
01 Jan 1988

Beavers
A story about several beaver families in their wild surroundings. The interesting process of building a dam can be watched as well as the dangers arising from hungry bears and other influences on the new-built home.
A panorama shot of the Norwegian town and harbour of Hammerfest. Believed to be the earliest surviving film of Norway.

01 Jan 1988

A story about several beaver families in their wild surroundings. The interesting process of building a dam can be watched as well as the dangers arising from hungry bears and other influences on the new-built home.

06 Sep 1966

Jonas Mekas documents Timothy Leary’s Millbrook estate in the wake of a police raid, juxtaposing serene images of the property with audio of officials justifying their actions. Blending diary footage with subversive reportage, the film exposes the gap between perception and authority, offering an oblique portrait of the counterculture and its suppression.
01 Oct 1909
On a market day in Kernascleden, two Breton women exchange their hair for a few coins. The hair becomes hairpieces. Last scene, an elegant Parisian removes her hat and exposes her generous wig skillfully coiffed.

01 Jan 1955

Gilles Groulx's first film shot in 1955 with a camera borrowed from his brother and edited during his spare time when he worked as an editor at the Radio-Canada news service a few years before he joined the NFB. Silent film, presented as its author left it, where the soil and the dialectic of Groulx's work are already there: documentary realism, the social space to be explored, daily life, the relationship between individual and society, social disparities, the consumer society, seduction and happiness.

28 Jun 1912

Footage shot during Japanese Army Lieutenant Nobu Shirase’s second Antarctica expedition.

01 Nov 2013

Mysteries of the Unseen World transports audiences to places on this planet that they have never been before, to see things that are beyond their normal vision, yet literally right in front of their eyes. Mysteries of the Unseen World reveals phenomena that can't be seen with the naked eye, taking audiences into earthly worlds secreted away in different dimensions of time and scale. Viewers experience events that unfold too slowly for human perception
01 Jan 1972
This short film documents Australian composer Richard Meale’s homage to the young French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Meale composed a music piece for woodwind, percussion and strings which he titled “Incredible Floridas”.
29 Jun 1919
This film records the vast public response to the early death of Vera Kholodnaya, the first star of Russian cinema.
02 Jan 1907
Short documentary released in 1907.

01 Jan 1928

A documentary on the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. Made by Istituto Luce, there is an understandable focus on Italian athletes, but it is the first Olympic documentary that describes the techniques of certain events.
28 Nov 1927
Finland’s first nature documentary. The filmmakers’ expedition leads them all the way to the Åland Islands and the Karelian Isthmus.

21 Mar 1961

An appreciative, uncritical look at silent film comedies and thrillers from early in the century through the 1920s.
01 Jan 1936
Short film about the manufacture of bricks.

09 Aug 1956

Two eighth graders doing an assembly on cleanliness and neatness seek underclassmen. A look into Don and Mildred's hygienic endeavors.

03 Nov 2023

Finnish filmmaker and artist Sami van Ingen is a great-grandson of documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, and seemingly the sole member of the family with a hands-on interest in continuing the directing legacy. Among the materials he found in the estate of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s daughter Monica were the film reels and video tapes detailing several years of work on realising her lifelong dream project: a sound version of her parents’ 1926 docu-fiction axiom, Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.

06 Apr 1898

A method soldier boys have for amusing themselves in their leisure moments. New comrades are frequently initiated by the old-fashioned sport of tossing in a blanket. The newly arrived recruit, who is the victim of their sport, enjoys himself, perhaps, less than the other participants.

29 May 1964

"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."

01 Sep 1999

Ciprì and Maresco's delicious documentary portrays Sicilian super-agent Enzo Castagna, a man with some 20,000 extras on his books, who has worked with the likes of Loren, Pasolini, Rosi, Coppola and Cimino (indeed, virtually anyone who's ever chosen to film in Palermo). It's typically weird, witty and wonderful, partly due to its subject, a self-styled 'little big man' who consents to be described as 'almighty' and 'the greatest contributor to Italian cinema in the last 35 years'. The local favourite has also done time for bribery, but refuses to comment on Cosa Nostra. The film is as astonishing as its subject. Shot in luscious b/w, it's driven forward by an offscreen interrogator who alternates between ludicrously hyperbolic flattery and forthright questions about corruption and crime. It also serves as a study of the way ethics get abandoned in the unending pursuit of fame, wealth and self-esteem.

01 Apr 1944

Arne Sucksdorff’s short documentary observes gulls raiding nests and stealing eggs with ruthless persistence. Though presented as pure nature study, the film was widely read as an allegory of Nazism—a symbolic parable of predation and violence during wartime. Sucksdorff himself denied such intent, but remarked that “a film that is not open to interpretation is a dead film.”
15 Mar 1911
A fascinating pictorial document: On an old, cluttered work ship, a man is helped on with a bulky, old fashioned diving suit. It's a complicated process, many layers and sections are carefully applied. He goes over the side. Some men row out to what looks like a wrecked barge and set dynamite. Then the diver returns and now laughs and acknowledges the camera. The other men, now safely away, blow up the barge.