
06 Aug 1997

Birth of a Nation
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
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.
06 Aug 1997
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
08 Oct 2023
If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.
26 Oct 2023
Filmed mostly on a Mini DV camera Gavin has thought of a quick way to become successful and be the master of the world but he has to wait for it all to fall into place… he has to wait for the postman to start production documenting the process of being master of the world.
02 Jun 2003
Video diary from behind the scenes of 2002's "Cruise of the Gods."
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.
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.
13 Nov 2018
After a routine partial hip replacement operation leaves his mother in a coma with permanent brain damage, what starts as a son's video diary becomes a citizen's investigation into the future of American health care.
26 Aug 2020
An experimental music ensemble is recording an album. They want a very specific sound: the sound of thick air. The sound engineer struggles to understand and to find that sound. A tale of sleepless nights and loud music, a noise-injected collage composed of diaristic footage, a found narrative (memories of a popular 60s band), original music and field recordings.
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.
23 Nov 2013
An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
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.
14 Sep 1976
Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.
22 Feb 1986
A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
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.
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.
10 Oct 2024
Nevermore Eleanor (2024) | 2160p
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.
10 Apr 2009
A short documentary by Jim McBride.
27 Sep 2025
In Holcá, Yucatán, eight-year-old Nara roams her hometown with a camera in hand. Alternating between her vivid, spontaneous footage and the director’s attentive gaze, Nara y su cámara paints a portrait of Nara and her village.
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