Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.
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06 Aug 1997
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
01 Jan 1985
An old man comes across a fascinating archive, then meets a woman who introduces him to the life of a banker, patron and philanthropist. A moving essay that is part documentary, part film diary.
05 Nov 2000
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.
20 Oct 2007
Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In these works, which play upon chance and coincidence, hotel rooms are employed as 'found' film sets, where architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events.
01 Sep 2024
The untold state of mind dealing with an incurable disease. One is wondering if there's still a dream to achieve in life. One is running as if this free spirit of mine has never been taken away.
29 Apr 2001
On January 1st, 1999, Caveh Zahedi started a one-year video diary. The idea was to shoot one minute each day. This is the result.
26 Oct 2025
In 2022, when the economic crisis in her native country was at its peak, she decided to visit her family there. She turned her short trip into a collage-like diary in which she reflects on her relationship with her homeland, which is in a state of protracted decay. The film is composed of spontaneous snapshots capturing the author's stay, interspersed with inserted captions serving as personal, often poetically formulated comments and observations. As a result, the film does not hide its strongly subjective perspective, but at the same time builds on it to make an important statement that shows the transformation of Lebanese society in everyday details such as the appearance of the city itself or in the intimate sphere of the author's family life.
14 Sep 1976
Drawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.
30 Nov 2008
Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.
01 Jan 1987
The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary. “An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”
01 Jan 2009
Somewhere between a diary and a filmed letter made while Caroline Champetier was shooting Benoît Jacquot's film L'Intouchable in India.
15 Nov 1967
Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.
01 Jan 1968
One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club
22 Feb 1986
A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
20 Nov 2015
I wasn’t told. I wasn’t told it would be so difficult to live together. To keep a family together. To maintain love and happiness. I wasn’t told, and if someone had told me I wouldn’t have listened. I chose to live with my camera in my hand, filming the trajectory of feelings, from the golden age to the lost paradise, from being born to being reborn.
01 Jan 1986
Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.
14 Jul 2023
This short experimental diary film reveals my struggles with mental illness in my adolescence and queer adulthood while simultaneously reflecting upon my joyous childhood experiences. I investigate when and how my depression began and explain that my relationships with the people I love have supported me through my harder times. The film incorporates footage shot over May and June 2023 and archival home videos. Overall, I aim to resolve my "growing pains" through the medium of diary film and by reconnecting with my younger self.
10 Apr 2009
A short documentary by Jim McBride.
01 Jul 2005
A filmed diary which chronicles two visits to the Olivas, a family of Spanish beekeepers from Salamanca, at the time of the honey harvest, in August and September. Their work and their itinerant life are seen from a friend's point of view.
10 Jan 2022
An experimental coming-of-age odyssey through someone's troubled mind, going from country to country, landscape to landscape, growing up in the process. A documentary, travelogue, vlog, dream and self-portrait. A reflection on life, death and history.