
02 Sep 2025

The Ozu Diaries
Unveiling Yasujiro Ozu’s legacy through his personal diaries, letters, and interviews, the documentary delves into his life, creative process, and lasting impact on filmmaking.
Footage shot in and around North Bergen, New Jersey presented in a minimalist series of fixed camera angles and long-takes accompanied by the ambient noise of city streets.

02 Sep 2025

Unveiling Yasujiro Ozu’s legacy through his personal diaries, letters, and interviews, the documentary delves into his life, creative process, and lasting impact on filmmaking.

01 Jan 2024

Two young documentarists travel around a forsaken island in the aftermath of a cataclysmic volcanic eruption. Their wanders lead them to the encounter of Professor Pereda, an acoustic geologist, conducting researches on geo-acoustics.

29 Oct 1983

An extremely lovely tribute to Ozu, on the 20th anniversary of his death. It uses a combination of footage from vintage films and new material (both interviews and Ozu-related locations) shot by Ozu's long-time camera-man (who came out of retirement to work on this). Surprisingly (or perhaps not), it focuses less on Ozu's accomplishments as a film-maker than on his impact on the lives of the people he worked with..

27 Oct 2022

With exclusive behind-the-scenes access into Herzog’s everyday life, rare archive material and in-depth interviews with celebrated collaborators – including Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman, and Robert Pattinson, we are given an exciting glimpse into the work and personal life of the iconic artist.
07 Jan 2016
“This film was a gift to me. I make no claims for it, nor do I offer any apologies. It comes from work on The Thoughts That Once We Had. There was one shot we had to cut whose loss I particularly regretted. It was a shot of a train pulling into Tokyo Station from Ozu’s The Only Son (1936). So I decided to make a film around this shot, an anthology of train arrivals. It comprises 26 scenes or shots from movies, 1904-2015. It has a simple serial structure: each black & white sequence in the first half rhymes with a color sequence in the second half. Thus the first shot and the final shot show trains arriving at stations in Japan from a low camera height. In the first shot (The Only Son), the train moves toward the right; in the last shot, it moves toward the left. A bullet train has replaced a steam locomotive. So after all these years, I’ve made another structural film, although that was not my original intention.”

19 Apr 2024

Through the Fondren Fellows program, the Rice Media Center Archive Project has spent the past few months sifting through material stored at the now-defunct Rice Media Center. The team has identified several films as especially notable and will be presenting them in conjunction with documentary footage the team shot of people involved with the films. From lectures featuring Roberto Rossellini and Werner Herzog to films from former Rice students and faculty, the film presentation will tell the narrative of the Rice Media Center through the films and filmmakers that passed through its corridors.

20 Oct 2023

It seemed like a typically quiet night... but the most unexpected encounter leads Chris to a difficult choice.

01 Jun 2012

A pre-fame Werner Herzog (Adam Ezagouri) is asked to share a flat with a strange new actor only known as Klaus Kinski. Herzog agrees but soon regrets his generous decision as Kinski proves to be one uncanny flatmate. Despite their disagreements, both decide to try and shoot Herzog's own version of Don Quixote, with disastrous consequences.
19 Dec 1969
Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.

22 Apr 2014

Chile hosts a decisive World Cup qualifier at Santiago’s National Stadium just weeks after the stadium had been transformed into a concentration camp and killing field for opponents of Augusto Pinochet (who had just gained power in a military coup). Though FIFA investigates the matter, the game goes on, with the Chilean team winning in a walkover after their opponents from the Soviet Union boycott in protest over the stadium's use
06 May 2021
Perennial Pilot tells the story of lifelong pilot, Walt Bates, and his love of flying.

01 Apr 2021

The Diggers is an observation journey into various artisanal mining sites in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The film shows the arduous and surreal labor of adults and teenagers extracting coltan, tungsten and black tourmaline. Our camera captures their repeated movements, their picks, their sweat, fatigue, their faces tense by the effort, their breathing. Their tirelessly repeated gestures compose a kind of bitter-sweet symphony. We enter makeshift tunnels and follow the men who have to arch their backs to advance to the deposits. Our camera is in no hurry to allow the spectators to live and feel this difficult work. The light falls and the workers leave the mining site little by little towards the evening refreshments, before returning to the same routine at dawn.

29 Apr 2021

On October 1, 2019 Alberto Salazar, perhaps the greatest track coach on Earth, was suspended for doping violations. Did he do it? Or is Salazar being victimized for his obsessive methods of pushing athletes to their absolute limits.
11 Mar 2019
In occupied post-war Germany, the ex-paratrooper and former SS man Gerhard Mertins rises to become a powerful arms dealer. He has many contacts in the Middle East and with old Nazi greats, a man who therefore becomes interesting for secret services. He starts right after the Second World War as a simple taxi entrepreneur in Bremerhaven, but soon he does best business with the German secret service BND and also the American CIA. Until today many files about Mertins are secret. Because against German laws, against international law, Mertins moved weapons into war zones with the backing and sometimes on behalf of the German secret service BND. For almost two years, the team around author Rainer Kahrs did research for the film. For the first time, the BND granted a camera team access to files on Gerhard Mertins, the first BND arms dealer. For the first time, Mertins' wife and daughter also speak in front of the camera.

07 May 2021

Kafi Dixon dreams of starting a land cooperative for women of color who have experienced trauma and disenfranchisement in the city of Boston. By day she drives a city bus; at night she studies the humanities in a tuition-free course. Her classmate Carl Chandler, a community elder, is the class’s intellectual leader. White suburban filmmaker James Rutenbeck documents the students’ engagement with the humanities. He looks for transformations but is awakened to the violence, racism and gentrification that threaten Kafi and Carl's very place in the city. Troubled by his failure to bring the film together, he enlists the pair as collaborators with a share in the film revenues. Five years on, despite many obstacles, Kafi and Carl arrive at surprising new places in their lives—and James does too.

10 Mar 2020

War, emergency, pandemics and hunger. Humanitarian workers are used to working in the most varied and extreme missions and contexts across the planet. However, few of them venture openly into the world of personal feelings. For this film, forty humanitarian workers and their loved ones did just that, speaking without reserve about the risk, the commitment, the first mission, the sense of powerlessness, the encounters, the passion, the return home and the unspeakable things they’ve witnessed. This film explores the question of their selfishness in choosing to do this kind of work. Each person, in their own words, tells us about their feelings and experiences. Openly and straightforwardly, they tell us who they are and speak of their commitment to others, their doubts, their weaknesses and the images that haunt them.

29 Apr 2021

"Orbital Squares", by the media art collective Moojin Brothers, points to deeper understandings of a cultural and political moment unfolding despite and because of human intervention. As elusive as it is utterly gripping, the film juxtaposes and intersperses three scenes. A snail’s movements – tentative, curious – on a grooved mound of clay are contrasted against the powerful rhythms of a horserace shot at 240 frames per second; both of these are bookended by a shadowy display of a living, sculptural humanoid seemingly tormented by a web-like concoction of thread and nails fully enveloping its head, as a soundscape of terror and flickering embers unfolds.

09 Nov 2023

Witness explores the personal, political, and cultural ramifications of going viral. Directors Yasmine Mathurin, Amar Wala, and Carol Nguyen follow people who chose to document what they saw, whether in rage, fear, or amusement, and reflect on the staggering but fleeting attention that changed their lives. This series of six short episodes tells the stories that happened after the stories we heard about.

13 Oct 2023

No overview found

11 Nov 2023

Set on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, Español and Barrabas, two "coyotes," or human smugglers, go about the business of surviving despite all the odds against them.