
17 May 2023

Étienne Robial, un spécimen de caractère(s)
Documentary on the French graphic and visual artist and designer, editor, artistic director, and teacher who is known for his widely-used fonts.
Alberto Casiraghy and Josef Weiss are true bibliophile artists. One in Osnago, the other in Mendrisio, they have been dedicating themselves for years to valuable editorial and typographical activities, still printing with mobile characters, preserving the memory of a perfect ingenuity made of manual skills and technique, but also of inventiveness and poetry. Silvio Soldini gives us a realistic and poetical portrait of these two artists-artisans, who chose one of the oldest professions in a modern world, finding great success and approval.
Self
Self
17 May 2023
Documentary on the French graphic and visual artist and designer, editor, artistic director, and teacher who is known for his widely-used fonts.
12 Sep 2007
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.
21 May 2017
Hanzi is a documentary exploring international design, visual culture, and identity through the lens of modern Chinese typography. The film covers a variety of topics such as how languages shape identity, and what role handwriting plays in the digital age.
25 Sep 2017
A portrait of the inventor of the letterpress, who was a key figure in the history of mankind, but also an enthusiastic inventor, a daring businessman, a tenacious troublemaker: the life of Johannes Gutenberg (circa 1400-68).
27 May 2017
Why has letterpress printing survived? Irreplaceable knowledge of the historic craft is in danger of being lost as its caretakers age. Fascinating personalities intermix with wood, metal, and type as young printers save a traditional process in Pressing On, a 4K feature-length documentary exploring the remarkable community keeping letterpress alive.
28 Sep 2012
A fascinating documentary about Piet Zwart (1885–1977), an idiosyncratic and stubborn designer, who lived for innovation and prepared the way for the international success that is now known as Dutch Design. Piet Zwart worked as an interior and industrial designer, commercial typographer, photographer, critic and lecturer, playing a key role in defining the design climate in the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century. He is especially known for designing the famous ‘Piet Zwart’ kitchen for the Dutch company Bruynzeel: a kitchen that could be easily produced and consisted of standardized elements. His versatility and influence on present-day designers led the Association of Dutch Designers to award him the title of “Designer of the Century” in 2000.
22 Mar 2023
Portrait of a Mexico City neighborhood where pages and pages are printed, and little by little, words appear. Máquinas de Palabras is a performance created in March 2023 in Mexico City, and is the result of a collaboration between Labo K (Rennes-based film laboratory) and LEC (Laboratorio de Cine Experimental) in Mexico City. A portrait of a Mexico City neighborhood where pages and pages are printed. And little by little, words appear... "From the deliberate use of found images to films that make uncompromising use of raw material, the camera and the plants will take our eyes... Pupils will certainly be illuminated by the projector... How can moving images stay in our heads?"
05 Nov 2009
A documentary film about Adriano Olivetti.
26 Aug 1979
Dedicated Dutch graphic designer Piet Schreuders visits Los Angeles to investigate all kinds of typeface as used in title-credits for movies and TV-series, letters on billboards, shop-windows or street-signs, the banner-headlines of The Los Angeles Times, and climbs finally to the giant letters of the HOLLYWOOD-sign. In the meantime he discovers, to his great satisfaction, the location and stairs where Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy shot their movie 'The Musicbox', by combining street-signs, partially shown on still-pictures of this movie: "…MONTE" and "…ENDOME", which turn out to be found on the street corner of Del Monte and Vendome in Culver City. This documentary is bluntly intercut with commercials, a phenomenon not yet known in the Netherlands in 1979. (Theo Uittenbogaard)
24 May 2013
A short, educational animation about the history of fonts and typography. In a paper cutout stop-motion style, it begins with Gutenberg's creation of the first typeface, travels through the innovations of Jenson, Caslon, and Bodoni, to the modern creation of Futura and the democratization of fonts in the digital age. A charming, engaging film about a technology that is all around us, but few people know much about.
01 Jan 1992
Words that start with the letter O, P, and R. A typographic animation.
01 Jan 1991
Words that end in -ake and start with ch-. A typographic animation.
14 May 2004
A documentary on the once promising American rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. The friendship between respective founders, Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor, escalated into bitter rivalry as the Dandy Warhols garnered major international success while the Brian Jonestown Massacre imploded in a haze of drugs.
15 Jan 2004
In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.
14 Jul 1998
This documentary follows the French soccer team on their way to victory in the 1998 World Cup in France. Stéphane Meunier spent the whole time filming the players, the coach and some other important characters of this victory, giving us a very intimate and nice view of them, as if we were with them.
01 Jan 1969
Festival panafricain d'Alger is a documentary by William Klein of the music and dance festival held 40 years ago in the streets and in venues all across Algiers. Klein follows the preparations, the rehearsals, the concerts… He blends images of interviews made to writers and advocates of the freedom movements with stock images, thus allowing him to touch on such matters as colonialism, neocolonialism, colonial exploitation, the struggles and battles of the revolutionary movements for Independence.
24 Jul 2013
When Ariel was just 33, his legs were shredded by an industrial dough mixer in Mendoza, Argentina. He became a living embodiment of the ongoing duel between man and machine. From that point on, he began to rediscover the meaning of freedom: to rebuild his broken identity, keep his family together and design his own prosthetic legs. Following Ariel for 10 years from the time of the accident, director Laura Bari has created an intimate and metaphorical portrait of Ariel’s newfound transhumanity, juxtaposing his daily life with dreamlike inner worlds—and pushing the boundary between the real and the imaginary.
20 Apr 2014
Just 60 miles north of New York City sits the poverty-stricken town of Newburgh, where, in 2009, four men were arrested for a plan to bomb two Jewish centers in the Bronx. But their leader, a suspicious Pakistani businessman planted by the government as an informant, led these men straight into the hands of the authorities. With endless footage gathered from hidden cameras, directors David Heilbroner and Kate Davis investigate just what homegrown terrorism truly means in this shocking and galvanizing exposé.
20 Apr 2014
Drop out of school to ride with the Merry Pranksters. Form America’s most enduring jam band. Become a family man and father. Never stop chasing the muse. Bob Weir took his own path to and through superstardom as rhythm guitarist for The Grateful Dead. Mike Fleiss re-imagines the whole wild journey in this magnetic rock doc and concert film, with memorable input from bandmates, contemporaries, followers, family, and, of course, the inimitable Bob Weir himself.
20 Apr 2014
From New York City to the farmlands of the Midwest, there are 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., yet one dish in particular has conquered the American culinary landscape with a force befitting its military moniker—“General Tso’s Chicken.” But who was General Tso and how did this dish become so ubiquitous? Ian Cheney’s delightfully insightful documentary charts the history of Chinese Americans through the surprising origins of this sticky, sweet, just-spicy-enough dish that we’ve adopted as our own.