30 Minutes or Less

2024 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short. Over 2,000 books have been removed from school districts in the U.S. The ABCs of Book Banning, directed by Sheila Nevins in her inaugural debut, follows the human toll the future will pay for depriving children of their right to read and learn about a complex world. Interviews with children and authors shed light on this ongoing dangerous precedent.

2020 Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary Short Subject. Bruce Franks Jr., a Ferguson activist and battle rapper who was elected to the overwhelmingly white and Republican Missouri House of Representatives, must overcome both personal trauma and political obstacles to pass a bill critical for his community.

This short documentary film captures the transformation of a young woman to the leadership of America’s most inspired anti-gun violence movement called #CocksNotGlocks. After concealed carry of handguns is legalized on the University of Texas campus, Jessica Jin posts clever humor on social media, and with the help of a tight-knit group of young female students, a movement is born: The Great Texas Dildo Revolt.

In 1900, Sigmund Freud began treating a 17-year old girl he called "Dora." Her parents brought her to therapy after she accused a family friend of sexual assault. Freud's account of his sessions with Dora was the only major case history he published of a female patient. Intercutting his published text with a scripted version told from Dora's point of view, Hysterical Girl, from the acclaimed director of The Gospel According to André, revisits this landmark case.

At the end of the 19th century the peasants in Portugal started a courageous struggle for better work conditions. After generations of starving misery, the Carnation Revolution sowed the promise of an Agrarian Reform. Mostly in the Alentejo region, these rural workers occupied the huge properties where they were once submitted to the power of their Masters. The protagonists of this film, resistants of this struggle, tell their story to the youngsters of today, in their own words.

From the Academy Award winning director of Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho's Influenza is a startling short film that marks a singular achievement in the filmmaker’s thrilling body of work. Bong's disturbingly humorous film traces the downward spiral of an unemployed 31 year-old man as he is captured on Seoul’s omnipresent CCTVs and cameras. Completed between Memories of Murder and The Host but never before released, it demonstrates a young filmmaker reaching the height of his powers.

Every time children visit their parents at San Vittore, Milan’s oldest prison, they’re subjected to thorough security checks – backpacks searched, toys checked, pat downs, metal detectors, endless waks down bare corridors. Incorporating drawings made by the children while they wait (in some the prison is transformed into a castle, the prisoners into kings and queens), this striking short documentary from Yuri Ancarini  meticulously depicts the lingering psychological and emotional trauma of this process.

Based on the acclaimed book by sociologist Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men offers crucial insights into why so many white American male voters seem to be so full of rage and hell-bent on smashing the political order. Drawing on extensive research, Kimmel elucidates the seismic economic, cultural, and political shifts that have transformed the American social landscape.

A marvelous exploration of Cezanne's "Still Life with Apples," Leo Hurwitz and Manfred Kirchheimer probe the mysteries of this modern masterpiece by simply observing the work, closely without commentary, focusing on the details - the brushstrokes, abstract shapes, color juxtapositions, hidden images - and in the process, discover its secrets.

In the late 1950s, a large American-Swedish company established a mining operation in the remote highlands of Liberia and built a sprawling, modernist city, a “true America,” for its employees and their families. Today, all that remain are abandoned buildings and empty pools. Exactly what happened involves mythical beasts, the environment, the promise of industrialization, and the last remnants of colonialism.

One day, Lucie decides to write a letter to the man who abused her when she was a young girl. She then takes her camera, her car, and resolves to bring it to him in person. This award-winning short doc was started by Lucie, but finished by her son, Loic, when he discovered the video tape of her journey ten years later.

A powerful, almost surreal distillation of a story by Heinrich Böll, Straub-Huillet's debut work concerns a former Nazi colonel who takes advantage of his political and sexual status in post-war Germany.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder stars alongside his future collaborators — Hanna Scyhgulla, Irm Hermann, and Peer Raben — in this short, radical condensation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play Pains of Youth that incorporates the screeds of Mao and May '68 protesters.

