Movies: Essay film

The Water Map is an essayistic journey through the ethnography and landscapes of the Region of Murcia. These places are in the process of disappearing due to the increasing and abundant agricultural exploitation. Water has marked the territory and th...

The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories....

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 be...

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....

A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, ...

A lone passenger is reflected in the windows of a train crawling through layers of textures towards Minsk. During his absence, the city has not changed: all the streets are frozen, long-gone voices can be heard in the empty rooms and around the corne...

A 25-minute visual essay by Kent Jones about Jean-Luc Godard and his film 'Weekend'....

Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities....

Recalling his childhood and relationship with his mother, a film student tries to understand the origin of his love for cinema and tragedies....

A documentary series finale analysing the entirety of Twenty One Pilots' new full-length studio album "Trench". Jimmy not only uncovers the stories of internal pain and fear that Tyler Joseph tells through the songs on the album. But, he also learns ...

"How Every Film You Watch Tells You To Love The Rich and What To Do About It" explores the representations of wealth in cinema. It looks into how most beloved characters are subtly more well-off than they should be, how criticisms of the system are c...

By the director: "Ar.Co embodies each person’s geography, it escapes normalisation. Each individual’s experience is his own. This film is my experience, our experience. Pieced together from the school’s archive, from recordings of classes by Manuel C...

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 comp...

With ghostly eyes looking through the winter landscapes of the plains and villages of Ain, where the sanctified priest the Curé of Ars once lived, Jacques Demy tried to understand this fighter for communal spirituality and his daily torments of mysti...

A glimpse of life through movement and memory, negotiating a narrative through images and sounds both personal and found, private and public, recounting four years of the filmmaker's life, relocating from Iran to the US....

The mind process behind the film, Transformers the Premake, explained by Kevin B Lee himself....

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....

How do you put a life into 500 words? Ask the staff obituary writers at the New York Times. OBIT is a first-ever glimpse into the daily rituals, joys and existential angst of the Times obit writers, as they chronicle life after death on the front lin...

Two decades on from Cinema of Unease, Tim Wong’s essay film contemplates the prevailing image of a national cinema while privileging some of the images and image-makers displaced by the popular view of filmmaking in Aotearoa. Now streaming for free a...

A story of diaspora. The film criticises the myth of Swiss neutrality, which violently masks structural, systemic, and social passivity....