Photography

Opening with Robert Oppenheimer’s immortal quoting of Hindu scripture following the first nuclear test bombings, this fascinating documentary explores the intersection of modern warfare and the development of AI, focusing on three seemingly disparate locations and lives; a scientist in Sweden, a private military contractor in the Nevada desert, and a world renowned war photographer in Afghanistan.

IWOW: I WALK ON WATER

Since 2011, Khalik Allah (Black Mother) has attracted global attention for his radiant portraits of the denizens of 125th and Lexington in East Harlem. In IWOW, Allah returns to the intersection to explore narratives of intimacy, voice, identity and personal transformation. Sometimes painful in its vulnerability, often extremely funny in its candor, and always visually extraordinary, Allah’s one-of-a-kind epic is a contemporary rethinking of the diary film: Gordon Parks meets Jonas Mekas.

THY KINGDOM COME

Initially intended as brief episodes for Terence Malick's To The Wonder which captured Javier Bardem (a parish priest in the film) talking with real-life residents of an Oklahoma town, this documentary project grew in scope as the townspeople, wholly aware that Bardem was a fictional priest, chose to share personal details of their lives. Thy Kingdom Come is a revelatory work in which unscripted conversations, shot by photographer and filmmaker Eugene Richards in beautiful widescreen, come to reveal the complexity of life in this small oil town.

BLACK MOTHER

A visionary filmmaker and photographer, Khalik Allah exploded onto the scene with Field Niggas (2015), a grassroots production which went from a YouTube upload to a sensation on the festival circuit. In his celebrated follow-up, Black Mother, Allah brings us on a spiritual journey through Jamaica, the land of his mother's birth, informed by the island's turbulent history yet existing in the urgent present.

WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD

A new edition of the landmark documentary, William Eggleston in the Real World – from Michael Almereyda, director of Escapes, Marjorie Prime, Experimenter, and Hamlet, among others – is a brilliant and intimate look at the renowned photographer, whose hallucinatory Faulknerian images were featured in the Museum of Modern Art's first one-man exhibition of color photographs.

THE DEAD NATION

A work of startling power and originality, acclaimed director Radu Jude’s documentary-essay examines the rise of anti-Semitism in Romania prior to and during World War II almost entirely through the diary of a Jewish doctor in Bucharest juxtaposed with recently unearthed photographs of provincial life in Romania between the years of 1937 and 1944.

RETURN TO CUBA: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF WALKER EVANS

In his first commissioned body of work, Walker Evans travelled to Cuba in 1933 to document life under the Machado regime. Nearly 75 years later, renowned photographers return to Cuba to retrace Evans' footsteps at a new historical tipping point.

LETTERS FROM BAGHDAD

Voiced and executive produced by Tilda Swinton, Letters from Baghdad is a visually rich, beautifully crafted documentary that tells the story of Gertrude Bell, who, more influential than her friend and colleague Lawrence of Arabia, shaped the modern Middle East in ways that still reverberate today.

DON'T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, a documentary about Robert Frank, the legendary photographer and filmmaker behind the seminal book “The Americans” and landmark films like Pull My Daisy.

THE ARTEFACTA

The mysterious work of Nicola Costantino, one of Latin America’s most controversial and admired artists.