61 Minutes to 120 Minutes

In 1969, at the end of a European tour, Thelonious Monk was invited to appear on a television program, where he would perform and answer questions in an intimate studio stage. Using newly discovered footage, filmmaker Alain Gomis reveals the troubling dynamic between Monk and his white interviewer. Gomis’s gripping film is a fascinating behind-the-scenes documentary; a subtle yet searing exposé of casual racism; and, above all, a chance to see one of the monumental geniuses of 20th-century music at work.

The thrilling American River follows Mary Bruno, the noted environmental author, and guide Carl Alderson on a 4-day, 80 mile adventure down the Passaic River, from its pristine source in a wildlife refuge to its toxic mouth in Newark Bay.  Engaging residents, historians and advocates in candid conversations, the film asks how the Passaic became one of the most contaminated rivers in America? And can it be saved? The Passaic is an archetype for thousands of rivers facing similar reckonings. 

In 2016, videos showing the slaughter conditions 
of farm animals shocked the world of public opinion. With complicit gaze, Elsa Maury films 
a young shepherd’s relationship of co-dependence with her flock of ewes, which she must learn to euthanise under the best possible conditions.  Considering the Ends discusses and raises important questions about our connection to the planet and its animals.

Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) seized on the idea of making a cinematic tribute to Ingrid Caven (a former member of R.W. Fassbinder’s cinematic troupe) when he first heard her sing at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, but the portrait he eventually made finds her exploring a more expansive range of performance styles and moods. A showcase for a truly sui generis musician—a sort of cabaret singer for the 21st century—and a respectful tribute to one artist from another.

A poetic documentary circling the origin of the death myth from the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, Małni follows two people as they wander through their surrounding nature, the spirit world, and something much deeper inside. Hopinka takes us on a journey through language and belief, offering a beautiful lesson about humanity’s place on this and other worlds, deceptively small and profoundly deep.

As one of the New Yorker’s most prolific cartoonists, James Stevenson’s body of work spans five decades, countless drawings and innumerable laughs. Featuring delightful animated interludes and interviews from colleagues, editors and his nine children, this wonderful look at Stevenson’s life - who also wrote a column for The New York Times and  is a noted writer of children's books - is a testament to observing the world from an original perspective.

“A film of great compassion and political and aesthetic ambition in which the idea of a collective is prioritised for a change, but without sacrificing or downplaying the individual voices and idiosyncrasies that it comprises... Beautifully exuberant and optimistic" (Sight & Sound), Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson's documentary, Here for Life, follows ten unruly Londoners as they navigate their wild and wayward way towards a co-existence far stronger than 'community'.

A visit to her mother’s home art studio in Texas prompts the filmmaker to explore the meaning of home and the search for belonging across three generations of her Iraqi family. Winner of the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2020 Film Independent Spirit Awards.

To a stranger, he’s a guy obsessed with toilets, but to those who know him he's “Mr. Toilet,” a crusader in global sanitation. A former entrepreneur, Jack Sim uses humor to campaign for something no one dares talk about: shit. It's a crisis that impacts over 2 billion people. In India alone, 200,000 children die each year from lack of safe sanitation. Jack fought for and established UN World Toilet Day, but with recent corporate pushback and thinning resources, he is discovering there is a price to pay for being the world's #2 hero.

One of the most important record labels in the history of jazz — and, by extension, that of American music — Blue Note Records has been home to such groundbreaking artists as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Art Blakey. Through rare archival footage, current recording sessions and conversations with jazz icons and today’s groundbreaking musicians, this thrilling documentary reveals a powerful mission and illuminates the vital connections between jazz and hip hop.

From performing in Jack Smith’s legendary Flaming Creatures to creating a series of groundbreaking experimental films to playing a pivotal role in the formation of The Velvet Underground, Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, twenty-two years in the making, examines the pioneering life and work of artist, musician, and educator, Tony Conrad.

One night, meteors start to fall in a Kurdish village on Turkey’s southern border with Syria. Earlier that year, the villagers endured a sustained and brutal assault by Turkish military forces. Neither the incident nor the fatalities were ever covered by local media. Incorporating internet uploads, foreign news reports and intimate interviews, this poetic documentary attempts to correct the historical record during one night when the sky is lit up with meteors.

Winner of the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award, Antonio Méndez Esparza's (Aquí y allá) powerful second feature presents another sensitive portrait of a struggling family - a single mother raising her two children when her 14-year-old son has a brush with the law. Life and Nothing More employs documentary-style realism in this snapshot of race, class and the bonds of family in contemporary America.

Filmmaker Mike Plante (Be Like an Ant) thoughtfully explores the relationship between the Wyatt Earp legend and the emergence of filmmaking as a popular medium. Featuring a wealth of clips from film adaptations of Earp’s life, alongside insightful interviews, Plante demonstrates the mutability of historical record and the power of moving images to shape our national mythology.

Filmed across India, the central theme of Paweł Wojtasik’s (End of Life) stunning new documentary is work. With a patient, unobtrusive approach, it consists of transcendent portraits of a broad spectrum of laborers, from a surgeon to a priest to a masseur, forming a composite vision of society, where each has a place in the tangled web of human endeavor.

A stirring and beautiful documentary from Academy Award nominated director James Longley (Iraq in Fragments), Angels Are Made of Light traces the lives of young students and their teachers at a school in the old city of Kabul. Interweaving the modern history of Afghanistan with present-day portraits, the film offers an intimate and nuanced vision of a society living in the shadow of war.

Presented in the US for the first time, from filmmaker director Claire Denis (Beau Travail, 35 Shots of Rum, Let the Sunshine In), Towards Mathilde utilizes sumptuous 8mm and 16mm cinematography, striking performances and the music by PJ Harvey to craft a singular documentary portrait of choreographer and dancer Mathilde Monnier.

In this landmark documentary, celebrated filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson presents a series of single-take, black-and-white sequences filmed in and around Lake Erie to draw a profound connection between Black migration from the South to the North and the economic hardships currently facing working class communities.

An intimate portrait of the great Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, the director of landmark films like La Cienaga and A Headless Woman, during the making of her fourth feature, Zama. Far more than a behind-the-scenes look, it is an attempt to evoke the oblique, transcendental tendencies that pervade Martel’s haunting films.

Considered the Architect‘s Architect of the 20th century, Nervi is the creator of style-forming constructions and a grand master of concrete buildings. Directed by Heinz Emigholz, Parabeton presents seventeen of his buildings punctuated by Ancient Roman constructions, suggesting, with its gorgeous compositions, a relationship between the two.

Charting the languorous, mysterious existence of two men who seem to share a deep, liminal understanding beyond words, until a third man enters their secluded space, Dane Komljen's debut feature, All the Cities of the North, is a radically open-ended but ravishingly beautiful work that’s animated by rhythms and ideas entirely its own.