Celebrated documentary filmmaker Simone Bitton (Ben Barka, Wall, Rachel) returns with her most personal film to date. Inviting viewers on a cinematic pilgrimage to her homeland of Morocco, Bitton explores her Jewish roots through the sphere of the Muslim guardians of the nation’s Jewish memory, centered around the tradition of "ziyara". In the arid but beautiful landscape of rural Morocco, the country’s …

With LE NAVIRE NIGHT, writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras (L'Amant, India Song) explores the matrix of love, desire and language in her characteristically oblique and experimental style. The film’s lovers—played by Dominique Sanda and Mathieu Carrière—are never allowed to meet in person, instead carrying out their conversations over the phone, using unlisted phone lines leftover from the …

Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) - best-known as the author of The Lover and for the screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (the classic 1960 New Wave film directed by Alain Resnais) - was one of the most prolific, controversial, and renowned cultural figures in post-war France. Between 1943 (when she published her first book) and 1995 (when she published her last - That's All), Duras directed 19 films …

Berkeley in the Sixties recaptures the exhilaration and turmoil of the unprecedented student protests that shaped a generation and changed the course of America. Many consider it to be the best filmic treatment of the 1960s yet made. This Academy Award-nominated documentary interweaves the memories of 15 former student leaders, who grapple with the meaning of their actions. Their recollections are …

The violent overreaction to 9/11 and to the revolutions of the 1960’s cannot be explained only with fear and politics. Franz Hinkelammert, a German-born liberation theologian, economist and philosopher, brings religion front and center to the discussion in a unique way. The emptiness and senselessness felt by the those at the margins of a free-market utopian ideology has been filled by an extreme …

Weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez came to the United Nations and delivered his "smells of sulfur" speech about Bush. After that speech, Bush was officially a lame duck—the Republicans lost the House and Senate and just had to sit around and wait for the air to go out of the economy. It was an 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment with perfect comic timing. No matter …

Little Radek, the step-dancing Bolshevik; Machera, the Andean Robin Hood, and Maria Spiridonova, the Russian socialist assassin are your guides for Past Leftist Life Regression therapy. In this third Inner Trotsky Child video, narrator Lois Severin—a former Trotskyite turned suburban housewife—attempts to radicalize the personal fulfillment and self-help scene. Like the Christian fundamentalist …

"You are invited to Jim’s party! Snake optional." —Cinematexas Festival

River ice sets the scene for Judy Garland's international cri de coeur. It's hard to understate the amount of anxiety created by a vice president who usurped authority for eight years to start wars and wreck the economy and then sidled off to Wyoming to be a a retired Hero of the Right. Impunity is not just the stuff of autocratic dictatorships in the third world. The American form of impunity is …

La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo is a recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path movement in their morning marches to their bedtime chants. Kept isolated in their own cellblocks, the guerrillas refused to acknowledge that were imprisoned. Their cellblocks were another front in the People's War: "shining trenches of … More

In the late 1960's Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father's Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and  authoritarian Stalinist pseudo-socialism. The film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche … More

"...the debut feature film from Jim Finn....will undoubtedly become a cult classic. ...an almost anally-retentive eye for the iconography and fashions of the Soviet-era Warsaw pact countries, and a great ear for both the comedy intrinsic to Socialist propaganda dialogue - and pauses - this film is a serious rib-tickler for those who can appreciate lines such as "Capitalism is a kindergarten for boneless … More

For four years in the 1860’s half of the United States was held hostage by an unrecognized white supremacist republic. Shot on 16mm in national military parks, swamps, forests and the suburban sprawl across the former battlefields, the film follows General Grant’s path liberating the southern United States. It focuses not only on his battles but on massacres committed by Confederate armies and … More

A vanguard short that displays the range of Mario Ruspoli’s insatiable curiosity and the depth of his talents: The Whalers, an influential portrait of the last whale fishermen, living in the Azores, to work with harpoons.

Chronicles the history of mankind's relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry. Chris Marker's co-director, Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986), descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, had been a journalist, painter, and ethnologist before discovering his vocation as a documentary filmmaker. In the Sixties he became … More

Dauman, whose father was a lifelong friend and producer of Ruspoli’s, uses her privileged perspective to produce an intimate portrait of this revolutionary but often overlooked artist. The result, a film that caused Chris Marker to exclaim “Finally, the tribute he deserved,” draws on a treasury of relics provided by Ruspoli’s widow, Dominique, as well as the testimonials of friends and … More

Ruspoli had a standing interest in isolated and marginal communities, very much on display in films he shot in Lozère, in France’s rugged, unforgiving south. In A LOOK AT MADNESS and CAPTIVE FEAST, it’s patients and doctors, including the hugely influential director, François Tosquelles, seen going about their daily rounds at the psychiatric hospital of St. Alban, formerly a monastery and … More

A tribute to Ruspoli’s longtime friend, the humorist and cartoonist Chaval, made after his suicide in 1968.

The Last Drink documents the process of detox treatments at a hospital in Bordeaux.