COMING SOON: Watch for these titles coming soon to OVID.tv

The Plains — Available Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Directed by David Easteal • Drama • With Andrew Rakowski, David Easteal • 2022 • 180 minutes • David Easteal

Every evening a man in his late 50s commutes home at the end of the working day in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. As the seasons pass in gentle rhythm we observe dramatic events of his life as well as mundane quotidian details, and learn more about the man, his inner conflicts and the relationships in his life—with his wife, his mother, deceased sister, and a younger co-worker whom he occasionally …

Kin-dza-dza! — Available Thursday, January 30, 2025
Directed by Georgiy Daneliya • Drama • With Stanislav Lyubshin, Levan Gabriadze • 1986 • 133 minutes • MVD Entertainment Group

Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa Solaris directing Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and you'll come close to the existential weirdness of this loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy. Two average Muscovites - a plainspoken construction foreman and a Georgian violin student - encounter an odd homeless man on the street who asks, 'Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?' In a flash, …

Three Monkeys — Available Friday, January 31, 2025
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan • Drama • With Yavuz Bingöl, Hatice Aslan • 2008 • 106 minutes • Cinema Guild

Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes, Three Monkeys is a moving, visually unforgettable triumph from the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Thear Tree) An ambitious politician flees a hit-and-run accident in the dead of night and a fraid of hurting his election chances, he pays off his chauffeur Eyup to take the rap. While Eyup stews in jail, this devil's bargain …

Trinity — Available Saturday, February 1, 2025
Directed by Martina Car, Anthony Audi • Documentary • With Phil Harrison, Henry Herrera, Bernice Gutierrez, Bill Payne, Louisa Lopez, Tina Cordova • 2024 • 76 minutes • First Run Features

Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project culminated in the Trinity test: the detonation of the first nuclear bomb. In an instant, shrouded in secrecy, the world forever changed. Trinity explores the silences surrounding what was unleashed - in New Mexico, Navajo Nation, and Japan. Contrasting official histories with first-person testimony, it leaves viewers to meditate on the ironies that emerge.

Francine — Available Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Directed by Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky • Documentary • With Melissa Leo • 2012 • 74 minutes • Film Sales Corp

After years of incarceration, a quiet, lonely woman, Francine (Academy Award® winner Melissa Leo), is released to start a new life in a small, rural town. But despite opportunities for warmth and connection, her years of “rehabilitation” have left her with little ability to create relationships and happiness, finding her only solace in her connections with animals. What happens when a second chance …

The Birth of Sake — Available Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Directed by Erik Shirai • Documentary • 2015 • 93 minutes • Film Sales Corp

A beautiful and immersive portrait of life at the 144-year old Yoshida Brewery, a producer of world class sake. With changing times ahead and new regime led by the 6th generation heir, this is a rarified look at the personal and professional intensity needed to create a revered product and the artisans behind it.

How They Got Over — Available Friday, February 7, 2025
Directed by Robert Clem • Documentary • With J.W. Alexander, Ira Tucker • 2018 • 87 minutes • First Run Features

How They Got Over tells the story of how Black gospel quartet music became a primary source for what we would call rock and roll, and in the process helped to break down racial walls in 1950s America. Beginning in the 1920s, Black singers across the country took to the highways as the new technology of radio and records made it possible to reach a wider audience. Intense competition brought new ways …

Roberta — Available Friday, February 7, 2025
Directed by Antonino D'Ambrosio • Documentary • 2022 • 87 minutes • Film Sales Corp

Directed by award-winning filmmaker Antonino D'Ambrosio, this is the long overdue documentary about the legendary Roberta Flack. Of course she is well known the world over for “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and "Killing Me Softly,” for which she became the first person in history to win two back-to-back Grammy Awards for Best Record (a feat only recently matched by Billie Eilish), but there is …

Poly Styrene: I am a Cliché — Available Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Directed by Celeste Bell, Paul Sng • Documentary • With Ruth Negga, Thurston Moore, Kathleen Hanna • 2021 • 96 minutes • Utopia Select LLC

Poly Styrene was the first woman of color in the UK to front a successful rock band. She introduced the world to a new sound of rebellion, using her unconventional voice to sing about identity, consumerism, postmodernism, and everything she saw unfolding in late 1970s Britain, with a rare prescience. As the frontwoman of X-Ray Spex, the Anglo-Somali punk musician was also a key inspiration for the …

Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting — Available Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Directed by Aviva Kempner and Ben West • Documentary • 2022 • 95 minutes • First Run Features

A comprehensive look at the movement to eradicate the words, images, and gestures that many Native Americans and their allies find harmful, demeaning, and offensive. The film examines mascoting issues through archival footage and interviews with those involved in the fight. It shows how teams such as Kansas City's football team and Atlanta's baseball team have refused to consider a change and brings …

RECENTLY ADDED: Titles added in the last two weeks

— Added Thursday, January 23, 2025
Directed by Tokuzo Tanaka • Drama • With Akira Ishihama, Shiho Fujimura, Machiko Hasegawa • 1968 • 80 minutes • MVD Entertainment Group

Two woodcutters spend the night in a mountain lodge after being caught in a snowstorm. A female spirit appears and takes the life of one of the men. She spares the other man's life on the condition that he never tell anyone what happened that night.

