Discovering Hamlet

IN 1988, rising star Kenneth Branagh tackled the role of Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark for the first time in his professional career under the guidance of celebrated actor Derek Jacobi. Narrated by Patrick Stewart, this hour-long film documents how Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi, two intelligent and passionate men, found new depths in Shakespeare’s classic drama, Hamlet. Filmmakers Mark Olshaker and Larry Klein follow the company through four weeks of rehearsals, from the first read-throughs to opening night.

1990-01-07 | en

Drei Frauen

2022-09-24 | de

Moving Together

Moving Together is a celebratory love letter to music and dance that brims with kinetic life and energy. This documentary explores the intricate collaboration between dancers and musicians, moving seamlessly between Flamenco, Modern, and New Orleans Second Line.

2023-02-11 | en

Carving the Divine

The documentary Carving the Divine offers a rare and intimate look into the life and artistic process of modern-day Busshi – practitioners of a 1400 year lineage of woodcarving that’s at the heart of Japanese, Mahayana Buddhism.

2019-11-29 | ja

Fall 1

Bas Jan Ader's first fall film shows him seated on a chair, tumbling from the roof of his two-storey house in the Inland Empire.

1970-02-01 | en

Fall 2

Bas Jan Ader rides his bike into a canal in Amsterdam.

1970-03-10 | en

Broken Fall (Organic)

Bas Jan Ader hangs from the branch of a tall tree, until he loses his grip and falls into a river below.

1971-02-23 | en

Nightfall

Shot in his garage-studio, the camera records Ader painstakingly hoisting a large brick over his shoulder. His figure is harshly lit by two tangles of light bulbs. He drops the brick, crushing one strand of lights. He again lifts the brick, allowing tension to accrue. The climax inevitable—the brick falls and crushes the second set of lights. Here the film abruptly ends, all illumination extinguished.

1971-03-24 | en

Cannibal Island

A disturbing chapter in Russian history is explored in this documentary. In 1933, Joseph Stalin sent 6000 "unwanted" citizens of Moscow and Leningrad to a desolate Siberian island - with no food or clothes to speak of. Decades later this documentary returns to the island.

2009-06-23 | fr

My Dad and the Volcano

Gavin built a giant volcano sculpture that's now in his dad's shed. Gavin seeks his dad's understanding but he's uninterested in modern art and refuses to participate in the documentary.

2024-08-18 | en

Pussy Versus Putin

In 2012 two members of anarchistic female band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a Mordovian labor camp for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred". Russian film collective Gogol’s Wives follow each step of the feminist punk band’s battle against Putin including their first disruptive performances on a trolley bus, shooting a video about transparent elections, a controversial performance in a Red Square cathedral, and footage shot in a jail cell. Support comes from many corners including Madonna who painted the words "Pussy Riot" on her back and wore a balaclava during her Moscow show. The documentary portrays the grim state of present-day Russia, a country starkly divided between conservatism and anarchy. Pussy Riot believes that art has to be free and they're willing to take it to extremes. "Pussycat made a mess in the house," they say, and the house is Russia. The filmmakers do not seek to moralize, they simply edit events and leave viewers to draw their own conclusions.

2013-08-30 | en

Traces: The Kabul Museum 1988

The Kabul National Museum, once known as the "face of Afghanistan," was destroyed in 1993. We filmed the most important cultural treasures of the still-intact museum in 1988: ancient Greco-Roman art and antiquitied of Hellenistic civilization, as well as Buddhist sculpture that was said to have mythology--the art of Gandhara, Bamiyan, and Shotorak among them. After the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992, some seventy percent of the contents of the museum was destroyed, stolen, or smuggled overseas to Japan and other countries. The movement to return these items is also touched upon. The footage in this video represents that only film documentation of the Kabul Museum ever made.

2003-01-01 | ja

Glittering Misfits

Dirty Martini and Tigger!, stars of the New York underground scene, reveal some of the secrets of their provocative and remonstrative forms of artistic expression in New York’s Off-Off-Broadway. Meanwhile, they will help us to understand from their everyday intimacy the reasons, the struggles and the keys that keep them in their place as the figures and references of the burlesque revival, more than 20 years after the phenomenon exploded in the New York of the 90s.

2019-09-22 | en

Rikers

This film from Bill Moyers is the first documentary to focus exclusively on people formerly detained in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island Jail. They tell their compelling stories direct to the camera, revealing the violent arc of the Rikers experience – from the trauma of entry to extortion and control by inmates, to oppressive corrections officers, violence and solitary confinement.

2016-11-12 | en

Giacometti

The Arts Council commissioned this film to coincide with their major retrospective of Giacometti's work at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in the summer of 1965. A similar exhibition was held concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sealing the artist's reputation as a modern master.

1967-01-01 | en

How to Get a Head in Sculpture

From the heads of Roman Emperors to the 'blood head' of contemporary British artist Marc Quinn, the greatest figures in world sculpture have continually turned to the head to re-evaluate what it means to be human and to reformulate how closely sculpture can capture it. Witty, eclectic and insightful, this film is a journey through the most enduring subject for world sculpture, one that carves a path through politics and religion, the ancient and the modern. Actor David Thewlis has his head sculpted by three different sculptors, while the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, artist Maggi Hambling and art critic Rachel Johnston discuss art's most enduring preoccupation, ourselves.

2011-02-23 | en

Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali

A documentary about surrealist artist Salvador Dali, narrated by Orson Welles.

1969-12-29 | en

ULTRA IV

A video magazine put out by the Come Organization label. Noise, smut, medical procedures and an unwholesome fascination with infamous murderers. PETER SUTCLIFFE preview WHITEHOUSE LP TRACKS 3 total sex side A SUTCLIFFE JUGEND interview & music WHITEHOUSE studio action 2 HERMANN NITSCH a study AUSCWITZ / BIRKENAU 1941-82

1982-01-01 | en

Meat Joy

"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."

1964-05-29 | en

Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age

This documentary by Léa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist plunges us into the vortex of online misogyny and documents hatred towards women. This bleak opus, reminiscent of a psychological thriller, follows four women across two continents: former President of the Italian parliament Laura Boldrini, former Democratic representative Kiah Morris, French actor and YouTuber Marion Séclin, and Donna Zuckerberg, a specialist in online violence against women and the sister of Facebook’s founder. This tour de force reveals the devastating effects such unapologetic hatred has on victims, and brings to light the singular objective of cyber-misogyny: to silence women who shine. Some targets of cyber-violence will crumble under the crystallizing force of the click. Others, proud warriors, will stand tall and refuse to be silenced.

2022-09-09 | fr