All Recommendations
At Land
A dream-like narrative in which a woman (Deren), is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey, a quest for personal identity, encountering other people and other versions of herself.
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.
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
Yeelen
A young man with magical powers journeys to his uncle to request help in fighting his sorcerer father.
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.
Of Mice and Men
An intellectually disabled giant and his level headed guardian find work at a sadistic cowboy's ranch in depression era America.
The Private Life of a Cat
An intimate study of the life of a domestic cat, taking place over a period of months as she gives birth to a litter of kittens and cares for them as they grow.
Larisa
Elem Klimov's documentary ode to his wife, director Larisa Shepitko, who was killed in an auto wreck.
Ballerina
David Lynch turns this digital video of a ballerina into an impressionistic exercise.
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.
Wasteland No. 1: Ardent Verdant
The interconnected circuitry. The aggregated flora. Alternating currents of the visual field.
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.
Hell-Bound Train
A jeremiad against intemperance, jazz music, and abortion, set on a train filled with unrepentant sinners hurtling toward damnation.
When Angels Fall
The twenty-one-minute-film is set in a men's public rest room and recounts the day to day existence of an elderly woman who serves as an attendant in the lavatory. As an endless procession of men pass before her, relieving themselves in the urinals, the attendant escapes her reality by daydreaming about the past and the soldier she once loved and the child she bore him.
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.
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.
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.