All Recommendations
At Land
A woman washes up on a beach and embarks on a surreal journey, encountering others and fragmented versions of herself in a quest for identity.
Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess
The story of a tiny Egg-girl who is forced to serve the evil Boar-like witch Baba Yaga. But after a blob of Dough comes to life, she befriends him and both escape from the witch's home at a Water mill on a cliff and set off to see the world. The soundtrack is Joe Hisaishi's arrangement of Vivaldi's La Folia
A Study in Choreography for Camera
Maya Deren’s shortest, two-minute A Study in Choreography for Camera seems like an exercise piece to capture a dancer’s movement on celluloid, which later on developed into her masterpieces such as Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence.
Annabelle Butterfly Dance
Annabelle (Whitford) Moore performs one of her popular dances. For this performance, her costume has a pair of wings attached to her back, to suggest a butterfly. As she dances, she uses her long, flowing skirts to create visual patterns.
In the Mirror of Maya Deren
Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.
Swimmer
A young man swims across the rivers and lakes of Britain to a soundtrack of assorted nationalistic music. As he passes people on the banksides including children, lovers and a tramp their thoughts and conversations are also heard. Ultimately, after walking through a wood at night, the boy returns to the water and appears to sink below the surface.
A Question of Silence
When three women with no previous acquaintance kill a male shopkeeper in the middle of the day, the female psychiatrist assigned to the case sets out to understand why.
The Tiger Factory
Ping Ping is 19 and wants to go to Japan to work in a car parts company. She's under the guardianship of her aunt, Madame Tien, who shuffles her between two jobs - working in a pig farm, and cleaning dishes in a rundown restaurant. Tien is also involved in a 'baby factory' scheme, pairing young women with migrant workers and then selling the babies for money. Both survive with each other in a love-hate symbiotic manner, until a truth about her aunt is revealed to Ping Ping.
Ballerina
David Lynch turns this digital video of a ballerina into an impressionistic exercise.
Larisa
Elem Klimov's documentary ode to his wife, director Larisa Shepitko, who was killed in an auto wreck.
Hold Me While I'm Naked
Presented as loosely autobiographical, Hold Me While I’m Naked centres on the tribulations of an independent filmmaker, frustrated at every turn as he tries to make a film that pretends to artistic merit.
Hurry, Hurry!
In this strange little film, Marie Menken photographs billowy flames superimposed over microscopic medical footage of writhing spermatozoa.
Ohero:kon - Under the Husk
This documentary follows two Mohawk girls on their journey to become Mohawk women. Friends since childhood, Kaienkwinehtha and Kasennakohe are members of the traditional community of Akwesasne on the U.S./Canada border. Together, they undertake a four-year rite of passage for adolescents, called Oheró:kon, or "under the husk." The ceremony had been nearly extinct, a casualty of colonialism and intergenerational trauma; revived in the past decade by two traditional leaders, it has since flourished. Filmmaker Katsitsionni Fox has served as a mentor, or "auntie," to many youth going through the passage rites.
Girl Power
Set to music by Bikini Kill (an all-girl band from Washington), Girl Power is a raucous vision of what it means to be a radical girl in the 90s. Benning relates her personal rebellion against school, family, and female stereotypes as a story of personal freedom, telling how she used to model like Matt Dillon and skip school to have adventures alone. Informed by the underground “riot grrrl” movement, this tape transforms the image politics of female youth, rejecting traditional passivity and polite compliance in favor of radical independence and a self-determined sexual identity.
Parvaneh
Parvaneh is a young Afghan immigrant who recently arrived at a transit centre for asylum seekers in the Swiss Alps. The only things she has got to know yet are the rural area surrounding the centre and the centre itself.
The Doodlers
Miss Nose and her class engage in drawings in an absurdist animation.
Hell-Bound Train
A jeremiad against intemperance, jazz music, and abortion, set on a train filled with unrepentant sinners hurtling toward damnation.
Je t'aime John Wayne
Belmonde lives in 1990s London as an iconic , cool Frenchman modelled on the new wave cinema of the 1960s. Really he is English and middle class – a fact that his family won't let him forget!
Carmencita
The first woman to appear in front of an Edison motion picture camera and possibly the first woman to appear in a motion picture within the United States. In the film, Carmencita is recorded going through a routine she had been performing at Koster & Bial's in New York since February 1890.
The Heart of the World
Pure fantasia, a race to save the world from a fatal heart attack, juxtaposed against a love rivalry between two brothers - a mortician and an actor playing Christ - for the heart of a scientist studying the earth's core.