Movies: Essay film

A "cinematic object" by Mariano Llinás, divided into 9 chapters, based on the poetry of Henri Michaux....

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...

The mind process behind the film, Transformers the Premake, explained by Kevin B Lee himself....

A girl haunted by traumatic events takes us on a mesmerising journey through 100 years of horror cinema to explore how filmmakers scare us – and why we let them....

Angela Su’s fictional artist Rosie Leavers is the last remaining person to upload her consciousness to a video game. Contemplating during a pandemic year which also saw people’s resistance movements in many parts of the world, the work pinpoints the ...

A glimpse of life through movement and memory, negotiating a narrative through images and sounds both personal and found, private and public, recounting four years of the filmmaker's life, relocating from Iran to the US....

What begins as an enquiry on things that mean other things itself becomes a thing that means other things, too. And whatever exactly that thing is, the latest by one of Canada’s most ingenious auteurs is another astounding feat of cerebral and cineph...

After the disappearance of Aldemar his wife decided to get overall uncertainty by including him in the list of deaths in the 1938 Colombian National Census. Today, 83 years later, I repeat her. I try to find myself among the numbers in the digital da...

Initially a made-to-order documentary on Spain, the film becomes an open-ended work-in-the-making about the creative process. “Settling in the Spanish capital to make a documentary, Hanoun sketches out for us the different steps involved in making a ...

The wanderer Rascal embarks on a psychotic and contradictory journey to break out of the ego bubble in which his self-loathing and isolation have inserted him in. After his metamorphosis, his soulmate, Paloma, makes him realize that life is as compli...

If cinema is the art of time, Linklater is one of its most thoughtful and engaged directors. Unlike other filmmakers identified as auteurs, Linklater’s distinction is not found on the surface of his films, in a visual style or signature shot, but rat...

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought toge...

It has been a lifelong dream of Kyrgyz director Melis Ubukeyev to create an elaborate film version of the Kyrgyz national epic 'Manas'. He spent years working with the National Academy of Sciences of Kyrgyzstan to gather material for this film projec...

A fragmented collection of independent closed cinemas, in London during lockdown, captured on Super 8mm film....

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

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...

The genius Spanish painter Salvador Dalí undertakes an amazing journey through the unknown mental territories of Upper Mongolia in search of a giant hallucinogenic mushroom while paying an experimental tribute to the French poet Raymond Roussel (1877...

A reflection on the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene epoch, White Noise is a roller-coaster of a film, a whirlwind of sounds and images. The fourth feature-length work by Simon Beaulieu, this film essay plunges viewers into a subjective sensory a...

A 25-minute visual essay by Kent Jones about Jean-Luc Godard and his film 'Weekend'....

This Pixar documentary short follows Sarah Vowell, who plays herself as the title character, on why she is a superhero in her own way. (This short piece is included on the 2-Disc DVD for "The Incredibles", which was released in 2005....