Movies: Essay film

If cinema is the art of time, Linklater is one of its most thoughtful and engaged directors. Unlike other filmmakers identified as auteurs, Linklater’s distinction is not found on the surface of his films, in a visual style or signature shot, but rat...

A girl haunted by traumatic events takes us on a mesmerising journey through 100 years of horror cinema to explore how filmmakers scare us – and why we let them....

A video essay where the author presumes motivations and insights in a fictionalized biography regarding Debra Paget, a contract player for 20th-Century Fox whom they groomed and coached for stardom....

A labyrinthine portrait of Czech culture on the brink of a new millennium. Egon Bondy prophesies a capitalist inferno, Jim Čert admits to collaborating with the secret police, Jaroslav Foglar can’t find a bottle-opener, and Ivan Diviš makes observati...

Angela Su’s fictional artist Rosie Leavers is the last remaining person to upload her consciousness to a video game. Contemplating during a pandemic year which also saw people’s resistance movements in many parts of the world, the work pinpoints the ...

A very personal interpretation, to say the least, of the passion of the Christ According to St. John....

After receiving a phone call, a man feels his inner world come to a standstill. Recalling the event decades later, he relives how everything changed in that moment and reflects on how quickly his life has passed and how his reality was constructed by...

"Nueve Sevillas" is a heterodox psycho-geographical profile of the new flamenco in Seville. Nine characters coexist with the great flamenco artists of today....

The genius Spanish painter Salvador Dalí undertakes an amazing journey through the unknown mental territories of Upper Mongolia in search of a giant hallucinogenic mushroom while paying an experimental tribute to the French poet Raymond Roussel (1877...

A personal essay film about the nature of artistic creation and the responsibility that comes along with it....

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Through the story of one woman’s year in a room with a view, the film catches its audience up in the collective memories of all those who have loved and lost. Through a study of Liz’s obsession and loneliness, the film mixes the particular with the u...

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The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the ...

“Leda + Swans” depicts an infernal, mythic birth of cinema, dredging the violence and horror from Wallace McCutcheon’s comic short film “Photographing a Female Crook” (1904). Leda, who may or may not be a falsely accused young woman, is brought in f...

A reflection on the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene epoch, White Noise is a roller-coaster of a film, a whirlwind of sounds and images. The fourth feature-length work by Simon Beaulieu, this film essay plunges viewers into a subjective sensory a...

The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church....

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, ...

Korean film critic Jeong Sung-il’s camera explores the work of Wang Bing, a Chinese director who won international fame with his film Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks. Jeong’s attempt to pry into Wang’s filmmaking secrets leads to the question: “What is...

Andrea and the simbionte travel to Toledo; when they arrive, they find a lonely bus station, which slowly turns off the lights for them. In the silence that surrounds them, Andrea watches the moment pass and with it her certainty about her future dre...