
01 Mar 1969

Alaska
Alaska is a wordless experimental film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum.
The Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, daughter of a former advisor of Ahmadinejad's, has been living in exile in Germany for four years. When she hears that the fellow Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi, who is also living in exile in Germany, faces death threats and has to hide because of one of his songs, she doesn't hesitate and has to find him. On her search she encounters fear everywhere. Narges Kalhor has to face her inconvenient memories of suppression, hatred and anger for her past in Iran.
01 Mar 1969
Alaska is a wordless experimental film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum.
01 Mar 1957
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)
21 May 2014
Rather than writing a simple letter to explain his absence from the press conference for his latest Cannes entry, "Goodbye to Language," at the Cannes Film Festival, instead, legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard created a video "Letter in motion to (Cannes president) Gilles Jacob and (artistic director) Thierry Fremaux." The video intercuts from Godard speaking cryptically about his "path" to key scenes from Godard classics such as "Alphaville" and "King Lear" with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald, and quotes poet Jacques Prevert and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
31 May 1975
The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.
10 Oct 2024
On stage since she was a toddler, Googoosh has been an icon of Iranian pop culture since the 1970s. Her progressive style and raw singing talent attracted worldwide acclaim and saw her performing alongside the likes of Tina Turner and Ray Charles. But the star's career came to an abrupt halt after the Islamic Revolution, which banned women from singing in public. Googoosh was placed under house arrest, where she remained for the next two decades. Niloufar Taghizadeh's documentary, which includes interviews with the charismatic singer (now in her seventies, but still performing and advocating for women and girls) and arresting archival footage, offers both a loving portrait of a national icon and a fascinating historical and cultural record of Iran.
10 Jun 2017
Filmmakers use archival footage and animation to explore the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert.
01 Jan 1972
An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.
25 Sep 1969
A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.
01 Jan 2000
Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.
01 Jan 2002
Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.
07 Nov 2003
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.
14 Oct 2009
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.
04 Jul 2013
On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.
01 Jan 1971
"…elegant yet rustic in its simplicity of execution; tugged gently toward different sides of the set by hints of color and motion interactions, positive and negative spaces, etc., and the unyielding delivery on one of the great apotheoses of poetic cinema at fade-out time." – Tony Conrad
20 Mar 1964
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).
24 Jan 2002
A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.
27 Jun 1978
This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
31 Dec 1971
Rapidly changing images of natural objects, scenery, animals, plants, and people flicker, flash, tumble, and cascade across the screen.
12 May 1929
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
15 Sep 2006
Jesus Camp is a Christian summer camp where children hone their "prophetic gifts" and are schooled in how to "take back America for Christ". The film is a first-ever look into an intense training ground that recruits born-again Christian children to become an active part of America's political future.