A fierce condemnation of anti-Semitism and the barbaric war machine of capitalism, inspired by a letter written in 1923 by composer Arnold Schoenberg to painter Wassily Kandinsky.

A recitation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” alongside the wall where the last 147 men and women of the Paris Commune were shot dead in 1871.

Originally released on a double bill with Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach, a short about a precocious, determined nine-year-old boy, and a story concerning a rejection of all forms of authority, whether family, school, or nation.

Straub-Huillet draw upon a pair of novels by Maurice Barrès, a celebrated Alsatian author, extreme nationalist, and ardent anti-Dreyfusard, to tell tales of perfidy, humiliation, and resistance during the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine between 1870 and 1918.

At the end of filming Umiliati, Straub and Huillet gave thanks to the cast and crew in a graceful way: by inviting Dolando Bernardini to sing several stanzas from Torquato Tasso’s 16th-century epic poem Jerusalem Delivered.

Based on Women of Messina by Elio Vittorini, Incantanti is an alternate ending to Straub-Huillet's 2003 film Umiliati — fragment as mini-manifesto.

In darkness, we hear a recording of the scandalous 1954 debut performance of Edgar Varèse’s revolutionary Déserts at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Then, in a different sort of Elysian Field, we hear a recitation of Canto XXXIII from The Inferno.

In the sun-dappled Tuscan countryside, the boar hunter Meleager, having been murdered by his own mother to avenge the tragic accidental killing of his brother, engages in conversation about fragility, resistance, and love with Hermes, who has taken female form.

Waters lap gently against the shore as Barbara Ulrich recites Maurice Barrès’s essay about the past glories and tenuous fate of the Most Serene Republic.

Straub’s testament of love was made seven years after the 2006 death of his partner and collaborator Danièle Huillet, and nearly 60 years after they met in Paris and planned to adapt this short story by Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest and Mouchette.

As a young man, Straub fled to West Germany after refusing to fight for France in the Algerian War. Later in his life, he returned to this bitter historical experience with this terse noir about “the instinct to heal” and to murder.

Inspired by questions that followed screenings of Sundance winner Last Men in Aleppo, this short documentary (produced by Last Men director Feras Fayyad) is a portrait of ordinary people's lives as they try to live through a normal day in the besieged city of Aleppo.

A film about ghosts and madness that is itself a kind of ghost, this short from master Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) tells the story of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune who was driven to insanity by unseen forces.

The newest work to emerge from Harvard’s groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab, Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field is a mesmerizing short film, a ghost story about buried cities, lost civilizations and Western colonialism.

A remarkable record of black life in the 1940s, as found in the films of Spencer Williams, the pioneering African American filmmaker. A new essay by Thom Andersen, director of Los Angeles Plays Itself.

Beginning with Ozu's 1936 The Only Son, Thom Andersen's latest cinematic treat, a documentary short, is an anthology of train arrivals, comprising 26 scenes from movies, 1904-2015.

From Alison Klayman, director of The Brink and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the remarkable story of Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, a pioneering abstract painter in the '40s and '50s who only found recognition as she approached her 100th birthday.

Can one taste a color or see a sound? This fascinating short documentary explores the brain and a neuro-cognitive phenomenon known as synesthesia where multiples senses are blended together.

A haunting, apocalyptic vision rendered in vivid black & white tableaux, a striking short film from the long-form master, Lav Diaz.

An artful meditation on Colombia's 70-year civil war--and the culture of violence that pervaded every aspect of society--through the marks, traces and images it left behind.

A courageous, essential portrait of what its like to be gay in Russia today, from Alina Rudnitskaya, one of the country's most important filmmakers. 

The first film made outside his native Baltimore, a luminous short film exploring place, character and transition from filmmaker Matt Porterfield (Putty Hill).

A pilot program in which female prisoners work at a nursing home for the elderly and disabled while serving out their sentences.

An evocative short documentary that juxtaposes the solitude and transformation of a political prisoner with the cicada, an insect that spends 17 years underground.

An acclaimed, award winning documentary about the women of a remote mining town in Bolivia where life above ground is just as dangerous as below.