Essay Film Movies

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.

A filmmaker canoes up North Carolina’s Black River to the Three Sisters Swamp, chasing light through ancient bald cypress groves. What begins...

Through the story of one woman’s year in a room with a view, the film catches its audience up in the collective memories of all those who have...

Two decades on from Sam Neill’s Cinema of Unease, Tim Wong’s essay film contemplates the prevailing image of a national cinema while...

A short 6-minute essay-documentary by Maurice Pialat on the region in which much of the action of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble unfolds.

In this new video essay, filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe delves into the dread-inducing mood and tone of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s modern horror...

In the fourth and final instalment of Karel Vachek’s not-so-little Little Capitalist Tetralogy, preparations for an opera performance in the...

Musing on the nature of memory, Don Hertzfeldt recounts stories about a kiss from The King, a floating child in a backyard and a giant foot.

In the idyllic world of Israeli kibbutzim everything has its own pace. There’s a time for work and for rest. There’s a time for fun too,...

An essay style film in the vein of Orson Welles' "F For Fake" and Jon Jost's "Speaking Directly". From 2011 to 2013, filmmaker Kristian Day randomly...

A peculiar portrait of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) drawn by the extravagant and original look of the Spanish writer Fernando...

A rose is a rose by any other name would be, well, something different, particularly if the rose was a woman. This tape is a witty and thoughtful...

In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware,...

A video-letter to Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and author of the unforgivable "Art for Dummies".

Recalling his childhood and relationship with his mother, a film student tries to understand the origin of his love for cinema and tragedies.

An experiment and a dialogue about recording, the act of filming and the colors available to whoever points the camera somewhere.

A documentary film contrasting present-day Lithuania with extracts from a peasant's diary from 1984/85.

Present, past and future merge in the wagons of a train that crosses Eastern Europe in the XXI century: Poland, Russia, Ukraine. The slogan of the...