Cinema Studies

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.

The Two Sights (An Dà Shealladh) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. As we listen to locals' accounts of haunting experiences—phantom horses, ghost voices and other supernatural phenomena—Bonnetta connects their testimonies with striking 16mm images and a carefully-curated sonic montage of the physical and aural environment of these enchanted islands.

Khadija (Saadia Bentaïeb) is a fifty-eight-year-old Maghrebi cleaning woman living in Brussels in the wake of the 2016 bombings that shook the city. After work one night, she falls asleep on the last subway train, wakes up at the end of the line and has no choice but to make her way home—all the way across the city—on foot.

When painter Youngsoo (Kim Joohyuk) learns that his girlfriend, Minjung (Lee Yooyoung), was recently seen having drinks with another man, he can’t help but question her about it. It doesn’t go well and they part on bad terms. The next day, Youngsoo tries to find her, but can’t. As he wanders and frets, Minjung has a series of encounters with other men. But to them it seems she’s not herself.

Just before the French Revolution, in a forest outside Berlin, a band of libertines expelled from the court of Louis XVI rendezvous with the legendary German seducer and freethinker, the Duc de Walchen (Helmut Berger), to convince him to join in their mission: the rejection of authority and all moral boundaries. What begins as an evening of strategizing on the proliferation of libertinage, descends into a Sadean night of pansexual one-upmanship.

Filmmaker Maxine Trump turns the camera on herself and her close circle of family and friends as she confronts the idea of not having kids, and explores the cultural pressures and harsh criticism childfree women regularly experience.

Astrid, a forty-something mother of two, struggles to regain her balance in the wake of her husband’s death. Her adolescent son Phillip disappeared for a week and now that he has returned, he faces disciplinary action at school and his toe requires amputation. As new questions confront Astrid from every angle, even simple activities like buying a bicycle or engaging with a work of art, are fraught with unexpected challenges.

Red Chef Revival is a unique and intimate documentary that follows three trailblazing chefs on a cross country journey to redefine and reclaim Indigenous cuisine. Using food as their access point, these chefs discover a new path to reconciliation, while working with ingredients you won't find in any cookbooks, like bison heart, beaver tail, moose nose, seal and cougar. 

Un Film Dramatique is a lively portrait of the first class to attend the newly constructed Dora Maar middle school, filmed over the course of four years. The group of 21 middle schoolers discuss the drama of their daily lives and experiment with cameras and equipment. They are the film’s subjects, and also its makers.

An aging poet, Younghwan, summons his two estranged sons to a solitary hotel beside the Han River because he feels his death is near. While waiting for them to arrive, he meets two women out walking in the new-fallen snow and is struck by their angelic beauty.

The Fourth Kingdom: The Kingdom of Plastics is a compassionate through-the-seasons study of a non-profit recycling and redemption center in New York.

When Ocho (Juan Barberini), a 30-something Argentine poet on vacation in Barcelona, spots Javi (Ramón Pujol), a Spaniard from Berlin, from the balcony of his Airbnb, the attraction is subtle but persistent. After a missed connection on the beach, a third chance encounter escalates to a seemingly random hookup. But are these two merely beautiful strangers in a foreign city or are they part of each other’s histories—and maybe even their destinies?

Feminist filmmaker Victoria Schultz captures the memory of her own past, trying to become a writer while becoming entangled in erotic and frightening encounters with an older man. A #MeToo film that stretches back to one woman's memory growing up in the 1950s.

Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows is the untold story of the British artist Penny Slinger and the events that led to the creation of her masterpiece, the 1977 photo-romance, An Exorcism. 

An Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late American documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig's decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

The Call is an inside look at the turbulent jury selection process in Italy. In Italy, citizens can be summoned at a day’s notice for potential jury duty. 60 common citizens are randomly selected by a computer and notified by the police in person to appear in court—by the end of the day, 6 people are selected to be jurors.