— Added Thursday, January 23, 2025
Directed by Kenji Misumi • Drama • With Yasuko Nakada, Kazuo Hasegawa, Yoko Uraji • 1959 • 84 minutes • MVD Entertainment Group

Samurai Iemon (Kazuo Hasegawa, Gate of Hell) has grown distant from his wife Oiwa since she miscarried. Oume falls madly in love with Iemon after he saves her from a group of drunk swordsmen. Without his knowledge, Iemon's associates conspire to clear the way for him to marry Oume by poisoning his wife. But Oiwa returns from the grave as a horribly disfigured ghost.

— Added Thursday, January 23, 2025
Directed by Satsuo Yamamoto • Drama • With Kojiro Hongo, Mayumi Ogawa, Miyoko Akaza • 1968 • 89 minutes • MVD Entertainment Group

Noble samurai Shinzaburo (Kojiro Hongo, Gamera) is visited one night by the beautiful courtesan Otsuyu (Miyoko Akaza, Lady Snowblood). She pleads with him to marry her and save her from life in a brothel. Instantly captivated by her beauty, Shinzaburo agrees and a cautious love affair develops, but in his infatuation, he fails to realise that Otsuyu is a ghost.

— Added Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Directed by Mosco Boucault, Ruth Zylberman • Documentary • 2024 • 38 minutes • Icarus Films

Just outside Paris, in a peaceful clearing surrounded by woods, a French flag flies above a bare concrete pad. Here, on February 21, 1944, Nazi occupiers executed 23 Resistance fighters by firing squad. After the executions, the Nazis highlighted many of the murdered fighters on a notorious red poster, labelling them as foreigners, communists, and Jews. 23 FOREIGNERS — OUR BROTHERS tells the stories … More

— Added Friday, January 17, 2025
Directed by Chie Hayakawa • Drama • With Chieko Baishô, Hayato Isomura • 2022 • 113 minutes • KimStim

In a near dystopian future, Japan’s government launches PLAN 75, a program encouraging the elderly to terminate their own lives to relieve its rapidly aging population’s social and economic burdens. In Chie Hayakawa’s remarkable and sensitive feature film debut, the lives of three ordinary citizens intersect in this new reality as they confront the crushing callousness of a world ready to dispose … More

— Added Thursday, January 16, 2025
Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2023 • 32 minutes • Tiffany Sia

Directed by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia, “The Sojourn” imagines a restless landscape film in Taiwan. Visiting scenic locations shot by King Hu, the short experiments with the road movie genre and its intersection with the martial arts epic. Sia meets actor Shih Chun, who played the protagonist in Hu’s Dragon Inn, Touch of Zen and other wuxia films, as he guides the quest to re-encounter the iconic … More

— Added Thursday, January 16, 2025
Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2024 • 33 minutes • Tiffany Sia

“A Child Already Knows” is a short film that describes a child’s retelling of an escape from Shanghai disguised as a family vacation through the south. Half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children’s animations of the same era. The work assembles fragmentary memories and images that must be conjured through the mind, in lieu of … More

— Added Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Directed by Reiner Holzemer • Documentary • With Martin Margiela, Carla Sozzani • 2019 • 95 minutes • Oscilloscope Laboratories

One of the most revolutionary and influential fashion designers of his time, Martin Margiela has remained an elusive figure the entirety of his decades-long career. From Jean Paul Gaultier's assistant to creative director at Hermès to leading his own House, Margiela never showed his face publicly and avoided interviews, but reinvented fashion with his radical style through forty-one provocative collections. … More

— Added Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Directed by Nora El Hourch • Drama • With Leah Aubert, Médina Diarra, Salma Takaline • 2024 • 101 minutes • Distrib Films

Despite their different social backgrounds, Amina, Djeneba, and Zineb have been friends for as long as they can remember. When Zineb experiences harassment from her brother’s best friend, Amina decides to post a compromising video of him on social media, hoping he will stop. Little does she know that the video will not only jeopardize her safety, but also threaten their close-knit friendship. Torn … More

— Added Friday, January 10, 2025
Directed by Mehran Tamadon • Documentary • With Mehran Tamadon, Zar Amir Ebrahimi • 2023 • 82 minutes • Icarus Films

“What are you thinking? You’re thinking, ‘This is cinema. I’m sowing seeds to create a dialogue.’ Maybe you’ll be able to open a dialogue. A dialogue without any outcome.” — Zar Amir Ebrahimi Filmmaker Mehran Tamadon (Bassidji) is an Iranian in exile, living in France. For years, he was able to travel back and forth between the two countries. Then, in 2012, he was warned that coming back would mean … More