Cinema Studies

2024 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature. Winner of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary Cinema, The Eternal Memory is directed by the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent). The documentary tells a profound and moving love story that balances vibrant individual and collective remembrance with the longevity of an unbreakable human bond.

PICTURES OF GHOSTS

A wondrous ode to movies and movie-going, Pictures of Ghosts, from acclaimed director Kleber Mendonca Filho (Bacurau, Aquarius, Neighboring Sounds), is a multidimensional journey through time, sound, architecture and filmmaking, set in the urban landscape of Recife, Brazil: a historical and human territory, examined through the great movie theatres that served as spaces of conviviality during the 20th century.

RAMONA

Feeling unprepared for her upcoming role as a 15-year-old pregnant girl from the outskirts of Santo Domingo, an actor from a more affluent background, Camila, decides to sit down with pregnant young girls to hear their stories. Ramona is a brilliant mix of telenovela pastiche, observational documentary, filmed rehearsals, cinéma vérité and theatre that constantly plays with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, reality and artifice.

ANHELL69

After members of the queer scene in Medellín, Colombia are cast for a vampire movie, the film’s protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at age 21. As the youth in Colombia grapple with a disarmingly high rate of suicide and drug overdoses, the documentary Anhell69 explores this generation’s “no future” mindset while chronicling the making of a new film, a film without borders or genders: a “trans film” about all those people who don’t belong to anything or anyone.

DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA

Five centuries ago, anatomist André Vésale opened up the human body to science for the first time in history. Today, De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens the human body to the cinema. In their thrilling new work of nonfiction exploration, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan) burrow deeper than ever, using microscopic cameras and specially designed recording devices to survey the wondrous landscape of the human body.

TO THE MOON

A cinematic ode to the moon composed of numerous film clips (from over 25 countries, filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, F.W. Murnau, Carl Theodor Dreyer and many others), archival footage, literary fragments and original moonlit cinematography filmed across five continents, To The Moon travels through the ages and ideas that people have drawn from the moon to create a meditative work of timeless resonance. "Gorgeous, a beautifully succinct visual essay." – The Guardian

NAVIGATORS

In 1924, the Buford, a large dormant ship, cost little to rent. Buster Keaton used it as a spacious set for his film The Navigator. And without realising it, by filming the vessel, he archived the scene of another story of crossing. A few years earlier, the Buford had served the forced exile of 249 political opponents of the United States government, including anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.

MAURICE HINES: BRING THEM BACK

An intimate portrait of an outspoken showman who with humor and grace navigates the highs and lows of a seven-decade career, and a complex relationship with his superstar brother, Gregory Hines. Maurice and friends — Chita Rivera, Mercedes Ellington and Debbie Allen — tell tales from his seven-decade career, while reflecting on the ever-present challenges of being a gay, black man in show biz.

WHERE DOES YOUR HIDDEN SMILE LIE?

Hailed by Jean-Luc Godard as "the best film ever made about editing and cinema," Pedro Costa's intimate documentary records with great sensitivity and insight the exacting process by which the iconoclastic filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet re-edit their film Sicilia!. They discuss (and argue) over each cut and its effect, and incorporate comments about the influence of figures as diverse as Chaplin and Eisenstein. Presented in a new digital restoration.

INGRID CAVEN: MUSIC AND VOICE

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.

AFTERNOON

Tsai Ming-Liang’s films (Days, Goodbye Dragon Inn, Rebels of the Neon God) typically have few lines of dialogue. He must have saved all his words for Afternoon, a conversation between him and his muse, actor Lee Kang-sheng, filmed in four static takes as the two sit next to each other in front of the camera. The visibly moved director talks to Lee about mortality, his beloved grandfather, sexuality, and their special bond in this laying bare of intimate thoughts. This is a must-see companion piece to Tsai’s rich body of work.

EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF

A young film director returns to Venezuela, inspired to make a film based on his father's life in the Amazon jungle. He casts Father to play himself. What starts as an act of love and ambition — filmmaking to more deeply understand the self, and the other — spirals into a process which confronts Father’s struggles with addiction and his life devoid of his son. This documentary holds a steady lens to the way the act of cinema unearths, binds, heals and destroys.

FILMFARSI

Action, melodrama, car chases, lurid affairs, and flashy musical numbers! They all figured into Iran's pre-1979 cinema known as “filmfarsi.” Featuring a treasure trove of incredible movie clips (painstakingly sourced from surviving VHS tapes) and accompanied by fascinating social commentary, Filmfarsi explores this cinematic period as a mirror for the country during those turbulent times.

SACAVÉM: THE FILMS OF PEDRO COSTA

A journey through the films of Pedro Costa, focusing on such works as Casa de Lava, Colossal Youth, In Vanda's Room and Horse Money. Incorporating clips from his films, and emphasizing the unique visual and aural landscapes he creates, along with his own reflections, Sacavem provides unique insight into one of the most powerful and singular bodies of work in contemporary cinema.

CINEMA, MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA AND ME

The great filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira lived for over a century, directing films like The Strange Case of Angelica, I'm Going Home, Francisca and many more. In this affectionate documentary, João Botelho guides us through the beloved filmmaker's career, exploring his ideas, methods and his extraordinary cinematographic inventions.

