Movies: Essay film

Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is one of David Lynch’s most enduring obsessions. This documentary goes over the rainbow to explore this Technicolor through-line in Lynch’s work....

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills....

Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writi...

"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...

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors....

A peculiar portrait of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) drawn by the extravagant and original look of the Spanish writer Fernando Arrabal, who establishes a bold parallelism between Borges' work and opinions and his own creations,...

The fascinating story of the rise to power of dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) in Italy in 1922 and how fascism marked the fate of the entire world in the dark years to come....

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, ...

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality....

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century....

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...

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....

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira....

The surrealist painter René Magritte questions the objective reality and emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relationship between an object, its image and its name: the evocation of mystery consists of images of familiar things gathered or transforme...

Following Bellavista and Totó, Peter Schreiner completes his informal trilogy of epic, black-and-white digital-video essay-films with the utterly monumental Fata Morgana. Shot in the Libyan desert and in an abandoned building in Lausitz, Germany, it ...

Clear Skies, Light Breeze, is a 2013 visual essay by Tati expert Stéphane Goudet about the debut of Monsieur Hulot...

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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....

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

A personal meditation on Rumble Fish, the legendary film directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1983; the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, where it was shot; and its impact on the life of several people from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay related to film ind...