Essay Film Movies

Why do we do incredibly difficult things that have no practical application? Is there a parallel between geographic and artistic exploration? Fram...

Penthesilea, the first of six films made by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, traverses thousands of years to look at the image of the Amazonian woman...

A visual essay on contemporary Kiwi architecture.

Humankind has always dreamt of the night sky. Of the infinite freedom offered by the black void, and of the strong, shining beacon inviting us to...

A year in the life of Elsa Michaud and Gabriel Gauthier, students of Fine Arts in Paris, lovers in troubled times, overwhelmed by maddening verbal...

This Pixar documentary short follows Sarah Vowell, who plays herself as the title character, on why she is a superhero in her own way. (This short...

While Trevor and Sam are smoking pot, Trevor’s mom comes home. When she finds out, Trevor reveals his father’s adulterous ways and...

An essay film about Jean-Paul Sartre and the French Existentialists, featuring Roland Barthes' last interview.

Expertly merging old VHS home movies with new family interviews, filmmaker Eddie Sánchez traces his parents' journey from Mexico to the U.S....

The Drone is the Message. It's not the laptop nor phone that best typifies our relationship to the internet. It's the drone.

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the...

A cinematic essay interweaving private archive images and a mixture of reflective, speculative and poetic intertitles that, like “an old movie...

Since the 1980s, the video shop has been a desperately necessary space for film culture. In Videoheaven, Alex Ross Perry tells the story of the...

This film essay about mushrooms and their connections to other living things tries to use the structure of mushrooms to explain nature, science, and...

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,...

A street in downtown Warsaw transforms into a kaleidoscopic portrait of Polish society. Behind the viewfinder is an Indian immigrant, who seeks to...

Filmmaker Kogonada unpicks what defines the Golden Age of Italian cinema with a side-by-side comparison of two edits of the same film, one according...

An experimental study about Czech life, focusing on Prague's National Street, its businesses and the varied people who frequent it.

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes...