Cinema Studies

Joaquim Pinto has been an instrumental figure in Portuguese cinema for over 30 years, as a director of his own films, or producer and sound designer for other renowned filmmakers. In What Now? Remind Me Pinto, who has been living with HIV, looks back at his life in cinema, at his friendships and loves, and at the mysteries of art and nature.

In the wonderful Art of Observing Life, renowned documentarian Marina Goldovskaya delivers a master class in cinema verité and an appreciation of the filmmakers who transformed the Documentary. Composed of intimate conversations with Robert Drew and Richard Leacock (Primary), Allan King (A Married Couple), Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens), Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room), Lionel Rogosin (On The Bowery) & others.

Produced by the directors of Sweetgrass and Leviathan, Manakamana is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind documentary experience. Filmed entirely inside the narrow confines of a cable car, high above a jungle in Nepal, that transports villagers to an ancient mountaintop temple, it is an acute ethnographic investigation into culture, religion, technology and modernity.

An enthralling journey through the history of Indian cinema, Celluloid Man is a portrait of P.K Nair, the legendary founder-director of the National Film Archive of India. Featuring extensive interviews and film clips, this is a gorgeous cinematic tribute to 'India's Henry Langlois' and to the importance of preservation.

A stirring documentary about the very beginning of Rwanda's film industry, Finding Hillywood looks at the people - the filmmakers, festival organizers, and audience - that are part of this blossoming film community and shows how it has become a beacon of hope and healing for a country still grappling with its past.

A collaboration between two Chinese artists, Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang, and acclaimed American filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, Yumen is a documentary-fiction hybrid that tells the story of a ghost town, a once-thriving oil-rich community in China's western Gansu province, through a series of wandering characters and inventive vignettes. Produced with the support of SEL

An illuminating and extremely rare documentary profile of one of the great filmmakers of our time, Bela Tarr. Filmed during the production of The Turin Horse, his final film, Tarr Bela: I Used To Be A Filmmaker features clips, behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with longtime collaborators such as Mihaly Vig, Erika Bok and Tarr's wife and co-director Agnes Hranitzky.

A lost masterpiece, now exquisitely restored, Dominique Benicheti's Cousin Jules is a beautiful, immersive documentary portrait of a farmer living with his wife in the French countryside. One of the earliest documentaries to be shot in CinemaScope with stereo sound, it is a record of a time and a way of life that has long ago vanished.

A dazzling and delightful mystery about love and its follies from filmmaker Matías Piñeiro - named one of "20 Directors to Watch" by The New York Times - VIOLA follows a young woman who joins a small Shakespeare theater company in Buenos Aires and becomes entangled in a seductive roundelay of romantic dalliances, intrigue and revelation.

Produced at Harvard's groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab (Sweetgrass, Leviathan, the upcoming Manakamana), People's Park is an exhilarating single shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through an urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, offering a fresh gaze on public interaction, leisure and self-expression in China.

A thrilling debut by a major new voice in world cinema, Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds is a film about the long-suppressed history of class and racial oppression that continues to haunt contemporary Brazilian society.

A heartbreaking and hilarious film of repeating patterns and circumstance, The Day He Arrives, from the celebrated Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo, is a meditation on relationships, filmmaking, and the unknowable forces that govern our lives. An official selection of the Cannes Film Festival.