80 year old outsider artist Al Carbee, whose strange Barbie-doll photography gains acclaim and interest over the course of the project's multi-year history. Far beyond a portrait of an eccentric, Magical Universe is about wonder, friendship, and the transcendent power of creativity

Leonora Carrington: The Lost Surrealist

British surrealist Leonora Carrington was a key part of the surrealist movement during its heyday in Paris and yet, until recently, remained a virtual unknown in the country of her birth. This film explores her dramatic evolution from British debutante to artist in exile, living out her days in Mexico City, and takes us on a journey into her darkly strange and cinematic world.

Statues Also Die

Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.

The Wormwood Star

A portrait of artist, actress, poet and occultist Marjorie Cameron, it shows images of her paintings and recitations of her poems. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2006.

Francofonia

Master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) transforms a portrait of the world-renowned museum into a magisterial, centuries-spanning reflection on the relation between art, culture and power.

The Arc de Triomphe: A Nation's Passion

The pride of Napoleon's victories, the Arc de Triomphe, whose first stone was laid in 1806 at the top of the Champs-Élysées, is, along with the Eiffel Tower, one of the most visited monuments in the French capital. Wanted by an emperor, inaugurated under the reign of a king (Louis-Philippe) and sanctuarized by the Republic, this patriotic temple polarizes the passions of a whole nation. A historical portrait before "packaging", which teems with anecdotes and unsuspected details.

Surviving Picasso

The passionate Merchant-Ivory drama tells the story of Francoise Gilot, the only lover of Pablo Picasso who was strong enough to withstand his ferocious cruelty and move on with her life.

Sk8face

Tells the history of skateboard art and its evolution through the decades, as iconic and rebellious skateboarders and artists give firsthand experiences and stories about their art that challenged the establishment.

Segantini: Back to Nature

Giovanni Segantini rose from humble origins to become the most important of Italian pointillists, and one of the most important symbolist painters in the 19th century. This film focuses on his way of feeling nature as a source of artistic and spiritual inspiration.

Reagan

Told through the voice of former KGB agent Viktor Petrovich, whose life becomes inextricably linked with Ronald Reagan's when Reagan first caught the Soviets’ attention as an actor in Hollywood, Reagan overcomes the odds to become the 40th president of the United States.

Billy Connolly: Portrait of a Lifetime

Celebrating Billy Connolly's 75th birthday and 50 years in the business, three Scottish artists - John Byrne, Jack Vettriano and Rachel MacLean - each create a new portrait of the Big Yin. As he sits with each artist, Billy talks about his remarkable life and career which has taken him from musician and pioneering stand-up to Hollywood star and national treasure.

Ma nouvelle Héloïse

A wealthy Japanese patron, enamored with Rousseau, offers an atypical and versatile filmmaker the opportunity to freely adapt Jean-Jacques Rousseau's epistolary novel into a film. The filmmaker brings together three young actors in a deserted palace above Clarens and begins shooting. Rousseau's tragedy then reverberates through the contemporary characters.

New York Stories

Three tales of love, ambition, and neurosis unfold in the city that never sleeps. In "Life Lessons" (Martin Scorsese), a tormented painter channels heartbreak into his art. In "Life Without Zoë" (Francis Ford Coppola), a precocious 12-year-old navigates privilege and loneliness in a Manhattan hotel. And in "Oedipus Wrecks" (Woody Allen), a man’s domineering mother literally becomes a looming presence over New York.

A Quiet Inquisition

At a public hospital in Nicaragua, Ob/Gyn Dr. Carla Cerrato must choose between following a law that bans all abortions and endangers her patients or taking a risk and providing the care that she knows can save a woman's life. In 2007, Dr. Cerrato’s daily routine took a detour. The newly elected government of Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist revolutionary who converted to Catholicism to win votes, overturned a 130-year-old law protecting therapeutic abortion. The new law entirely prohibits abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, or when a woman’s life is at stake. As Carla and her colleagues navigate this dangerous dilemma, the impact of this law emerges—illuminating the tangible reality of prohibition against the backdrop of a political, religious, and historically complex national identity. The emotional core of the story—the experiences and situations of the young women and girls who are seeking care—illustrate the ethical implications of one doctor's response.

Venus

Maurice is an aging veteran actor who becomes taken with Jessie, the grandniece of his closest friend. When Maurice tries to soften the petulant and provincial young girl with the benefit of his wisdom and London culture, their give-and-take surprises both Maurice and Jessie as they discover what they don't know about themselves.

Ein Traum von Revolution

When the revolution in Nicaragua won its victory nearly 40 years ago, the world began to dream. A young generation was taking the reins in a country of grand utopias. From West Germany alone, 15,000 “brigadists” travelled to help rebuild the war-torn country: liberals, greens, unionists, social democrats, leftists and church representatives harvested coffee and cotton, built schools, kindergartens and hospital wards. No movement has mobilised so many people. What became of the hopes and dreams of the revolutionaries and their supporters?

Bomb It

Through interviews and guerilla footage of graffiti writers in action on five continents, the documentary tells the story of graffiti from its origins in prehistoric cave paintings thru its notorious explosion in New York City during the 70’s and 80’s, then follows the flames as they paint the globe.

Poison Ivy 2: Lily

A young and naive college art student becomes obsessed with assuming the identity and personality of a departed coed who used to live in her room, and in so doing causes complications that result in two men, a student and her art professor, lusting after her.

Tell Them We Were Here

Tell Them We Were Here is an inspirational feature-length documentary about eight artists who show us why art is vital to a healthy society and reminds us that we are stronger together.