Will Work for Views: The Lo-Fi Life of Weird Paul

A film exploring the life of “Weird Paul.” After 30 years, 2000 videos, 800 songs, & 42 albums, he’s still not giving up on his dream.

2017-08-01 | en

Travelers

The diaspora of Filipinos around the globe is driven mostly by the economics of supply and demand. The yearning for something better, stability, and self-validation leads a handful of sojourners from the provinces of the Philippines into the arms of one of its former colonial masters — the USA. But what happens when they finally get what they want? And how? Filmmaker Dennis Empalmado explores the musings of Filipino expatriates and hopeful immigrants in "Naglalakbay" (Travelers).

2023-06-03 | tl

Filmed Memory of Eternal Longing

This documentary is a record of moments with family, friends, travels, outings, and a passion that Carla inherited from her father. The need to encapsulate time led her to film her daily life with Bahian friends in Barcelona, a city where she lived the best of her youth for eight years. When she decided to return to Brazil, everything took on new significance. It was then that she began the project of making a documentary to immortalize that period. The casual recordings turned into an obsession, and her friends were interviewed, totaling more than 50 hours of filmed memories and a year of editing in Brazil. This process was a painful stagnation in the past, an effort to make sense of material that fed a difficult feeling to overcome: longing. The result is a delicate film that reflects on exile, memory, time, family, change, and life.

2012-03-06 | pt

The Stars Are Beautiful

We move back and forth between scenes of a family at home and thoughts about the stars and creation. Children hold chickens while an adult clips their wings; we see a forest; a narrator talks about stars and light and eternity. A dog joins the hens and the family, while the narrator explains the heavens. We see a bee up close. The narrator suggests metaphors for heavenly bodies. Scenes fade into a black screen or dim purple; close-ups of family life may be blurry. The words about the heavens, such as "The stars are a flock of hummingbirds," contrast with images and sounds of real children.

1974-11-19 | en

Window Water Baby Moving

On a winter's day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She's happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby's head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With the help of the attending hands, the mother expels the placenta. The infant, a baby girl, nurses. We return from time to time to the bath scene. By the end, dad's excited; mother and daughter rest. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.

1959-08-02 | en

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.

2011-07-06 | fr

things that won't die

After finding some videos she uploaded to YouTube when she was a child, Manuela attempts to follow the trail she herself has left on the Internet. A search that looks into all that things that won't never die and that, especially, thinks about the way we look at ourselves.

2022-03-05 | es

Aznavour by Charles

In 1948, French singer Charles Aznavour (1924-2018) receives a Paillard Bolex, his first camera. Until 1982, he will shoot hours of footage, his filmed diary. Wherever he goes, he carries his camera with him. He films his life and lives as he films: places, moments, friends, loves, misfortunes.

2019-10-02 | fr

The Last Days of Left Eye

Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes was the hip-hop voice of TLC, the best selling female R&B group of all time. On March 30th, 2002, Lisa decided to document her life. She filmed at a mysterious spiritual retreat deep in the jungles of Honduras, but 26 days later, after a tragic accident, she was dead and her unedited tapes were left behind. Last Days of Left Eye is the re-imagining of the film Lisa never got to complete. Revealing private moments from Lisa's journals and home movies, along with highlights from her celebrated career, this film is an intimate journey into the soul of a talented and still provocative young artist. Directed by Lauren Lazin, Academy Award nominated director of Tupac: Resurrection (2005, Best Documentary Feature), Last Days of Left Eye has screened to sold-out audiences at film festivals around the world.

2007-05-18 | en

Think of Me First as a Person

Documentary film and home movie about Dwight Core, Jr., a boy with Down syndrome. The footage was originally shot throughout the 1960s and 1970s by Core's father, Dwight Core, Sr. The footage was later discovered and completed by the filmmaker's grandson, George Ingmire.

1975-01-01 | en

Kindergarten

A childhood story is narrated while home movie footage is displayed. The narrator recounts her assimilation experience: moving to America, learning English, giving up your culture and a part of yourself.

2020-09-27 | en

Born in Evin

Follows filmmaker and actress, Maryam Zaree, on her quest to find out the violent circumstances surrounding her birth inside one of the most notorious political prisons in the world.

2019-10-17 | de

La petite maison toujours dans la prairie

2024-10-30 | fr

Trópico de Capricórnio

The recovery of family videos is the resumption of a path: the massification of VHS brought new levels to family recordings. With the incorporation of sound, home videos gave way to commentaries, speeches and the filtering of sounds, giving rise to a documentation of the sounds of each era. In this first-person film, Juliana Antunes revisits, reframes and recombines the discordances between norm and desire in the memories of an LGBT girl in a Brazilian suburb.

2020-11-06 | pt

Le regard de Georges Brassens

An atypical portrait of singer, songwriter, poet Georges Brassens.

2013-10-30 | fr

Our Godfather

The story of how Sicilian Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta (1928-2000), the Godfather of Two Worlds, revealed, starting in 1984, the deepest secrets of the organization, thus helping to convict the hundreds of mafiosi who were tried in the trial held in Palermo between 1986 and 1987.

2019-04-28 | en

Put the Camera on Me

Before he went on to direct "Jawbreaker" and "Sparkler," Darren Stein grew up making videos. Along with his friend Adam Shell and the other neighborhood kids, these young film makers touched on such adult subjects as jealousy, cruelty, and sexuality.

2003-11-14 | en

The Saskatchewan Trilogy Part I

Using home movies, vintage memorabilia, and the straight facts about Saskatchewan, the filmmaker creates an eccentric portrait of the first year of his life, and the province that shaped his identity.

2002-01-01 | en

Time Theorem

The director Andrés Kaiser combines hundreds of amateur films and photographs from the treasure trove of images belonging to his migrant grandparents creating a cinematic firework of analogies.

2022-05-08 | es

Spring by the Sea

Alternating Philippines and Saudi Arabia as her home, the filmmaker uses personal home videos and present footage to tell the story of her family.

2019-10-13 | en