Movies: Essay film

Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is one of David Lynch’s most enduring obsessions. This documentary goes over the rainbow to explore this Technicolor through-line in Lynch’s work....

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills....

Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writi...

Lies can kill. Transgender Nuclear Suicide Sojourner is an exploration of propaganda, lies, and the overwhelming urge to end it all....

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors....

Commissioned by French television, this is a short documentary on the neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, predominantly on the walls of buildings, holding up windows, roofs etc....

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists....

The fascinating story of the rise to power of dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) in Italy in 1922 and how fascism marked the fate of the entire world in the dark years to come....

A found-footage essay, Filmfarsi salvages low budget thrillers and melodramas suppressed following the 1979 Islamic revolution....

Building on Forensic Architecture’s previous investigation into herbicidal warfare and its effects on Palestinian farmers along the eastern perimeter of the occupied Gaza Strip, this investigation marks Land Day in Palestine by examining the systemat...

A personal essay which analyses and compares images of the political upheavals of the 1960s. From the military coup in Brazil to China's Cultural Revolution, from the student uprisings in Paris to the end of the Prague Spring....

A provocative and poetic exploration of how the British people have seen their own land through more than a century of cinema. A hallucinated journey of immense beauty and brutality. A kaleidoscopic essay on how magic and madness have linked human be...

In the fourth and final instalment of Karel Vachek’s not-so-little Little Capitalist Tetralogy, preparations for an opera performance in the Czech capital’s art-nouveau National Theatre become the occasion for a reflection on rebels, dissidents, and ...

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality....

Quite a few years have passed since November 1989. Czechoslovakia has been divided up and, in the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus’s right-wing government is in power. Karel Vachek follows on from his film New Hyperion, thus continuing his series of comp...

40,000 years in the making: Kogonada's video essay created for The Connected Series....

Jim, a slacker college student, decides to procrastinate on an essay worth 25% of his grade. Will he finish in time, or suffer the consequences?...

Andrea and the simbionte travel to Toledo; when they arrive, they find a lonely bus station, which slowly turns off the lights for them. In the silence that surrounds them, Andrea watches the moment pass and with it her certainty about her future dre...

A story of diaspora. The film criticises the myth of Swiss neutrality, which violently masks structural, systemic, and social passivity....

A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, ...