WILCOX

A man goes into the woods alone. We know nothing about him, apart from his military-style attire with a nametag indicating he might be called Wilcox. Is he a traumatized veteran, a survivalist, a desperate man or even a philosopher-hermit? A documentary style fictional film, a minimalist adventure yarn haunted by reality, Wilcox, from award-winning filmmaker Denis Cote, is both simple and mysterious, a non-judgmental perspective on people who decide to remove themselves from the world.

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.

ZIVA POSTEC: The Woman Who Edited Shoah

In 1985, Claude Lanzmann debuted Shoah, one of the most monumental cinematic works of all time. Ziva Postec was an indispensable part of the project. In this fascinating documentary, Postec recalls this gargantuan, painful and necessary experience which consumed six years of her life. With previously unseen footage from the making of Shoah, it's a moving portrait of an artist who for a long time has largely gone unnoticed, eclipsed by the towering presence of her male colleague.

LA FLOR

A decade in the making, filmed around the world, and featuring the same four remarkable actresses in six episodes (each a different genre), Mariano Llinás’ landmark 14-hour feature film La Flor is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing; a wildly entertaining exploration of the possibilities of fiction and storytelling. A must-see.

TONY CONRAD: COMPLETELY IN THE PRESENT

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.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL SHORTS COLLECTION 2018

Five visionary short films selected from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, widely considered to be the premier showcase for shorts, and the launchpad, for more than 30 years, of many now-prominent independent filmmakers.. Grasshopper is proud to present the 2018 collection, Fauve, winner of the Short Film Special Jury Award, and Matria, winner of the Short Film Grand Jury Prize.

AND WITH HIM CAME THE WEST

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.

DREAM OF A CITY

Between 1958 and 1960 Walter Hess and Manny Kirchheimer shot black and white 16mm film from Wall Street to midtown New York to the Delaware River. The footage was left unedited. Nearly 60 later, Kirchheimer took up the challenge of editing it, adding music and sound that would mesh with the surrealism of the material. The result is a dynamic and compact symphony of a city.

FOUR 3D SHORT FILMS BY BLAKE WILLIAMS

Born in Houston, TX, now residing in Toronto, Blake Williams is one of the most exciting experimental filmmakers working today. In recent years, Williams has been exploring the possibilities of 3D technology, creating visually striking, enigmatic films from archival and found footage that have screened at festivals and museums around the world.

STREETSCAPES [DIALOGUE]

A director speaks at length to a psychoanalyst, confiding his obsessions, fears, ideas about cinema, and creative blocks. Based on his own six-day psychoanalytic treatment with trauma specialist Zohar Rubinstein, Heinz Emigholz’s latest masterwork is a demonstration of his singular working methods, and a playful, moving treatise on trauma and architecture.

LIGHT YEARS

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.

CANIBA

A new documentary from the groundbreaking filmmakers behind Leviathan, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Caniba reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalistic desire in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL SHORTS COLLECTION 2017

Six innovative, surprising short films selected from the Sundance Film Festival, widely considered to be the premier showcase for shorts, and the launchpad of many now-prominent independent filmmakers. Grasshopper is proud to present the 2017 collection, which includes two Jury Award winners and Come Swim, the directorial debut of actress Kristen Stewart.

PROTOTYPE (3D)

Hailed as "the most significant 3-D film since Godard’s Goodbye to Language" (Village Voice), Blake Williams' experimental sci-fi masterwork immerses us in the aftermath of the deadly hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas in 1900 to create something entirely new; a haunting treatise on technology, cinema, and the medium’s future.

THE STRAUB-HUILLET COLLECTION

Hailed by critics, academics and filmmakers, the world has never seen a collaboration like that between Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, a fiercely intellectual husband-wife duo whose work aimed to spark a revolution among the masses. Encompassing nearly 50 films, the collection includes many works never before available in the U.S..

ESCAPES

Directed by Michael Almereyda and executive produced by Wes Anderson, a journey through 20th-century Hollywood via the experiences of Hampton Fancher – flamenco dancer, actor, and unlikely producer and screenwriter of Blade Runner - showing how one man's personal journey can shape a medium's future.

VAMPIR-CUADECUC

Filmed on the set of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula starring Christopher Lee, Portabella’s masterpiece mixes making-of footage and an electronic soundtrack for an investigation into the figure of the vampire - as both a reflection on fascism and cinema - to create a subversive fever dream of a meta-film.

A TRAIN ARRIVES AT THE STATION

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.

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.

DOUBLE PLAY: BENNING AND LINKLATER

This documentary on the friendship between these renowned filmmakers explores the connections and divergences in their approach to life and cinema.

CASA DE LAVA

In only his second feature, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa (Horse Money) brilliantly reworked Jacques Tourneur's classic I Walked with a Zombie into a reflection on his country’s colonial legacy. Never before released in the U.S. and now beautifully restored.

THE THOUGHTS THAT ONCE WE HAD

A richly digressive journey through cinematic history from master cinematic essayist Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself).