Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.
The Perfect Woman (from Det perfekte menneske) (archive footage)
The Perfect Man (segment "Cuba")
(segment "Cuba")
Maid (segment "Brussels")
Couple (Man) (segment "Brussels")
The relationship between Lelia, a light-skinned black woman, and Tony, a white man is put in jeopardy when Tony meets Lelia’s darker-skinned jazz singer brother, Hugh, and discovers that her racial heritage is not what he thought it was.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
Fisher, an ex-detective, decides to take one final case when a mysterious serial killer claims the lives of several young girls. Fisher, unable to find the culprit, turns to Osbourne, a writer who was once respected for his contributions to the field of criminology. Fisher begins to use Osbourne's technique, which involves empathizing with serial killers; however, as the detective becomes increasingly engrossed in this method, things take a disturbing turn.
A young man goes on a road trip with an old lady he saves from a hospital.
October 1918: After returning to the civil life, the young Doctor Giorgino Volli searches for a group of children, which he had been the care-taker of before the first world war began. However, soon the searching becomes a part of hide-and-seek with death. Giorgino finds a village bordered with a treacherous marsh and rumours of wolves. There he also meets the mysterious Catherine....
An elegant and humorous film—in the guise of a serious anthropological treatise—spotlights "The Perfect Human," a model of the modern Dane created by our wishful thinking.
A carousel barker falls in love with a young woman. Both are fired from their jobs, and when the young woman becomes pregnant, the carousel barker tries to help pull off a robbery, which goes wrong. Because of the robbery, he dies, and after spending time in hell, is sent back to earth for one day to try to make amends. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.
The film has been ten years in the making, and over time it has grown to become what the director himself has called an artistic testament. It is simultaneously his most personal and most provocative film. A film about growing older, about losing, about the special moments one remembers, and about the director's own circling around the essence of eroticism.
Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled pokes fun at both mad scientists and the Egyptian mummy craze that followed the discovery of King Tut's tomb early in the 20th century. A young man wooing the daughter of a scientist hatches a get rich quick scheme when he spots a classified ad searching for "a mummy for experimental purposes." While he wraps up a phony for the scientist, two Egyptian agents (outfitted in a crazy mix of ancient fashion and modern style) tracking stolen relics get tangled in the confusion.
In 1880s Australia, a lawman offers renegade Charlie Burns a difficult choice. In order to save his younger brother from the gallows, Charlie must hunt down and kill his older brother, who is wanted for rape and murder. Venturing into one of the Outback's most inhospitable regions, Charlie faces a terrible moral dilemma that can end only in violence.
A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.
A mix of home-video and documentary styles about a group of young people who have decided to get to know their “inner-idiots” and thus not only facing and breaking their outer appearance but also their inner.
Fictional documentary about the life of human chameleon Leonard Zelig, a man who becomes a celebrity in the 1920s due to his ability to look and act like whoever is around him. Clever editing places Zelig in real newsreel footage of Woodrow Wilson, Babe Ruth, and others.
The wife of a famous composer survives a car accident that kills her husband and daughter. Now alone, she shakes off her old identity and explores her newfound freedom but finds that she is unbreakably bound to other humans, including her husband’s mistress, whose existence she never suspected.
Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness, struggles to make ends meet for herself and her son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life gets too difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, escaping life's troubles – even if just for a moment – by dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.
When a beautiful young Grace arrives in the isolated township of Dogville, the small community agrees to hide her from a gang of ruthless gangsters, and, in return, Grace agrees to do odd jobs for the townspeople.
A grieving couple retreats to their cabin 'Eden' in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.
When aspiring model Jesse moves to Los Angeles, her youth and vitality are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will take any means necessary to get what she has.
SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher at the Film Academy.
A documentary about the crowd of people that commingle throughout the 3.5km of the Minhocão, an overpass in the central region of São Paulo, built during Brazil's military dictatorship.
Embarks on a journey that traces the life and work of Antonio Martorell, a prolific plastic and multi-disciplinary artist in Puerto Rico. This film is a dance between the director (Paloma Suau) and the portraitist while portraying each other. More than a documentary, this film is an experiment of a director trying to reconnect with her creative voice.
Analog celluloid strips are disappearing. Is film dying, or just changing? Are the world's film archives on the brink of a dark age? Renowned filmmakers, museum curators, historians, and engineers help dramatize the future of film and the cinema in the age of digital moving pictures.
Arab-American filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashi embraces the rhythmic rituals that have run alongside Islamic tradition throughout the centuries in this surreal and poetic short film. Piecing together old and new, Al-Rashi's dream-like imagery breathes fresh air to a subject hardly seen in positive light.
An experimental docu-fiction short from hours of collected material shot by the director. Different scenes, from drunk parties with friends to shots of the Dutch landscape during a train ride, are cut together to see if a narrative story can be constructed from nothing but randomly shot footage.
We hear from Coppola, Spielberg, director of photography Gordon Willis, consulting restoration cinematographer Allen Daviau, film archivist Robert A. Harris, Paramount Post Production executive VP Martin Cohen, MPI senior technical advisor Daniel Rosen, MPI scanning technician Chris Gillaspie, senior digital artist Steven A. Sanchez, digital artist Valerie V. McMahon, and MPI technical director and senior colorist Jan Yarbrough as they offer interesting facts about the original cinematography, details on the restoration of the three films.
An observational film that using the fragmented format of a newscast program proposes a cinematic glance to the same reality depicted daily by the media.
Documentary about the 1970 film, "End of The Road."
This documentary is featured on Arrow Video's 2011 DVD & Blu-ray releases for The Beyond (1981).
Documentary about the life and career of a comic genius, Peter Sellers.
A detailed history of documentary filmmaking in the US and the UK from 1929 to 1945. The first part, Working for Change, focuses on 1929-1941 and the social movements of the times, The Great Depression, The New Deal, and the awakening of the Leftwing in the UK. The second part, The Strategy of Truth, focuses on 1933-1946 and explores the role of film as propaganda during World War II, and the different forms it took in the US, the UK, and Germany.
A filmmaker and rapper duo revive Michel Gondry’s “Be Kind Rewind” protocols - a set of filmmaking “rules” with which groups of strangers can conceive, shoot, and screen a film in just two and a half hours. Against the grim backdrop of the stringent Shanghai lockdown, the event soon turns into a sanctuary for individuals to forge collective dreams.
In 1928, as the talkies threw the film industry and film language into turmoil, Chaplin decided that his Tramp character would not be heard. City Lights would not be a talking picture, but it would have a soundtrack. Chaplin personally composed a musical score and sound effects for the picture. With Peter Lord, the famous co-creator of Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit, we see how Chaplin became the king of slapstick comedy and the superstar of the movies.
A documentary that exposes the shocking truths behind industrial food production and food wastage, focusing on fishing, livestock and crop farming. A must-see for anyone interested in the true cost of the food on their plate.
Portrait of director Andrey Zvyagintsev against the background of the filming of his film "Loveless".
Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.
Alaska is a wordless experimental film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum.
Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus. The duration of the takes emphasises the photographic character of the pictures, simultaneously with a crackling, brutal sound. (Hans Scheugl)