Essay Film Movies

A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan,...

Initially a made-to-order documentary on Spain, the film becomes an open-ended work-in-the-making about the creative process. “Settling in the...

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. A group of friends get together to make a film about their experiences growing up in suburban...

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

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

If cinema is the art of time, Linklater is one of its most thoughtful and engaged directors. Unlike other filmmakers identified as auteurs,...

"At that time (late 1992), I made a film for British television, Channel 4, called Las Soledades, the name of a long poem by Góngora. It was...

In this Criterion Collection video essay, Kogonada explores how doors recur throughout the films of Robert Bresson. The short considers doorways as...

From 1920 to 1965, the great Buster Keaton made spectacular use of locomotives in his films. This video essay charts the course of his iconic...

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...

Through voiceover and static San Francisco landscapes this experimental narrative short tells the melancholy story of a butch dyke pining over a one...

An experimental short film, shot during the COVID-19 pandemic, made by one person. Using recorded scenes and archival footage, the short presents an...

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,...

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...

1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack...

A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new...

Feeling lost, a holidayer takes a vacation, only to discover a world that is as banal as it is hyper-real. A found-footage essay film. A home-movie....

A group of musicians seem isolated from the world playing beautiful pieces. But in the darkness of the night, and from their minds, there are...

A video essay by Luiz Rosemberg Filho on the standardization of beauty through mass media.