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...

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

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 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,...

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

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....

"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...

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists....

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 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 ...

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...

The wanderer Rascal embarks on a psychotic and contradictory journey to break out of the ego bubble in which his self-loathing and isolation have inserted him in. After his metamorphosis, his soulmate, Paloma, makes him realize that life is as compli...

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...

A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using ...

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, ...

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

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....

Musing on the nature of memory, Don Hertzfeldt recounts stories about a kiss from The King, a floating child in a backyard and a giant foot....